Death and Transcendence in the Lyrics of Conor Oberst Diplomarbeit

Home , Azure Ray, A New Morning, Blake Sennett, Call the Comet, Common Existence, Conor Oberst

“A Hopeless Romantic?” Death and Transcendence in the Lyrics of Conor Oberst

Diplomarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Philosophie

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von Alina Stockinger

am Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Begutachter Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. phil. Hugo Keiper

Graz, 2008

Ich möchte meinem Betreuer Hugo Keiper dafür danken, dass er uns Studierenden die Möglichkeit bietet, im literaturwissenschaftlichen Neuland der Rock- und Poplyrics zu forschen, wo es noch viel Platz für neue Ideen und Gedanken gibt und dessen literarische Wurzeln oft auch im klassischen Kanon englischer und amerikanischer Literatur vergraben liegen. Ohne Professor Hugo Keipers motivierende, unterstützende und geduldige Betreuung hätte ich es nicht gewagt, dieses spannende und noch wenig erforschte Gebiet zu betreten.

An dieser Stelle möchte ich mich auch bei den folgenden Menschen bedanken: Diana – danke, dass du mich auf allen meinen Wegen liebevoll und mit unendlicher Geduld unterstützt. Javi – danke für deine ansteckende Lebensfreude. Nikola und Martin – danke für eure große Hilfe bei der Umschlaggestaltung. Jan – danke, dass du mir spannendes philosophisches Material zum Thema Tod herausgesucht hast und Benji – danke, dass du mir zu Weihnachten 2006 meine erste Bright Eyes-CD geschenkt hast.

Für Diana und Billa.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Theory, Methods, and Background Information

Introduction: Mysterious death and its many roles in this paper…………………………. 7 Theory: Authorship and Romanticism…………………………………………………… 9 Methods: Literary approaches……………………………………………………………. 12 Structure and terminology ……………………………………………………………….. 17 Text, music, and voice……………………………………………………………………. 18 Background: The beginning of a career ………………………………………………….. 20 Politics and protests………………………………………………………………………. 22 Inspirations, influences, and intertextuality………………………………………………. 24

Chapter 1: “Part of the puzzle” and universal oneness. Death awareness and ‘carpe diem’. Romantic transcendentalism. “The Big Picture”. Time and transience. Oberst’s awkward introductions. “At the Bottom of Everything”. Predestination and freewill.

Romantic transcendence…………………………………………………………………... 27 Oberst’s cosmic puzzle……………………………………………………………………. 29 A song of Romantic transcendentalism? …………………………………………………. 35 Enigmatic introductions…………………………………………………………………… 38 Finding “The Big Picture” “At the Bottom of Everything”………………………………. 42 Determinism and freewill………………………………………………………………… 43

Chapter 2: Death as a liberating force. Plato, the ‘cage metaphor’, and “Landlocked Blues”. Nihilism and the motif of ‘Todessehnsucht’. Metamorphoses of the ‘clouded mind’. Questioning the (im)mortal soul in “Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come”. The peregrination of life and the metaphor of the circle.

A cage called life………………………………………………………………………….. 47 Escaping life ………………………………………………………………………………. 49 5

Cures for the blues – alcohol, writing, and singing ………………………………………. 50 Flee from the “horror vacui”………………………………………………………………. 52 “Landlocked Blues”: Modernist or Romantic?…………………………………………… 53 Problems of fragmented reading…………………………………………………………... 54 Oberst’s lyrical development: Abandoning ‘Todessehnsucht’…………………………… 55 The “clouded mind” in search of clarity and purification…………………………………. 55 The (im)mortal soul……………………………………………………………………….. 58 Concluding the “cage metaphor” and introducing the idea of returning home…………… 59 ‘Peregrinatio’: Returning ‘home’ and realisations of the circle metaphor……………….. 60

Chapter 3: Oberst’s Apocalypse. “Four Winds” and its relation to Ezekiel, Eliot, Yeats, and Blake. The Dylan/Oberst comparison. Cruel and soothing death in the apocalyptic “No One Would Riot for Less”.

Apocalyptic writings ……………………………………………………………………… 65 The winds of change………………………………………………………………………. 66 Oberst’s wasteland………………………………………………………………………… 67 An eponymous “school of meditation”……………………………………………………. 71 Parallels between “Four Winds and “The Second Coming”……………………………… 72 Cassadaga: The lyric persona’s personal place of rebirth………………………………... 74 Political readings of “Four Winds”……………………………………………………….. 76 Oberst vs. Dylan…………………………………………………………………………… 77 Cruel heartless Death in “No One Would Riot for Less”…………………………………. 81

Chapter 4: Death & Love. Personifications of Death. “A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction”, “Hotel California”, and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”.

Eros and Thanatos…………………………………………………………………………. 85 Oberst’s “Night-Mare Life-in-Death”……………………………………………………... 86 “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”……………………………………………………………… 89

Summary, Results, and Conclusion

Characteristics of Oberst’s lyrics of death and transcendence…………………………….. 92 The song-poems of “A Hopeless Romantic”? ……………………………………………. 94

References

1. Primary Sources

1.1. Conor Oberst………………………………………………………………….. 99 1.2. Others…………………………………………………………………………. 99

2. Secondary Sources

2.1. Printed Literature……………………………………………………………… 100 2.2. Online 2.2.1. Interviews and articles…………………………………………………. 102 2.2.2. Wikipedia articles……………………………………………………… 103 2.2.3. Youtube videos………………………………………………………… 103 2.2.4. Forum discussion………………………………………………………. 104 2.3. Films…………………………………………………………………………… 105

Appendix 1: List of Songs ………………………………………………………………... 106

Appendix 2: Lyrics

1. “The Big Picture”………………………………………………………………….. 107 2. “At the Bottom of Everything”…………………………………………………….. 109 3. “Landlocked Blues”………………………………………………………………... 110 4. “Four Winds”………………………………………………………………………. 111 5. “No One Would Riot For Less”……………………………………………………. 112 6. “A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction”………………………………… 113

Appendix 3: Summaries

1. Summary…………………………………………………………………...... 115 2. Zusammenfassung…………………………………………………………………. 116

Introduction, Theory, Methods, and Background Information

Introduction: Mysterious death and its many roles in this paper

We understand then do we not? What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted? What the study could not teach – what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not? Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman’s three short lines sum up one of the main concerns of this introductory chapter – that death is actually inaccessible and not understandable as far as its very nature is concerned. After death, we no longer have the ability to make ourselves heard. Whitman’s contemporary, Emily Dickinson elegantly alludes to the inadequacy of words when it comes to describing death in her poem “There’s something quieter than sleep”: “We – prone to periphrasis,/ Remark that birds have fled!” She expresses the same thought in poetic terms as Paul Tillich does in philosophical terms when he says that death is “the unknown which by its very nature cannot be known” (cited in Edwards 1978/1994: 55). There is no solution, there is no answer to the mystery of death, as is affirmed by Whitman’s question: “We understand then do we not?” (cf. “Restless Explorations”, Smith 2007:4). The very uncertainty of its nature puts death at the core of every religion, and Barloewen even calls it “der entscheidende Topos, um die Unterschiede der Kulturen auf der Erde zu begreifen” (1996:25). However, death does not only differentiate various cultures and religions from each other – it also shapes the identity of each individual since “the way people look at death and dying is invariably connected to the way they look at life” (Stannard 1975:xv).

While we can experience the death of others and the feelings resulting from losing someone, we will never be able to know death as personal experience until we die ourselves and with us the ability to communicate our state in death. Nevertheless, the famous doctors Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Raymond Moody published their empirical data including hundreds of reports from people who claim to have had out-of-body experiences and seen their relatives and friends who had died before them, when they were physically dead. 1 Aware of the impossibility to prove these reports true, Kübler-Ross and Moody try to overcome the finality of death by presenting something where there probably is nothing. In his polemical essay “My Death”, philosopher A.J. Ayer recounts his out-of-body experience when he was clinically

1 E.g. in Moody, Raymond A. (1975). The Investigation of a Phenomenon – Survival of a Bodily Death . Georgia: Mockingbird Books. 8 dead for four minutes; he claims to have seen a painful red light and some cosmic guardians, and remembers that he had to bring order into the chaos of the universe by extinguishing the red light. Ayer, however, believes that this was a delusive memory based on the story he had heard from a friend years ago. Ayer rationally explains his vision by claiming that there is no evidence that the brain stops working at the same moment as the heart stops to beat (cf. 1988/1994:226-36). Like Ayer, many scientists argue that a person should be considered ‘dead’ only when the loss of consciousness is irreversible.2

The above debate, however, does not change the fact that we simply do not know what happens after our death or if anything happens at all. This impossibility to explore death scientifically is what makes it such a mysterious and attractive topic for philosophy and literature. When talking and writing about death, however, it is important to notice that the images connected to death and a possible afterlife as well as all discourses about death, come from “life itself” and from “the present world” (Ernst 1991:205). Or as Arleen Beberman puts it: “If we think or imagine what it would be like to be dead, we surreptitiously introduce scenes from life and living people and thus fail to reach our objective” (cited in Edwards 1994:57). In his self-critical article “De Anima”, Richard Taylor happily concludes what philosophy has achieved when pondering about death: “In fact all any philosopher has ever done here is to arrange his presuppositions and prejudices in an orderly way, then step back and say, ‘Behold what I have proved.’” (1978/1994:188)

When we turn back the time to the eighteenth century, we find the famous Enlightenment philosopher John Locke claiming that men should not be too concerned with things that are beyond human understanding – this attitude was more or less maintained during the Age of Reason. At the dawn of Romanticism, however, things started to change and writers again enjoyed the plunge into the unknown areas of death and metaphysics. While the enlightened and very rational Romantic writer Emily Dickinson “remains faithful to [her] speaker’s remoteness from any knowledge of the condition of death or dying” (Ernst 1991:202), other Romantic poets such as Walt Whitman hide their scepticism behind the vision of a cosmic union where there will be comfort of some kind beyond death, at least in the naturalistic form of fusing with the earth again. Whitman’s positivism is rooted in the feeling of being connected to everything and everybody. Robert Pattison calls this kind of Romanticism the

2 Cf. “Tod und Sterben (Biologie)” (2005). Encarta [CD Rom]. Seattle: Microsoft. 9

“flirtation with Indian mysticism” and “the adulation of Eastern wisdom” (1987:68). “The simple, compact, well-joined scheme” (Whitman) also seems to bring comfort to the protagonists of this study – the lyric personae of Conor Oberst’s prolific writings. The way they transcend their limited perception in order to feel part of the world will be discussed and compared to Emerson’s and especially Whitman’s Romantic transcendentalism in the first chapter of this paper. Chapter two will explore Plato’s idea of death as the liberator of the soul, or the self, or the essence, from whatever restricts it. Applied throughout literature, it is also a repeated metaphor in Oberst’s earlier lyrics. It implies the motif of ‘peregrinatio’, the triadic scheme of an original place that is left and finally returned to (cf. Volkmer-Burwitz 1987:106). The metaphorical basis of this peregrination is the circle – its concrete realisation is frequently the cyclic movement occurring in nature, such as the wandering of the sun leading to day and night and to the seasons representing the stages of life. Chapter three will depart from transcendental feelings and metaphysical imagery to apocalyptic songs concentrating on the death of the world as we know it. Finally, death will be discussed in combination with love in chapter four. With regard to this topic, I have chosen one of Oberst’s earlier songs, in which a “foreign girl” seduces the lyric persona to experience a sort of death in life – or “Life-in-Death” if we use Coleridge’s words from his gloomy “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”. In the last part, I will summarise the insights gained from the analysis and interpretation of Oberst’s songs concerning the aspects of death and transcendence introduced above. Finally, I will try to answer the question I have asked in the title of my paper – the question whether Oberst can be called “a hopeless Romantic”, as suggested by the lyric persona in the 2007 song “If the Brakeman Turns My Way”: “I was a hopeless Romantic now I’m just turning tricks.”

Theory: Authorship and Romanticism Analysing and interpreting literary texts, one always meets a range of questions about the connection between the artist and his/her work and consequently muses about how far the author might have been influenced by his/her own emotions and experiences when creating a piece of literature. In his study of Romantic communication, Christoph Reinfandt provides a comprehensive summary of authorship theories ranging from Plato’s inspiration model to the postmodernist criticism of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, who plead for the autonomy of the text and for its analysis “through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of internal relationships” (Foucault 1975/2002: 226). The author is merely conceived as 10 the initiator, as the creator of a snow ball that, once having started to roll through the snow, grows and grows and grows, taking on new meanings. However, the author him-/herself is already subject to various social factors, such as his/her cultural environment and his/her social situation (cf. Reinfandt 2003: 213) which consequently contribute to shaping the snowball. Although postmodernist criticism has deprived the writer of authority and has sort of given it to the reader instead (cf. Barthes 1968/1996: 122), the Romantic image of the authentic artist with his/her strong ideological agenda has not been extinguished (cf. Reinfandt 2003: 213). Especially in rock music, which Robert Pattison calls the “ideological currency of the Western masses” (1987:30), we still encounter the image of the artist as “an individualist up against a materialistic world, trying to create something pure and unsullied” (Thomas Inge cited in Reinfandt 2003:213). This image, which characterises the author by authenticity of expression as well as a certain ideological commitment, is what Reinfandt claims to be a feature of Romantic communication valid for serious rock musicians. However, Reinfandt emphasises that, in addition to his/her social and moral commitment, the Romantic author is also an aesthete creating what Oscar Wilde famously labelled “art for art’s sake” in his Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray : [D]er romantisch geprägte Grundwiderspruch zwischen dem a-sozialen Potential der ästhetischen Selbst-Verwirklichung in originellen Werken oder in expressiv-authentischen Selbstinszenierungen einerseits und dem grundsätzlich sozialen Impuls moralischer Kommunikation andererseits [erweist sich] als letztlich nicht auflösbar. (Reinfandt 2003:293)

Keir Keightley is another critic who attempts to filter out the Romantic features of rock music. However, while Reinfandt rather investigates linguistically, Keightley focuses on the musical composition. In his essay “Reconsidering Rock”, he connects characteristics of music to either the concepts of Romanticism or Modernism. He detects features of Romanticism especially in the genres of folk, blues, country and rock’n’roll, supported by traditional sounds and promoting “sincerity [and] directness” as well as a sense for the past. These Romantic elements of music are then contrasted to what he identifies as Modernist features, such as “experimentation and progress”, “irony, sarcasm, obliqueness” and “celebrating technology”, and connects them to musical genres such as soul and pop (cited in Reinfandt 2003:328). Since the subject of this paper are the lyrics of Conor Oberst, the singer- songwriter, guitarist and once in a while pianist of the Nebraskan band Bright Eyes, I suggest Oberst’s strongly folk and country influenced music to generally belong to Keightley’s first, ‘Romantic’ category, even though his experimental and electronic album Digital Ash in a Digital Urn as well as his multi-instrumental LPs Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your 11

Ear to the Ground (2002) and Cassadaga (2007) point to the impossibility to confine Bright Eyes to one particular genre. Oberst’s lyrics frequently seem to draw the Romantic image of the sensitive authentic individualist pondering on philosophical issues. To find out whether this image of Oberst as “the hopeless Romantic” is accurate will be the task of this paper, parallel with the broader study of how Oberst treats the themes of death and transcendence in his lyrics.

Last but not least, I would like to round off this section by returning to the beginning of the authorship debate, where we encounter two opposed concepts in Plato’s dialogue between Socrates and the singer Ion: the inspired author or poeta vates and the imitating author or poeta faber. The first is usually associated with the poet-genius who has been given his talent and ability by some higher force, while the imitating author is usually the hard-working craftsman, acquiring his/her abilities on his/her own (cf. Reinfandt 2003:152-53). Basically, the inspiration model is more romantic since it involves a mystically gained ability while the second is rather down-to earth and rationally explainable and thus often connected to Enlightenment or ‘classical’ authors. The real and concrete artist is probably a combination of the two. Since it is also a successful means for self-mystification, especially singer- songwriters claim to have been given a talent to write and compose songs. In this sense, Leonard Cohen says in the epigraph of Paul Zollo’s Songwriters on Songwriting : If I knew where good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery. (1991/2003)

Similarly, Conor Oberst, who has recently been elected ‘Best Songwriter 2008’ by Rolling Stone , claims about his songwriting, “I have still no idea what I’m doing, or why I’m doing it. It just kind of keeps happening. For me, at this point, it’s about accepting it all, letting it all go and moving forward” (Decurtis 2008). What feels best to him is the process of songwriting and the feeling of having created something new: [I]t makes me feel a certain way. […] and everything after that, from the recording to the releasing to the performing – those are all interesting in their own ways, and challenging, but I guess it’s not where my passion lies. Just the writing of the song – it’s still when I feel best […]. (LaGambina 2007)

Clearly, Leonard Cohen’s and Conor Oberst’s statements recall the inspiration model (cf. Reinfandt 2003:336), involving something unexplainable and mystical as being responsible 12 for their writing. Oberst’s song “If the Brakeman Turns My Way”, describes this mystery of songwriting with a concrete supernatural image: “All this automatic writing I have tried to understand/ From a psychedelic angel who was tugging on my hand.” Providing a strong image of the lyric persona as poeta vates, the assumption that Oberst is talking about himself is here founded on the similarity with what Oberst says about how songwriting “keeps happening” to him. Nevertheless, Oberst admits that he is influenced by very earthly things as well: other songwriters, books and films being just some of the things he soaks up like a sponge (cf. Sakamoto 2000).

Methods: Literary approaches This paper will mainly work within the framework of text-oriented and reader-response theories and thus focus on what in the simplest communication models is termed the message and the receiver/decoder of the message. Barthes argues that giving a text an author “is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified” (cf. 1968/1996: 121). Nevertheless, I will not attempt to ‘kill the author’ in this paper, as Barthes hyperbolically suggests when claiming that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (1968/1996: 122). Conor Oberst will not be ignored in the communication process since I believe that one cannot pretend to give an inclusive study of the lyrics and songs of a singer-songwriter without knowing certain incidents in his/her life which might have influenced his/her writing. Similarly, the social and cultural environment within which Oberst operates surely stamps his work. His growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, as well as his catholic education have certainly moulded the author’s personality and have consequently affected his music and his songwriting. The listeners are usually very aware of this sender, automatically trying to decode ‘the message’ the same way the sender encoded it to make the communication successful. The interest of communication is to understand each other, to find congruent meaning in order to avoid misunderstandings. This is only one reason that may forever protect the author from “dying”. Another is the fact that the musical press works by creating personality cults – we will hardly ever read an article talking about a song without naming its author and his/her relation to the piece.

The postmodern anti-author campaign was a necessary rebellion that empowered the reader to analyse and interpret in text-oriented ways. Nevertheless, I believe that a comprehensive study should include the artist and carefully drawn biographical connections to his work. 13

‘Careful’ is the key word since the autobiographical approach is highly speculative, even if the information comes from the artist him- or herself. Hugo Keiper concludes his essay “It’s Easy (?)” by providing a convincing example of misinterpretation due to the artist’s self- mystification; In his liner notes to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan , Dylan relates the apocalyptic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna fall” to the Cuba crisis, an interpretation which is still found in secondary literature although Dylan did certainly not write the song thinking of the crisis because he created it much earlier – according to Dave Van Ronk it was on “a very warm night in September” when he “heard it for the first time at the Gaslight” (cf. Keiper 2007:192; Spitz 1989: 205).

Another problem of inexperienced or ‘lay’ decoding is the naïve habit to identify the author with the lyric personae created by him/her. Examples of this kind can be found abound in the empirical interpretation data in the Bright Eyes forum ‘songmeaning.net’. Usually written by Bright Eyes admirers or ‘normal’ listeners of the songs, many comments prove the suggested tendency to construe the lyric persona of the songs as being the same person as the singer- songwriter. This especially happens in songs where the communicative situation is immediate and the subject is overt because of an undefined ‘I’-pronoun. Interpreting one of Oberst’s earlier songs, “A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction”, eleven out of 18 people identified the lyric persona as Conor Oberst by either explicitly mentioning his name (3) or just implicitly referring to Oberst with forms of the pronoun ‘he’ (8), which in the particular context clearly refer to Oberst as well. ‘ToSadToGiveaFuck’, to mention a rather extreme example, suggests that Oberst favours dark-haired and dark-eyed girls like Winona Ryder and Maria Taylor 3 and therefore claims that it has to be Oberst who is seduced by the song’s “foreign girl” with the eyes “wet like oil”.

In his study of the subject or the lyric persona in poetry, Dietmar Jaegle suggests separating those parts of the poem which contain personal, reflexive or possessive pronouns of the first person singular from those parts that do not contain any. Thus, he argues, we obtain “die Welt als Objekt”, which we might oppose to the lyric persona (cf. Reinfandt 2003: 150). It is very likely that those poems or songs which clearly mark the lyrical text-subject but which do not define it as a concrete person pave the way to interpretations concerning the author’s life. If,

3 According to Der Spiegel and Spin magazine, Oberst had an affair with the US American actress Winona Ryder (cf. Hentschel 2005; Goodman 2008). Maria Taylor is a member of Azure Ray, another band of the Nebraskan Saddle Creek Records-‘family’. She might be Oberst’s long-time girlfriend (cf. Williams 2005). 14 moreover, the lyric ‘I’ does not contradict the image the interpreter has of the artist, the doors/fallacies of biographical reading are open and lead to (sometimes naïve) conclusions. However, this does not mean that all biographical linking between the writer and the written subject is to be avoided. On the contrary, the receiver who decodes and interprets should still dare to ask biographical questions relating to a more complete and comprehensive investigation, always having in mind the relative reliability of biographical information not only due to the artist’s possible self-mystification but also to the personality cult generated by the musical press in the case of Conor Oberst. Since “popular music has become a one-way communication over the years” (Elicker 1997:31), the only possibility to relate to an artist is through his/her songs and through his/her concerts, and through the way s/he is presented in the media. In an interview with the A.V. Club , Oberst says that he has “never read anything about [his] band that’s accurate,” claiming that “[i]t’s either totally glorified and exaggerated, or it’s completely malicious” (LaGambina 2007). What happens is that the way Oberst sees himself and his band diverges from the way people from the outside see them. His self-image is not congruent with the image the musical press provides of him. Nevertheless, the public image is not ‘wrong’ – it is just different from how he wants to be seen and what he believes to be like.

In a ‘fake’ radio interview recorded for Fevers and Mirrors (2000), Oberst ironically expresses his concern about autobiographical interpretations. The interviewer, who is the moderator of a radio channel, starts to talk while the previous song is fading out, insinuating that it has just been played on the radio: Radio: Hi, we’re back. This is Radio KX and we’re here with Conor Oberst of the band Bright Eyes. How are you doing Conor? […] Radio: So talk a little bit about some of the symbolism[.] Conor: The fever? Radio: Sure[.] Conor: Well the fever is basically whatever ails you or oppresses you, it could be anything. In my case it’s my neurosis, my [pauses] depression, but I don’t want to be limited to that. It’s certainly different for [pauses] different people. It’s whatever keeps you up at night[.] Radio: I see[.] Conor: And then the mirror is like, as you might have guessed, self-examination or reflection o[f] whatever form. This could be vanity or self-loathing. I don’t know, I’m guilty of both[.] […] Radio: […] How about this Arienette[4], how does she fit in to all of this?

4 Reference to the song “Arienette”, in which a frightened and desperate speaker asks Arienette to stay with him “until the wolves are away”.

Conor: I’d prefer not to talk about it, in case she’s listening[.] Radio: Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize she was a real person[.] Conor: She’s not, but [pauses] I made her up[.] Radio: Oh, so she’s not real? Conor: Just as real as you or I [.] Radio: I don’t think I understand[.] Conor: Neither do I, but after I grow up I will. I mean, you know what, a lot of things are really unclear for me right now[.] Radio: That’s interesting. Now you mentioned your depression[.] Conor: No I didn’t[.] Radio: You’re from Nebraska, right? Conor: Yeah, that’s right[.] Radio: Now let me know if I’m getting too personal, but there seems to be a pretty dark past back there somewhere. What was it like for you growing up? Conor: Dark? Not really. Actually I had a great childhood. My parents were wonderful. I went to a Catholic school. They have, I had money, so it was all easy. I basically had everything I wanted anytime[.] Radio: Really? So some of the references like babies in bathtubs are not biographical? [5] Conor: Well I did have a brother who died in a bathtub…he drowned. Well actually I had five brothers that drowned[.] Radio: (Chuckle) Conor: No, I’m serious. My mother drowned one every year for five consecutive years. They were all named Pedraic, and that’s why they only got one song. It’s kind of like walking out a door and discovering that it’s a window[.] [serious in tone] Radio: But your music is certainly very personal[.] Conor: Of course, I put a lot of myself into what I do. It’s like being an author, you have to free yourself to use symbolism and allegory to meet your goal. And part of that is compassion, empathy for other people and their situations. Some of what I sing about comes from other people’s experiences as well. It shouldn’t matter, the message is intended to be universal[.] […] Radio: […] Now you mentioned empathy for others. Would you say that that motivates you to make the music that you make? Conor: No, not really. It’s more a need for sympathy. I want people to feel sorry for me. I like to feel the burn of the audience’s eyes on me when I’m revealing all my darkest secrets [whispers what is written in italics] into the microphone. [people start talking in the background]. When I was a kid I used t carry a safety pin around with me every where I went in my pocket, and when people weren’t paying enough attention to me, I’d dig it into my arm until I started crying. Everyone would stop what they were doing and ask me what was the matter. I guess, I guess I kind of liked that[.] Radio: Really, you’re telling me that you’re doing this for attention? Conor: No, I hate when people look at me, I get nauseous. In fact, I could care less what people think about me. [ 6] […]

5 Reference to “Pedraic my Prince”, a song on Oberst’s 2001 album Letting off the Happiness . In this song, the lyric persona talks about his brother who was drowned in a bathtub by their mother.

6 This transcription is taken from the Bright Eyes-forum on http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=123425. It was submitted by ‘EricFrank’ in 2002. (I have referred to all the postings in the Bright Eyes-forum in the Reference-section of this paper.)

By recording this exaggeratedly ironic interview, in which the young Oberst constantly contradicts himself and makes the interviewer feel confused and uncomfortable, he certainly wants to make the point that although some of his lyrics might seem very personal and intimate, they are not diary entries but a product of art and should therefore be considered as such: “[A]lthough the songs are a lot to do with me, it’s a song not an autobiography” (Sakamoto 2000) 7. To sum up, it is important to keep in mind that biographical interpretations are always tenuous and to be treated with caution. With this in mind, this paper will sometimes provide quotes from (real) interviews, especially from well-known musical and popular culture magazines, such as Rolling Stone or New Musical Express (NME) 8. Since we are living in the age of ‘myspace’ and ‘youtube’, it is also possible to take glimpses at Oberst’s behaviour and comments at some of his live performances, which are certainly more authentic sources of information than the interviews, which reflect the impression of one person only and might be modified by the press for economical reasons as well. Moreover, when giving interviews, ‘stars’ are usually very aware of their self-image, being especially careful about what they say.

To conclude this subchapter, it has to be made clear that interpretations relying on biographical material will be presented as one more possible reading, but will not be valued as superior to the main approach of this paper, which is text and reader--oriented and thus free of evaluative categories such as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. The biographical approach might merely offer additional interpretations which might contribute to the multiplicity of meanings. As an additional source of interpretation, I will also cite people who contributed comments on individual songs in the Bright Eyes-forum on ‘songmeanings.net’. These interpretations might sometimes support my own reading and at times provide new thoughts and ideas, which I will sometimes pick up on and develop further if necessary. The aim of this ‘empirical data’ is to make the interpretation not just the finished product of one person but to gladly accept the impulses of others who commented on the songs to provide a more comprehensive and less subjective reading of how Oberst treats the themes related to death and transcendence in the chosen corpus of songs published from the years 2000 to 2007. With respect to the themes of

7 In the same interview Oberst claims that it is “sometimes […] better to dress things up and make it vague and more easier to swallow” but “sometimes things slip out that are a little too obvious”.

8 Simon Frith claims that the music papers not only help fans “to develop private fantasies about their stars”, but that they influence even those people who do not buy them since their readers are “the opinion leaders” and “the ideological gatekeepers for everyone else” ( Sound Effects 1981: 165). 17 death and transcendence, I have chosen to focus on three LPs: the Bright Eyes breakthrough album with the long title Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002), the ‘folksiest’ of his LPs, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, and finally the up to now latest and last Bright Eyes album Cassadaga . I chose these LPs not only for their highly spiritual and philosophical concerns, but also to provide a larger context for interpretation. Moreover, three albums seem to be a good start for observing the development and changes in Oberst’s songwriting. It is impossible to analyse and interpret all the songs on each album thoroughly on only 90 pages; thus, one or two songs of each album will be studied in more detail whereas other songs might only contribute a line or a verse to this paper. Of course, lines from other songs and albums will not be ignored but, unfortunately, will have to be torn out of their artistic context to provide a more general picture of Oberst’s highly poetic treatment of death and transcendence.

Structure and terminology As the title of this paper suggests, the main focus will lie on the lyrics rather than on the music or the instrumental arrangement of the songs since, as a student of literature, my knowledge in the realms of music is restricted to the basic terminology of conventional rock and pop songs. For the analysis of the songs of this paper, I will generally use Pat Pattison’s terminology 9 including the basic structural concepts of verse, chorus, bridge, refrain, and hook. In her essay “Sound, Image and Social Space”, Jody Berland points out that the verse is typically the descriptive part of a song (1993:49). Pattison suggests it to be the section in which ideas are introduced, developed and continued and where “the point of comparison for other structures in the lyric” is set (1991:53). I will use the literary term ‘stanza’ synonymously, especially for those songs that have no contrasting sections and are built up of verses/stanzas alone. Oberst’s lyrics of “Waste of Paint” are an example of a song consisting solely of stanzas which conclude with a repeated line, the refrain, which in this song always has to do with the waste of something: “And everything I do is trite and cheap and a waste…of paint, of tape, of time”. This repeated part of the verse is called ‘refrain’ and like the chorus it contains the central idea of the song. The refrain differs from the chorus in that it is always part of the verse and it is not a section by itself (cf. Pattison 1991:63). Another example of a song consisting of verses alone is Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, in which the refrain is also the last line of the verse and also contains the central idea, namely

9 See Pattison’s book Songwriting: Essential Guide to Lyric Form and Structure . 18 that “it’s a hard, it’s a hard and it’s a hard and it’s a hard, it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.” This purely ‘stanzaic’ structure with a refrain recalls the old ballad form (cf. Faulstich 1978:67), which is known to have influenced Dylan as well as many other folk musicians. However, it has of course spread to all genres of rock and pop music, although less frequently than the more typical song structure of alternating verse and chorus, often accompanied by instrumental or lyrical bridges. Berland describes the typical pop song and its video as a combination of descriptive verse, expressive chorus, and instrumental breaks (cf. 1993:40). Pattison’s chorus carries the central idea, the “come home” of the verses while he calls the bridge a “boredom breaker” since it breaks away from the repeated alternation of verse and chorus (cf. 1991:55). Using this basic terminology, I will attempt to structure Oberst’s songs as far as possible, although some songs, such as “A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction”, will resist this common categorisation. Finally, Oberst’s lyrics composed of verses and a recurring chorus require a more differentiated terminology with regard to the chorus. Since the chorus is usually repeated melodically but not lyrically, I will therefore make a difference between the ‘first melodic chorus’ and ‘the second melodic chorus’ as will be the case in “At the Bottom of Everything” and “Four Winds”. Of course, Oberst was not the first to alter his chorus as far as the lyrics are concerned; in the Eagles’ “Hotel California”, which will acquire special importance regarding Oberst’s “A Poetic Retelling” at some later point in this paper, we also find textual alternation between the two choruses: 1) Welcome to the Hotel California 2) Welcome to the Hotel California Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place) Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place) Such a lovely place Such a lovely face Plenty of room at the Hotel California They[’re] livin’ it up at the Hotel California Any time of year (Any time year) What a nice surprise [What a nice surprise] You can find it here Bring your alibis 10

Text, music, and voice

Although this paper will certainly foreground the comprehension and interpretation of the lyrics, the interplay of text and music will be taken into account whenever it produces an extraordinary effect on the listener. Especially Oberst’s distinctive voice will play an essential role in the analysis and interpretation of his songs since the way he sings, intonates, and pitches might often stir extreme emotions, including emotions of embarrassment. Moreover,

10 Eagles (1976). “Hotel California.” In: Hotel California . Asylum. Lyrics: [Online] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/eagles/hotelcalifornia.html [2008, July 8].

19 his vocal timbre seems to cause what David Brackett would call the “authenticity effect” (1995/2000:90) on the audience. In his interview with Conor Oberst in 2000, Mariko Sakamoto even claims that seeing Oberst performing “is like watching an emotional explosion, it’s certainly cathartic but somehow makes the audience uncomfortable, like they’re seeing and hearing too much”. In Roman Jakobson’s words, one might claim that the emotive function is dominant in many Bright Eyes songs not only because of the lyrics and the instrumental arrangement but also because of the way Oberst intensifies words and music via the emotive bursts of his unique voice as in the album versions of “The Big Picture” and “At the Bottom of Everything”. His characteristically imperfect voice, which has certainly not been “trained in the European bel canto tradition” (Brackett 1995/2000:90) and which has often been described as “hazy” and “woozy” (Simpson 2005), apparently contributes to the image of the anti-commercial authentic singer-songwriter that has been mentioned in the previous chapter in the context of Romantic communication. However, with the listener, vocal expression of this kind certainly evokes the feeling that what is sung with such intensity must come right from the singer’s heart – one more reason to feed the ideology of the ‘authentic’ and in this sense also Romantic artist. According to Barthes’s essay “The Grain of the Voice”, “the very precise space of the encounter between a language and a voice” (1972/1977: 181) is where we find “the body in the voice as it sings” (188) as it pronounces language, far away from concepts such as “communication, representation, and expression” (182). Barthes argues that this “grain” alone is able to “escape the tyranny of meaning” (185) – but this grain might actually be the signifier of the “authenticity effect” of singers such as Bob Dylan and Conor Oberst.

Oberst’s imperfect voice could also be considered one of the reasons for the highly controversial comparison with Bob Dylan since one might claim that an imperfect voice foregrounds the lyrics as the most appreciated element of the song while, as frequently happens in pop music, the best singers often produce rather shallow lyrics since the pleasure they create within the listener rather stems from their voices than from their words. Obviously, sometimes all three components of a song - music, voice, and lyrics - could be considered as aesthetically pleasing as well. The Bright Eyes audience, however, seems to value the words over the music and appreciates Oberst’s poetic skills more than his musical/vocal skills. This conception of Oberst as a poet mirrors Bob Dylan, who himself repeatedly emphasised that to him being a poet is more important than being a musician (cf. 20

Faulstich 1978:68). Likewise, Oberst sang in “Saturday as usual”, from his first Bright Eyes album A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997 : “And me I’m in my bedroom drawing in my notebook, because my hand thinks I’m an artist but my heart knows I’m a poet.” Although the lyric persona in this song, which Oberst wrote at some time between the age of 15 and 17, does not claim that his lyrics mean more than the music (since in his case it is the painting), the text projects the self-portrayal of the lyric persona as a gifted poet. This image seems to be congruent with how his fans and listeners feel about Oberst; in the forum of “A Poetic Retelling”, the commenter ‘the_faint_=_shimmy’ states the following: I've always kind of felt that Conor made a better poet than he did a songwriter and this song is a great example of that […]. But I love this idea of fractured and aesthetically unappealing art – I don't always like the way it sounds, but it sure as hell provokes me, and isn't that what art is meant to do? So in a lot of ways, I feel like this song is beautiful in its ugliness.

Until this point, we have provided two affinities between Dylan and Oberst – the voice, the poet-label and the “authenticity effect”; however, the contrasts and comparisons between the two artists do not stop here but will be discussed time and again in this paper – especially in the apocalyptic context of chapter four.

Background: The beginning of a career Since I have discussed the problem of autobiographical interpretation and nevertheless decided to sometimes additionally provide possible connections between Oberst and his songs, this chapter will provide some – hopefully reliable – biographical material about “indie rock’s reigning poet-prince” (Frere-Jones 2005); about his social surroundings, his career as a songwriter and musician, his political commitment, and about his interest in spirituality, spiritualism, and the mystical world. The sources of information are various articles and online interviews, which are partly available as transcript versions and partly in their original audio version.

Born in 1980, Oberst has not yet completed his thirties, but has already published more than 150 songs with his long-time band Bright Eyes, whose two constant members are multi- instrumentalist and producer Mike Mogis and Conor Oberst himself. To build up such an enormous corpus, Oberst had to start writing and composing at an early stage of his life; Rolling Stone magazine claims that it all started at the age of thirteen when Oberst had just learned to play some chords on the guitar (cf. Decurtis 2008). No wonder that the concern of his lyrics has changed significantly throughout the years. Musical press critics say that he has 21 matured and left behind his lyrics of “self-pity and regret” (Bouza 2007) to finally feel comfortable in his own skin on Cassadaga (2007). Indeed, the artist’s lyrical development regarding the themes of death and transcendence will be one of the subjects of investigation in this paper.

Oberst grew up in the conservative city of Omaha, the capital of the state of Nebraska, birthplace of Malcolm X, a place whose atmosphere and landscape might have inspired Oberst to write some of his many songs about loss and loneliness. He himself describes Nebraska as […] a really unique place because of the balance of the seasons. They’re all very separate, we have really hot summers, cold winters and really beautiful springs and falls. I guess in parts, a very desolate place. Empty and lonely and a lot of space, but somehow out of that you can strike some optimism or hopefulness. (Sakamoto 2000)

The American heartland seems to be essential for the identity of Oberst’s lyric personae – in the open space, his 11 mind seems less distracted by the busy city life and more on terms with itself. This city vs. country feeling not only recalls Rousseau’s philosophy of returning to nature and to simple life but it is also an essential part of Wordsworth’s, Emerson’s, and Thoreau’s approval of the ‘primitive’ life. In “Poison Oak” from I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning (2005) Oberst’s persona sings, “I always get lost when I leave the village/ So I couldn’t come meet you in Brooklyn last night.” A consequence of this detachment of busy and superficial city life might either be a newly Romantic hopefulness and optimism on the one hand, but at the other hand it might also lead to alienation and nihilism, as in “Landlocked Blues”. Probably Oberst’s moving to New York for some years was also an escape from this latter feeling.

According to Rolling Stone magazine, which highly appreciates Oberst’s work and has just labelled him ‘Best Songwriter 2008’ (Decurtis 2008), Oberst started to write songs “as soon as he knew two chords” (Edwards 2002), when he went to a Jesuit all-boys high school where he led the school life of an outsider who never really connected with his classmates (Binelli 2005). With some friends he started to make music, “partially out of boredom” saying that

11 I decided to refer to all the unidentified lyric personae of Oberst’s songs with forms of the pronoun ‘he’ for the sake of simplicity. Moreover, in those songs, in which the lyric ‘I’ is identified, it is a male speaker, as in “At the Bottom of Everything”. The third reason is that there are parallels between Oberst’s life and the lyric ‘I’ in many of his songs. They often share profession, views, and ideology, which diminishes the tendency to think of Oberst’s personae as female characters.

“you have to make your own fun, especially in high school”, which “was such a conservative sort of place” (Smith 2007). On the run, he co-founded the Nebraskan independent label Saddle Creek 12 , on which all Bright Eyes songs have been released so far, although the band also signed a publishing deal with the major label Sony (Lewis 2001) some years ago. As Oberst’s second band project, Bright Eyes followed his first band Commander Venus and it was shortly intervened by the punk rock project Desaparecidos, which is the Spanish word for ‘the disappeared’. The origin of the name Bright Eyes has somehow remained a mystery even though interviewers have asked for it over and over again. In an interview with Ben Maack, Oberst claims that Bright Eyes is the nickname for someone you like and that he did not choose the name because of the Garfunkel song “Bright Eyes”, the main theme of the heartbreaking cartoon movie Watership Down (cf. Maack 2005). In chapter two, I will provide some assumptions about the band name regarding Oberst’s recurring desire to achieve a state of ‘purity’.

Except for Oberst and Mogis, the members of Bright Eyes have always been changing until finally Nate Walcott, who plays the trumpet and composes the scores for strings, horns, and other instruments (Bouza 2007), was made the third official member of Bright Eyes when Cassadaga was released in April 2007. According to recent NME news, Oberst decided to abandon the name Bright Eyes for his new solo album because Mike Mogis, “the other person of the band” (TV interview with Ferguson 2005) did not participate in the production of Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band (NME News 1 Aug 2008). The name for the band is a translation of the name of the place where the album was recorded – in the ‘valle místico’ in Tepoztlan, Mexico, which is famous for UFO sightings (cf. Spencer 2008). It seems that Oberst is and has always been a person favouring the spiritual, the metaphysical, and the mysterious; his latest album with the band Bright Eyes was not only named after but also inspired by a “spiritualist camp for psychics and mystical theology” (Bouza 2007) named Cassadaga.

Politics and protests Singer-songwriter, guitarist, and part-time pianist Oberst is sometimes called a ‘protest singer’ because he follows the strong anti-war commitment made popular especially by the

12 All information about the successful indie label Saddle Creek is taken from Jason Kulbel’s and Rob Walters’s documentary Spend an Evening with Saddle Creek (2005). 23 folk singers of the 60s. While Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and all the other rebels protested against Vietnam, Oberst criticises President George W. Bush for his war policy. While there are some beautiful and subtle anti-war songs such as “Landlocked Blues” in Oberst’s lyrical corpus, he also wrote a rather blunt and sarcastic protest song entitled “When the President Talks to God”. In this song, which was released on the live album Motion Sickness , the lyric persona (who can doubtlessly be identified as Oberst himself this time) asks whether the president has ever thought if the voice of God he claims to serve could not just be a voice “inside his head when he kneels next to his presidential bed” and whether he has “ever smelled [his] own bullshit.” Bright Eyes also participated in the ‘Vote for Change Tour’ in 2005 where they performed with Michael Stipe from R.E.M. and Bruce Springsteen hoping to prevent people from voting for Bush a second time (cf. Hentschel 2005; Binelli 2005). Obviously, they were not successful in their support of John Kerry, but that did not stop Oberst from criticising the president and his party’s war policy. In a TV show in 2005, Oberst sang “At the Bottom of Everything” and dedicated the song to President Bush and to the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger: “[…] two men I admire a lot…for their biceps…and for their creepy fascist agenda.” 13 In an interview in 2007, Oberst recalled that from the beginning on Bush reminded him “of people [he] went to school with, these total Neanderthals” (Smith 2007). In January 2008, Oberst performed in Iowa at a rally in favour of the democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama 14 (NME News 27 May 2008), where he chose to play “One Foot in Front of the Other”15 , the original version of “Landlocked Blues”, including some beautiful anti-war lines: We made love on the living room floor With the noise in the background from a televised war And in the deafening pleasure, I thought I heard someone say, “If we walk away, they’ll walk away.”

But greed is a bottomless pit. And our freedom’s a joke we’re just taking a piss. And the whole world must watch the sad comic display, If you’re still free start running away.

13 Watch this video “Bright eyes – At the bottom of everything (Live Kilborn)” on http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=nFXs_vn7tjk.

14 For an unfortunately miserable video recording of the event, watch “Obama Rally w/ Conor Oberst” on http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=kP-QTjp1MaU.

15 “One Foot in front of the Other” was published on the Saddle Creek compilation SC50 . It was re-recorded with some changes – among them Emmylou Harris’s voice and a new title - as “Landlocked Blues” for the 2005 LP I’m Wide Awake , It’s Morning . 24

Because we’re coming for you. 16 [followed by a transitional bridge to a trumpet solo reminiscent of the sound of the military]

Oberst’s political commitment is important for this paper since politics, death, and spirituality are not always separable, especially not in the US war policy that has lead to thousands of deaths. When investigating “At the Bottom of Everything”, “Four Winds”, and “No One Would Riot for Less”, we will return to death and war.

Inspirations, influences, and intertextuality

I think it’s best to be like a sponge and let everything seep into you, like everything you watch or hear or dream about. Conor Oberst in an interview with Mariko Sakamoto (2000)

Since there seem to be some affinities with other works of literature, Oberst’s way of dealing with subjects related to death and transcendence might frequently be linked to that of fellow- poets or writers. My hypothesis is that especially the Romantics, with their idealistic philosophy, might have had an impact on the young artist whose lyric persona of “Soul Singer in a Session Band” claims: “I was a hopeless romantic now I’m just turning tricks.” Similarities to the universal philosophy of Whitman, Schleiermacher and the other transcendentalists are evident in some Bright Eyes songs, especially in those that will be analysed in detail in chapter one. Oberst seems especially interested in what Rüdiger Safranski calls “das Romantische” in the sense of “eine Geisteshaltung” (2007:12), which embraces the unknown, the irrational and the mysterious (cf. 53). Jerome McGann, however, believes that enjoying the plunge into the unknown and the impulse to question and disturb is not just a feature of Romantic poetry, but of poetry in general (cf. 1983/1985:62).

Concrete intertextual references can be found in the majority of Oberst’s lyrics: “Four Winds” strongly builds upon Yeats’ “The Second Coming” and Eliot’s imagery in The Waste Land , “Tereza and Tomas” is obviously influenced by Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “Don’t Know When But A Day I Gonna Come” borrows the soul-selling-theme from the legend of Dr. Faustus, and Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground is packed with biblical references. As far as biblical allusions are concerned, Oberst seems especially fascinated by prophetic texts, such as those of the Book of Revelation, of

16 All of Oberst’s lyrics are taken from his album booklets. 25

Ezekiel and John, as well as by the myth of Adam and Eve. Unlike the poetry of Keats and Shelley (to stay with the Romantic poets), however, Oberst’s lyrics lack classical references to Greek mythology – he seems to prefer Christian and Eastern imagery.

Another large pool of possible intertextuality and intermediality is provided by fellow singer- songwriters, such as Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Simon Joyner, the latter of which Oberst claimed to be one of his biggest influences on Craig Ferguson’s Late Late Show in 2005 17 . Particularly Oberst’s more folk- and country-inspired songs, such as those on I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, seem to have been influenced by the 70s folk records, which he adores because of the space in this instrumentally simple kind of music.18 This space is filled up by various instruments and sounds on his records Lifted and Cassadaga . However, in an interview with The Daily Trojan Oberst claims that his songs are all just simple folk songs at the core, “just simple chords and simple melodies” which can then be “decorated” in various ways (Bouza 2007). As far as connections to other songwriters are concerned, I have limited my comparison to Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, although hundreds of possible, insightful readings are surely excluded with this decision. However, restrictions of this kind are necessary since I have decided to focus primarily on intertextuality with the Romantics and with those works of literature which have doubtlessly influenced Oberst’s songwriting. I preferred to choose Dylan before any other songwriter as another reference for comparison because he is not only the most acclaimed songwriter among literary critics but also the benchmark for every talented American lyricist.

Last but not least, various aspects of death and transcendence in Oberst’s songs will be compared to the thoughts of some of the best-known philosophers pondering on the mysteries of life and death. Especially the name of Plato will repeatedly come up in this paper since Plato influenced Christianity as well as the Romantic way of thinking 19 . In addition, the ideas of existentialism – the leading philosophical movement of the 20 th century (cf. Tillich 1956:739-40), which is essential for any study focusing on death – will be introduced with songs like “The Big Picture” and “Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come”.

17 A video recording of Oberst’s performance of “Road to Joy” and the subsequent interview with Craig Ferguson is available on http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=YCU18eCno6E.

18 Cf. Mark Binelli’s reportage “King of Indie Rock”.

19 For further connections between Plato, Christianity and Romanticism, one might want to take a look at Kabitoglou’s Plato and the English Romantics (1990). 26

Eventually, the French revolutionary thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the ‘godfather’ of naturalistic Romanticism, as well as Blaise Pascal, with his views on modern nihilism, will be of special importance with respect to Oberst’s lyrics.

The idea of death raises questions which lie at the core of all religious and philosophical systems of thought […]. If the function of a belief system is to give meaning to the exigencies of collective history and individual biography, the fundamental test of a world view is how it deals with death. Mary Ann Meyers (1975:112)

Romantic transcendence As has been said in the introduction, the poets and philosophers of Romanticism – the American Transcendentalists, Walt Whitman, the German Romantics and especially their theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher – share one significant ‘spiritual’ feature in most of their philosophical and poetic writings: the feeling of interconnectedness with the cosmos. In their writings, they transcend the boundaries of their own bodies to mystically fuse with the universe and thus create the awareness that a human lifetime is a tiny but essential part of the evolution of the world which, at the bottom of everything, follows a harmonious plan. The moment the lyric persona realises his/her being part of this cosmic whole, he/she usually enjoys happiness in its highest form, freed from doubts and fears of all kinds. This philosophy is comforting because it takes away much of the pressure of being successful and accepted in our human societies since one can find comfort in a bigger kind of ‘society’ that involves not only a relatively small number of human beings with their constructed realities and social rules, but rather everyone and everything as being citizens of the same cosmos. In these moments, even death seems to lose its dread since the momentarily experienced joy feels like an eternity leaving no place for it. It also diminishes the feeling of life’s meaninglessness since life obtains a new sense of belonging and contributing to the world. Julia Kristeva claims that “belonging to something” is the most essential feature of human identity (quoted in Tarasti 2002:170). However, according to Michael A. Slote’s essay “Existentialism and the Fear of Dying”, the dangerous side of such an ‘anti-individual’ philosophy is that one might “put a low value on one’s living” (1994:85) because the individual human being might seem rather insignificant in relation to the hugeness of the cosmos. Nevertheless, for the Romantics, it seems possible to become one with the cosmos and still embrace the individual self as a small but integral and thus powerful part of a whole. In his brilliant and comprehensive study 28 on the essence of German Romanticism, Rüdiger Safranski describes this fusion with the universe as the anti-institutional “Romantic Religion” [my translation] (2007:133) and suggests that the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher as its principal preacher. Although Safranski believes to have detected the same idea in eastern mysticism as well as in the earlier texts of Herder and the younger Goethe, he thinks it was Schleiermacher who placed this spiritual feeling at the very centre of his work. For the German Romantic, one of the most important aspects was to realise that eternity exists in certain moments and not in some far- away future in death. Safranski describes Schleiermacher’s religion as “Transzendentalreligion“ (2007:148): Die Einheit mit Gott oder besser: die Teilhabe am Göttlichen, ist nicht eine Sache eines unsterblichen Lebens nach dem Tode. Auch setzt sie nicht die Annahme eines himmlischen Gesetzgebers voraus. Vielmehr ist sie Partizipation am ewigen Leben hier und jetzt. […] Es ist ein Gefühl des liebenden Verschmelzens. Die Dinge des Lebens, auch das Individuum mit seinen Beschränkungen bleiben wichtig, aber sie relativieren sich vor einem Horizont des Ungeheuren. Sie behalten ihren Ernst, verlieren aber die bedrückende Schwere. Das Leben bekommt etwas Schwebendes. (2007:143)

But not only the Romantics and eastern spiritual systems find comfort in this spirituality of transcendence. Some of Oberst’s songs build up this idea of universal integration as opposed to individual solitude. “At the Bottom of Everything” and “The Big Picture” address the concept of universal connectedness and have their climaxes in the realisation of the cosmic union. One could call these moments ‘epiphany moments’, a term introduced by New Criticism for the analysis of modernist writings, to describe moments of significant insight(s), especially important in the development of the individual’s feeling of identity. In these instances of Oberst’s lyrics, all questions about the sense of life seem to disappear; the lyric persona’s mind clears up – he is suddenly sure about what to do in the world, feeling his connectedness with everyone and everything. In “The Big Picture”, the lyric persona’s eyes are “wet with clarity” after the “veil has been lifted” because he feels his participation in the universe. Unlike the Romantics, however, he still feels that he has to seize the day since “this lifetime’s one moment and wishing will just leave [him] empty”. Time hunts him, which is not the case in Whitman’s and Schleiermacher’s transcendental writings which are “Kreuzungen zwischen Gegenwart und Unendlichkeit, Sterblichkeit und gottgleicher Existenz” (Volkmer-Burwitz 1987:93). In this sense, Oberst’s “The Big Picture“, which is one of the more thoroughly discussed songs of this paper, will now be analysed and interpreted under the aspects of death, transcendence and time until it will finally be contrasted and compared to the Romantic spiritualism of Whitman and Schleiermacher. 29

Oberst’s cosmic puzzle “The Big Picture”, the first song of the album Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002) starts with the song’s lyric persona telling a child - who we later find out to be a boy - that “the picture is far too big to look at” and that it always changes and that it has always been changing, which makes it even less graspable. 20 Although “we have all made our predictions”, what will happen in the future is still unknown to us (“If you wanna see the future go stare into a cloud”). The speaker probably tells the boy that we are constantly repeating history with all its mistakes and that there is nothing new to discover (“Each time you turn a corner you are right back where you were/ and your only hope is that forgetting might make a door appear.”) In the following stanza, he asks the child why he does not raise his voice to communicate his opinions and thoughts to the world: “Is it the fear of being buried that makes you so afraid to speak?/ An avalanche of opinions like the one that fell that I’m now underneath.” Apparently, other people’s criticism cannot prevent the lyric persona from speaking up via his songs as suggested by the following line, “So I mean it’s cool if you keep quiet but I like singing,” and by the first melodic chorus: So I'll be holding my note and stomping and strumming and feeling so very lucky. There is nothing I know except this lifetime's one moment and wishing will just leave me empty.

After echoing Socrates in the last line of the chorus, he encourages the boy to start to seize his life, to be active, to stop living in ignorant darkness, “that comfortable cocoon”, in stanza four. The lyric persona tells the boy, “You can try to live in darkness, but you’ll never shake the light/ It will greet you every morning and make you more aware with its absence at night.” Interpreted as a reference to Plato’s cave-allegory, he compares the boy’s way of life to the people who sit in the dark cave and only see the shadows projected by the sun into the inside of the cave. However, the (sun)light in Plato’s allegorical story represents the absolute truth

20 On the same album, in the last stanza of the optimistic song “Bowl of Oranges”, the lyric persona suggests that it would be nice to stop the world for a second in order to comprehend that it is a beautiful “big picture” we all form part of: And we’ll keep working on the problem we know we’ll never solve of Love’s uneven remainders. Our lives are fractions of a whole. But if the world could remain within a frame like a painting on the wall. Then I think we’d see the beauty. Then we’d stand staring in awe at our still lives posed like a bowl of oranges, like a story told by the fault lines and the soil. 30 while Oberst’s light signifies another truth – the fact that one day everyone has to die. It is the same message as “[l]ife’s too short/ Death doesn’t ask” from the Cassadaga love song “Make a Plan to Love Me”, which is reminiscent of ‘carpe diem’ poems such as Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”. Similarly, in “The Big Picture”, death awareness motivates the lyric persona to seize the day and to convince the boy to do the same since daylight “will greet [the boy] every morning and it will make [him] more aware with its absence at night”. He emphasises the unstoppable transience of time that will be “marching on to a madman’s drum” (cf. “Cleanse Song”, Cassadaga ) until we die.

In the song’s forum, ‘Actors&Habits’ presents the book of John as another possible source and interpretation for the dark/light imagery: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed […] (John 3:19-20)

In these biblical lines, light is connected to ‘goodness’ whereas darkness represents ‘evil’. Furthermore, light might signify consciousness, justice, or even God. If related to these connotations, the dark/light imagery in “you can try to live in darkness but you can never shake the light/ It will greet you every morning and make you more aware with its absence at night” is a lesson in morals; the boy could act against his ethics and could try to repress his consciousness, the angelic part in him, but it will never disappear. The boy’s “awakening” which the lyric persona predicts in the following line could in this moral/biblical sense allude to some kind of justice that will soon get the boy out of “that comfortable cocoon” he sleeps in and expose his deeds.

Personally, I prefer to stick to the ‘carpe diem’ reading suggesting that it is impossible to stop time from moving on, that the days and nights will just pass by as our lives will pass by as in “Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset. Swiftly go the days” (cf. “Sunrise, Sunset.” Fevers and Mirrors ). Being aware of our lives’ transience is what pushes us to really seize the day. Certainly, living with the sense of finality is more exhausting than living as if we were immortal, always postponing what we want to reach in our lives. However, the lyric persona also lectures that ignoring transience and death is not really possible when he says, “you can try to live in darkness but you can never shake the light”. He even becomes prophetic when claiming, “I have seen the day of your awakening, boy, and it’s coming soon.” The 31 awakening could be interpreted as a positive incident that finally opens the boy’s eyes after having slept for so long “wrapped up in [his] blanket […] that comfortable cocoon”. This awakening might make him realise that life’s finality is life’s engine at the same time. On the other hand, the awakening could be death itself – in this case, the lyric persona urges the boy to start seizing his life now, to start living in the light of death’s presence because his life will soon be over. Oberst’s stressing of the words “it’s coming soon” with a painful penetrating quality in his voice rather pleads for the latter interpretation.

So far, there has been given a short commented summary on the first two stanzas and the lyric persona has been identified as a confident singer who lectures a boy, the fictitious addressee of the song who never replies or talks back to his authoritarian teacher and therefore is in the same position as we - the listeners - are. The ‘carpe diem’ motif has been explored in the dark/light metaphors and the lecturing lyrical ‘I’ has presented himself as role model of how to seize live, even if obstacles and barricades such as “the avalanche of opinions” seem to block the way. The idea of the cosmic puzzle, however, has only been announced briefly in the first stanza, where it is presented as something ungraspable because it is too huge and always altering (“The picture’s far too big to look at, kid. Your eyes won’t open wide enough/ and you’re constantly surrounded by that swirling stream of what is and what was.”). Verse five will now return to this big cosmic picture: So go ahead and lose yourself in liquor and you can praise the clouded mind but it isn’t what you’re thinking, no, it’s the course of history, your position in line. You’re just a piece of the puzzle so I think you had better find your place. And don’t go blaming your knowledge on some fruit you ate.

The metaphor of the clouded mind resulting from alcohol might allude to the fact that, when one is drunk it, is easier to accept that there are many things that lie outside human understanding. On the other hand, the speaker claims that, in truth, the boy wants to understand and that he just uses alcohol to forget the questions and thoughts that cloud his mind by further clouding it with an attitude of indifference and the feeling of lightness coming along with being drunk. 21 Then, however, the lyric persona argues that the boy, deep inside, does not really believe in his alcohol-drenched “clouded mind” but in finding his place in the world, his “position in line”. He tells him that he is part of the cosmic picture into which everyone has to fit and warns the boy about blaming himself too much, about taking

21 In “Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come”, another song from the Lifted LP, Oberst sings, “we’ll get some lighter heads for a heavy heart.” 32 himself too seriously because he is “just a piece of the puzzle” even if he identifies with Adam and Eve’s sinning (“some fruit you ate”). One could interpret his “knowledge” as death awareness; in this sense, the lyric persona dismisses the Bible’s explanation of man’s mortality by including death as a simple part of the big puzzle – not as the result of humanity’s sinning. He frees the boy and, in a broader sense, humanity of its burden by freeing death of its biblical mythological origin and by making it an integral part of the natural cycle in the following stanza six: ‘Cause there’s been a great deal of discussion, yes, about the properties of man. Animal or Angel? You were carved from bone but your heart, it’s just sand. And the wind is gonna scatter it and cover everything with love. So if it makes you happy, then keep kneeling, Mama, but I’m standing up.

This verse continues with the well-known discussion whether human beings are animals or angels; animals in the sense that we just act selfishly to satisfy our instincts, or angels representing compassionate altruistic creatures. The speaker seems to be sure that the human being is an in-between creature, “carved from bone” and thus being obliged to satisfy the bodily needs but with a heart that can spread its love like sand. Interpreted under the aspects of the duality of body and soul, he might refer to the bones representing the body and the heart representing the soul, the consciousness, or the self. Thus, one could argue that the singer disbelieves in the immortality of a human consciousness as one reasonable entity. Rather, he lets it dissolve into sand and become one with nature in a form that has lost all human traits. The image of the wind covering “everything with love” is that of a loving god – like parental spirit covering everything with a warm and comforting blanket (love of our hearts and of the wind itself). The words of these lines, although maybe existentialist in their meaning since all that is left after death is bones and sand, still do not suggest a total absence of existence but a fusion with nature as it actually happens with dead bodies. As Katharina Ernst says about Emily Dickinson’s poetry, it conveys the “notion of the integration in a realm beyond religious belief” (1991:178). There is comfort in the feeling to outlast death at least in some way, even if it is not in a human-like form or as an immortal soul but as a part of nature, of the universe, from which new life can spring again, always contributing to the constant motion of the huge cosmic picture. 33

Image 1:

One of the five linocuts by Kaite Murphy for the CD book(let) of the Lifted LP. Apparently the print alludes to the idea of fusing with the soil after dying – the person lying on the ground already being embraced by the roots. The book lying next to him/her might be symbolic of “the story told by the fault lines and the soil” (“Bowl of Oranges”). The mysterious dog appears on all five linocuts but its appearance always changes. It might be interpreted as death- omnipresent and inescapable.

As in the majority of Bright Eyes songs, the second chorus shares the melody but not the lyrics of the first chorus, which is why I call it ‘second melodic chorus’ in my analysis. This second melodic chorus and the following bridge show how the lyric persona will communicate his belief in forming part of the cosmic puzzle to the world:

I’m gonna follow the road And let the scenery sweeping by easily enter my body. I’ll send you all this message in code, Under ground, over mountains, through forests and deserts and cities.

All across electric wire, it’s a baited line. The hook is in deep, boys, there is no more time. So you can struggle in the water and be too stubborn to die Or you could just let go and be lifted to the sky.

The second line (“And let the scenery sweeping by easily enter my body”) recalls Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous line “I become a transparent eyeball” from his philosophical credo “Nature” and the general Romantic feeling of fusing with the surroundings, of becoming one with nature. In the third line, the lyric persona starts to spread his message all over the world, reminiscent of some of the lines of the last stanza of Dylan’s musical ballad “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”22 : And I’ll tell it and sing it and think it and breathe it And reflect from the mountains so all souls can see it And I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’

22 “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was published on Dylan’s second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1963 (cf. Detering 2007:31). This extract is taken from Lyrics from http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/ahardrainsagonnafall.html. 34

Similar in style, the difference lies in Dylan’s messenger announcing a sort of apocalyptic rain while Oberst’s persona wants to get through his message that everyone forms part of ‘the big picture’ but should seize his/her short human lifetime to a maximum because we are all like fish on the hook of death. However, we can either die struggling against death or let go and “be lifted into the sky”, accepting it as part of the big cosmic picture. The words “just let go and be lifted to the sky” carry the album’s main idea and echo its long title: Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground whose CD booklet is designed as if it was the copy of a very old book. Its dirty brown-yellowish cloth pattern suggests oldness, as do the letters in the inside of the booklet, where the ink seems to have been bleached by age. Furthermore, the book(let) opens with a table of contents and the songs are presented as chapters with references to page numbers. Each chapter/song starts with an ornate first capital letter which is a typical aesthetic feature of old books and writings. Eventually, the lyrics are not printed in the usual layout of song lyrics and poems but as if they were a prose-text; the lines continue until the right margin of the page, ignoring poetical and musical structuring units such as verse-line, stanza/verse, chorus, and bridge. This technique of visually blurring the song’s linguistic and musical structure in the layout was also applied to other Bright Eyes albums such as A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997 , Fevers and Mirrors , Letting Off the Happiness , I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning , and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn . Only the lyrical transcription of the most recent Bright Eyes album Cassadaga conforms to the form we are used to when reading song-lyrics or poems, marking the spaces between the structuring units. The earlier booklets might suggest that the songs should be read as if they formed a book, as interacting with each other, one song continuing with the idea of another. Especially the Lifted album forms a continuum of ideas, imagery and sounds, blurring the breaks between the songs by letting them merge, as in the case of the subsequent songs “Bowl of Oranges” and “Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come” where the latter’s introductory part is recorded at the end of “Bowl of Oranges”. In an interview with Matt Sheret (2007), Oberst commented on these conceptualisations and the lack of continuation on his latest album Cassadaga : Well, it seems that all our records have like certain concepts, whether they’re lyrical or just sonic concepts like the last two [ I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn , my comment] and this was the first time where the concept was ‘there is none’ and it’s just total freedom to make whatever sound we wanted to.

The concept of Lifted is certainly both – sonic and lyrical. Musically, the songs are all layered with a large variety of instruments and experimental sounds while the philosophical and 35 spiritual lyrics centre on the idea of forming part of the cosmic puzzle whose history is in the soil, which is why we should listen to it, as is suggested by the album’s second title The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground .

Returning to the analysis and interpretation of the “The Big Picture”, the one who lifts us into the sky like a fisherman lifts a fish out of the water could also be referring to the wind that gives the ‘hearts of sand’ back to the soil “cover(ing) everything with love” and thus closes the circle of universal oneness and recalls the album’s second title. On the other hand, the fisherman can also be read as a personification of death whose hook we cannot escape from, no matter how hard we struggle. To “be too stubborn to die” can be read as pushing away and ignoring the thought that death will come sooner or later and therefore going on living as if life was never-ending. It reminds us of the earlier stanza four: “So you can try to live in darkness, but you will never shake the light.” Curiously, Oberst’s voice reaches an orgasmic intensity when groaning the first sound /a/ three times before he bursts into the final bridge: A-a-all across electric wire, it’s a baited line. The hook is in deep, boys, there is no more time. So you can struggle in the water and be too stubborn to die Or you could just let go and be lifted…to the sky.

The bridge contrasts starkly with the rest of the song not only because of its different melody but because of its many unstressed syllables which make Oberst accelerate his speech and give it a sudden rap-like quality until the very last line where he suddenly slows down to enjoy the song’s last words “lifted…to the sky” – again screaming out the ending diphthong /ai/ with a groaning quality. He really sounds as if he had a kind of intellectual orgasm, very similar to the one he has in “At the Bottom of Everything”, the other song that will be dealt with partly in this chapter and partly in the chapter dealing with metaphors of the circle.

A song of Romantic transcendentalism? As far as this interpretation of “The Big Picture” is concerned, it does not exactly echo what Safranski conceives as Romantic “Transzendentalreligion” since time and transience are here the action-pushing factors that motivate living while we usually find a timeless quality in the epiphany moments of Emerson, Whitman and especially Schleiermacher. Oberst’s “I”, on the other hand, feels time’s pressure, he feels “hot death on [his] heals” and, in this way, rather recalls the time-concept of Renaissance poems à la Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”. In this poem, the desired woman is reminded of life’s transience by her admirer who urges her 36 to give herself to him before the worms take advantage of her body. This awareness of the present time and the finality of life contrasts with the future-oriented Christian time-model of the Middle Ages (cf. Volkmer-Burwitz 1987:70) where man was “very acutely conscious that he had merely been granted a stay of execution, that this delay would be a brief one” (Ariès 1976/1994: 44-45). The ‘carpe diem’ poetry of the Renaissance implies the idea that death ends one’s life and all its pleasures while people in the Middle Ages awaited the future kingdom of God, seeing their present lives as a simple preparation for it. According to Arthur Lovejoy’s “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms”, the Renaissance and the classicist movement were inspired by the ancient Greeks and Romans who “set themselves limited ends to attain […] and were thus capable of self-satisfaction and finality” (1975:17). We also encounter the idea of life’s finality as shaping the way we see and live life in Emily Dickinson’s poem 186, “By a departing light”: By a departing light We see acuter, quite, Than by a wick that stays. There’s something in the flight That clarifies the sight And decks the rays. (Cited in Ernst 1991:74)

Just as in “The Big Picture”, the awareness of “finitude and cessation motivate[s] living” (Ernst 1991:185) and shapes the speaker’s attitude towards death. Katharina Ernst concludes her study on death in Dickinson’s poetry by claiming that death awareness is an important identity-shaping feature since it is like “a mirror in which the speaking I experiences herself” (1991:202). However, Dickinson’s poem is not typically Romantic, although she is considered a Romantic poet, even if only because she lived during the era of Romanticism and not because her work as such was‘Romantic’. 23 As far as their time-awareness was concerned, the American transcendentalists, Whitman as well as the early German Romantics usually revived the future-oriented time model of the Middle Ages, sometimes combining it with the ‘carpe diem’ motif, and introduced a new concept that transcends time and space and therefore enables the poet to “experience eternity in the moment” (Volkmer-Burwitz 1987:70), as it was described before in the words of Safranski’s “Transzendentalreligion” relying heavily on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s spiritual commitment:

23 In the introduction to The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse , Jerome McGann emphasises that “the romantic period and its correspondent breeze, the romantic movement, are not the same thing” (1993:xx). While the movement has always existed and will always continue in various forms (e.g. in rock music and rebellious political movements), the period dominated by the romantic movement is over (cf. 1993:xx). 37

Strebt danach, schon hier eure Individualität zu vernichten und im Einen und Allen zu leben, [… ] und wenn ihr so mit dem Universum, so viel ihr hier davon findet, zusammengeflossen seid und eine größere und heiligere Sehnsucht in euch entstanden ist, dann wollen wir weiterreden über die Hoffnungen, die der Tod uns gibt. […] Die Unsterblichkeit darf kein Wunsch sein, wenn sie nicht erst eine Aufgabe gewesen ist, die ihr gelöst habt. Mitten in der Endlichkeit eins werden mit dem Unendlichen und ewig sein in einem Augenblick, das ist die Unsterblichkeit der Religion. (Cited in Volkmer-Burwitz 1987:37)

Although it is not this Romantic eternity and transcendence of the moment that Oberst’s lyric persona experiences in the “The Big Picture”, he experiences a glimpse at the big picture of history, the Romantic feeling of belonging to the universe, which in Oberst’s words is a divine puzzle everyone and everything forms part of. According to David Morse’s study on Romanticism and myth “the essential step [of Romantic Transcendentalism] is to oppose all dualisms, whether of God and man, or man and nature, to suggest that a common energy sweeps through all of them” (1987:144). Consequently, man, nature, and the divine are felt to be one and this is what also applies to the core of the spirituality of Oberst’s lyric persona in “The Big Picture”. It is the spiritual message of the song and recalls the basic idea of Buddhism in which the Romantics found their home: “Das Leben ist kein individuelles Phänomen, es repräsentiert eine universale Existenz eines mächtigen Lebens-Geistes” (Barloewen 1996:44). In Oberst’s songs, however, this spiritual feeling goes hand in hand with the ‘carpe diem’ advice, which we also find on of the flipside of the Digital Ash in A Digital Urn booklet: “Never minding hot death on our heels, but never forgetting it either.” Unlike the transcendentalists, Oberst’s persona is always hunted by transience and death: he feels “hot death on our heels”, he feels the inescapable hook of death inside us in “The Big Picture”, he feels that his “compass spins” in “Make War” ( Lifted , 2002) and “time marching on to a madman’s drum” in “Cleanse Song” ( Cassadaga , 2007), and he blames the clocks that “completely ignore everything that we hate or adore” in “A scale, a mirror and those indifferent clocks” ( Fevers and Mirrors , 2000).

Image 2: Another linocut from the Lifted album. The dog is again accompanying a man who, in this print, resembles Conor Oberst. He has a sad expression on his face – probably because he feels life’s transience (“My compass spins.”) and contrasts it with everlasting nature (“The wilderness remains.”) Offering himself to death personified as dog, he attempts to reconcile with death, accepting it as his lifelong companion.

Enigmatic introductions One last step is necessary to complete this analysis and interpretation of “The Big Picture”; as the first song of the album, it has the privilege to be introduced by what a forum-contributor who names himself ‘tombstoneblues’ calls the Bright Eyes-tradition of starting each album with “long annoying things no one wants to listen to”. Leaving aside the irrelevant discussion whether the introductions are annoying or not, ‘tombstoneblues’ is certainly right when claiming that Oberst starts his albums with unusual and sometimes awkward introductory scenes. The latest album, Cassadaga (2007), opens with spherical sounds and a woman describing where to find the ‘Cassadaga’ spiritual camps in the United States. She further describes Cassadaga as a place where people are “getting rid of the old feelings”. While she is talking, an orchestra begins to prepare for a concert and drowns the woman’s words. Finally, the introduction fades into the first track “Clairaudients” – a neologism Oberst created by compounding the noun ‘clairvoyance’, meaning the gift of telepathy and seeing what will happen in the future, with the adjective ‘audible’ or the noun ‘audience’. “Clairaudients” might therefore denote the ability to hear what will happen in the future. The title not only matches with the apocalyptic songs on Cassadaga but also with the idea of communicating with spirits, as in “Four Winds”: “I went back […] to Cassadaga to commune with the dead.” “Clairaudients”, however, might also be relevant for the introduction of Lifted or The story is in the soil, keep your ear to the ground. Also focusing on the ear and the sense of hearing, the title suggests that we have to listen to the ground, to nature, in order to understand what cannot be seen – the big picture. We also have to listen carefully to the introduction of the “The Big Picture” in order to understand what is said. We hear that a man Sennett) and a woman 24 are getting on a car and driving somewhere, the woman giving the directions to the driver. Thanks to the almost ‘clairaudient’ forum-user ‘RazorbladeKiss6677’, the first part of their conversation can be provided – with some modifications and extra-comments on the discourse: Man: Seems like it, right?...Don't you think? Woman: We’re going in now. Man: Do you wanna drive? Woman: No you can drive. [Car doors are opened and closed; Key starts the car.] Man: It's kinda cold out here. Woman: Go left…. then up here. That will make a right. [far away a spherical tone starts]

24 The male voice is that of Blake Sennett and the female voice belongs to Jenny Lewis. Both are members of the band Rilo Kiley from the Saddle Creek ‘family’, the record label which is now “[t]he most vital underground rock scene in the country [the USA]” ( The New York Times on the flipside of Kulbel’s and Walters’s documentary about the first ten years of Saddle Creek ). 39

Then we'll go up to... make a right here. [Sounds of windscreen wipers] Can you make a right here? Yeah. And then maybe, left...twenty-seventh... [loud motor-sounds – as if a motorbike was passing them] Man: Oh he told you where it was? Woman: Nope he didn't. Man: You're just guessing? Woman: Just guessing about it [laughing – more people seem to be laughing in the car] [long dialogue-pause, spherical tone becomes louder] Man: Just too bad all my stuff is still there. Oh, wow…. Woman: Wow!! [loud and frightened] Jesus! Jesus! [guitar starts softly and slowly] Man: That was, that was here [relieved laughter] [Man and woman go on talking unintelligibly]

The car and street noises continue when Oberst, after approximately two minutes, starts singing the lyrics of “The Big Picture”. Actually, sounds of car doors opening and closing and motor noises in the background accompany the whole song, establishing a parallel between the people’s driving and the lyric persona’s metaphorical movement in the second verse: And keep trying to find your way out of that maze of memories. It all sort of looks familiar until you get up close and it’s different, clearly. Each time you turn a corner, you’re…you’re right back where you were. And your only hope is that forgetting might make a door appear.

At some later point of the introduction, their talking becomes unintelligible, just like the woman talking in the Cassadaga -introduction: Towards the second half of stanza two until the first chorus, Oberst’s singing, which sounds as if it was recorded in a small room with a poor sound machine, is supported by the soft and clear female voice of Jenny Lewis, the voice that is also heard in the introduction. The song’s only instrument is Oberst’s guitar playing a soft melody, which is played louder whenever Oberst’s voice becomes louder and more painful with the last verse line of each of the seven stanzas 25 . After the last bridge, when Oberst screams the final /ai/ of the word ‘sky’ several times, the song is suddenly turned off, as if it was on the radio and somebody had switched the channel. It seems as if we were suddenly back in the car with the man and the woman, who could be the ones switching the radio channels, which seem to layer one above the other. Finally we have a confusing noise-

25 In his guide Interpreting Popular Music , David Brackett sums up Richard Middleton’s three types of text/music relationships. Middleton’s first category is termed “affect”, which means to intone feeling, to use text and music to emphasise the expression of emotion. In this first case, the voice tends towards singing. The second type is “story”, meaning that the words tend towards speech and govern the song and its rhythmic flow. Finally, the third category, which is insignificant for the analysis of the music of Bright Eyes, is “gesture”, signifiying that the voice functions as if it was another instrument. “Gesture” also suggests that he words are significant as sounds rather than as linguistic units. All Bright Eyes songs seem to be a mixture of “affect” and “story” whereas there might always be one aspect that dominates over the other. In the case of “The Big Picture”, the narrative text/music relationship (“story”) is clearly the dominate one of the two. 40 salad of talking, mysterious classical music, and extraterrestrial sounds until an unearthly and uncanny female voice crystallizes, singing something in a very soft tone – the only recognisable word being “saved”. Considering the idea that spirits can make themselves heard via radio frequencies, this woman with her message of ‘saving’ might be interpreted as one of these extraterrestrial voices heard by Oberst’s ‘clairaudient’ couple – and simultaneously by us, the listeners.

Now what are we to make of this strange embedding of the actual song? The forum lacks any attempt to interpret the relation of the introductory part to the song. Here is a short summary: two people are driving somewhere, but they do not really know where to because a mysterious ‘he’ has not told them the way. We further know that the weather is cold, probably it is even raining because we hear the sounds of the windscreen wipers. Finally, the woman’s frightened shout “Jesus” signifies that something has happened surprisingly and they get off the car since we hear the doors smashing. However, they start chuckling in a relieved way right afterwards, so it seems to have been only a little shock for them. We, the listeners, are left with the mystery of what happened when they cried out “Wow! Jesus! Jesus!” The little accident could be interpreted as the trigger for the song’s musings about life’s brevity since it might have made the man and the woman feel the breath of death and might have made them aware of how quickly their lives could come to an end. In this sense, they have been able to glimpse ‘the big picture’ and how it works. Eventually, the ‘clairaudient’ part after the actual song is self-explanatory – it seems to be the comforting message that we are ‘saved’ since the cosmic puzzle encloses everything and everyone as part of its soil.

“At the Bottom of Everything”, the first track of I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning is the other song that will be briefly discussed here as an example of transcendence because it also transmits the feeling of interconnectedness with the cosmos. It starts with a totally different introduction; a seemingly drunk Conor Oberst narrates the story about a woman and a man in a plane that is about to crash into the ocean when the pilot announces that the engine has broken. The frightened woman asks the man next to her where they are going and he answers, “We’re going to a party, it’s…it’s…a birthday party…happy birthday darling! We love you very very very very very very very much!” Then, Oberst lets the man start “humming this little tune” and the actual song starts with its complicated levels of transmission. Supposedly, the man on the plane is the lyrical persona of the song since the narrator of the story, who 41 operates on the first level of transmission, either quotes the man on the plane after announcing “he [the man] starts humming this little tune” or he lets him sing the following song himself – we do not know since all persons are spoken and sung by Conor Oberst. Thus, we encounter two levels of transmission; on the first level there is the narrator of the plane-story and on the second level there is the man on the plane who reflects about life and society at the brink of death. After the first two stanzas, a third level of transmission is introduced, namely that of the father of the lyric persona or the narrator who is then again either quoted by one of the two or speaks himself – again Oberst’s voice makes the distinction impossible. After the chorus, it seems as if the narrator of the introductory story is commenting from his outside- perspective again when announcing, in a kind of spoken bridge: “then they smashed into the deep blue sea! It was a wonderful splash!” Because of the pronoun ‘they’ it is clear that he is not part of the people on the plane and thus has to be the narrator of the introduction again. Stanzas three and four could again be sung either by the narrator of the first or by the lyric persona of the second level. The same applies to the following transitional bridge where the pronoun ‘we’ makes both options possible as well. Finally, the transitional bridge leads us to the last part of the song – the resolving chorus, in which, again, the levels of narration are no longer separable, they somehow seem to have become one, just as the pronoun suddenly changes from ‘we’ and ‘they’ to ‘I’ which makes sense when we look at the last line of the song: “I’m happy just because, I found I am really no one.”

So much for the analysis of the complex levels of transmission created by the introduction, which Oberst usually skips when performing live. This means that the first level of transmission, the plane-crash-story, disappears, just like the brink-of-death-scenario. Therefore, multiple meanings are reduced as well; knowing the I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning introduction, one sees the plane falling into the ocean as parallel to the father’s metaphorical sunset. Without the plane-story, this parallel image is not even created in our minds. However, sometimes Oberst just replaces the plane-frame and puts the song into another context. When Bright Eyes performed “At the Bottom of Everything” on Jay Leno’s TV show, Oberst replaced the album’s introduction by a dedication to the governor of California and to the president of the United States, “two men [he] admire[s] a lot…for their biceps and for their creepy fascist agendas.” 26 Obviously, in this context, lines such as “Into the face of

26 Watch “Bright eyes – At the bottom of everything (Live Kilborn)“ on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFXs_vn7tjk [2007, Oct. 20]. 42 every criminal strapped firmly to chair/ We must stare, we must stare, we must stare”, will be interpreted as a critique aiming at Arnold Schwarzenegger and George W. Bush for being in favour of capital punishment. In addition, Oberst also exchanges the ‘bat’ in the line “We must hang up in the belfry where the bats and moonlight laugh” with a “dying soldier” who laughs, which in this context might be a cynic reference to the Iraq war and all the soldiers who had to die in this war over oil and money 27 .

Finding “The Big Picture” “At the Bottom of Everything” After this excursion into the complex area of Oberst’s introductions, framing strategies, and their consequences on the songs following, we will now return to the main theme of this chapter – the feeling of universal oneness. Staying with “At the Bottom of Everything”, we will briefly investigate the words Oberst utters enthusiastically after the plane’s crash into the sea in what might be called the transitional bridge that elapses into the resolving melodic chorus. Considering Pattison’s theory, one could argue that this last transitional bridge and the following melodic chorus form a so-called “song-system”. This term was created by Pat Pattison and Tom Frazee to refer to a grouping of contrasting song units such as chorus, verse and bridge, if they belong together more than other song units (cf. Pattison 1991:56-57): And then we’ll get down there, way down to the very bottom of everything and then we’ll see it, oh my God, we’ll see it, we’ll see it, we’ll see it

Oh my morning’s coming back, the whole world is waking up. All the city buses swimming past, I’m happy just because. I found out I am really no one.

The first two lines are spoken rather than sung and produce the image of the plane still falling or of people plunging “into the caverns of tomorrow” (verse four) and finally arriving “at the bottom of everything”, the place we might arrive at when dying, the place where the lyric persona finds out that he is “really no one”, but rather ‘many’ or part of a whole, of the “big picture” and piece of the cosmic puzzle. ‘Seeing it’ is his epiphany moment and the lyric persona pronounces the words “we’ll see it” louder and with more excitement each time he repeats them. As in “The Big Picture”, he almost sounds as if he has an intellectual orgasm

27 This version is also recorded on the Bright Eyes live album Motion Sickness (2005). It also includes the blunt protest song “When the President Talks to God”, in which the lyric persona ironically asks, “Does God suggest an oil-hike when the president talks to God?” 43 because he has found out the big and comforting secret of human existence that guarantees him ‘a new morning’ and thus a new life whether as part of the soil from which new life can spring as in “The Big Picture”, or as an immortal soul returning to God as suggested by the lyrical person’s father in the first chorus of “At the Bottom of Everything”. This insight, which the lyric persona of this song finds “at the bottom of everything”, makes him happy and relieves him, it takes away his fear of death and converts it into a feeling of having a place in the universe. This interpretation seems to be supported by Oberst’s spiritual statement in an interview from 2007: Well…I think that…everything’s connected and I think […] the mind has a lot more to do with the way reality is […]. Obviously there’s a lot more beyond what we can understand and I think there’s different ways to try to get out that…[…]…whether it’s spiritualism…religion…science…or …art or…you know, fasting, I don’t know. Whatever gets you feel more part of everything instead of…a part of it. I think that is important. 28 [My transcription.]

In one concert, Conor Oberst dedicated “At the Bottom of Everything” to a friend who died on the day of the concert. In a moving speech, he told the audience that this friend whose name was Rose had taught him what it means to be “part of everything and… beyond yourself and being included into this great thing we’re all included in…which is living and…helping each other out” [my transcription].29

Determinism and freewill We find a similar sentiment of comfort in cosmic oneness in Walt Whitman’s “On the Beach At Night Alone” from his famous epic work Leaves of Grass 30 : On the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song, As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the cleft of the universes and of the future. A vast similitude interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, All distances of time, all inanimate forms,

28 Listen to ”Bright Eyes Interview (2 of 2)” on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6utOyhpJvU&mode=related&search= [2007, Oct. 3].

29 Watch “Bright Eyes – At The Bottom Of Everything“ on http://www.youtube.watch?v=4re_OcSZCRo [2007, Oct. 20].

30 This version is from the 9 th and last edition of Leaves of Grass , often called the ‘death-bed edition’, which was firstly published in 1891-2.

All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilisations, languages, All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe, All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, The vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d, And shall forever span them, and compactly hold and enclose them. (The Complete Poems . Ed. Francis Murphy. 1975:288,289)

In contrast to Whitman’s imagery, however, Oberst’s images are those of the puzzle and the picture. Both seem to imply a concept of predestination where “everything must belong somewhere”31 , where there is a structure and sense behind the cosmos that we are not able to grasp 32 because of our limited perception. While in Whitman’s poem there is more of a ‘divine chaos’ held together loosely by “a vast similitude”, Oberst’s ‘puzzle’ or ‘big picture’, implies a concept of predestination, or, in more secular terms, the idea of determinism in both of the songs discussed. In “The Big Picture”, he addresses a boy telling him to, […] go ahead and lose yourself in liquor and you can praise the clouded mind but it isn’t what you’re thinking, it’s the course of history, your position in line. You are just a piece of the puzzle so I think you had better find your place. And don’t go blaming your knowledge on some fruit you ate.

This verse suggests that there is a sublime pattern in which we have to find our place like little chess figures, only able to act freely in a restricted way and armed only with limited perception which could fool us into believing that the whole world was a coincidence. “[T]he philosophical problem of God’s omnipotence and man’s responsibility, which is the religious analogue of the secular philosophical problem of freewill and determinism” (Flew 1971:222) also leaks out in “At the Bottom of Everything” when the lyric persona says that “we must rip out all the epilogues from the books that we have read”. He could either be ironic - as during most of the song - criticising those who tell us that the story of our life is completely unwritten and in our hands. On the other hand, it could also be read as the serious advice to make ourselves the masters of our lives with our future being an unwritten book. The same problem arises in the fourth stanza of the same song when it says, “We must stare into a crystal ball and only see the past.” Probably the lyric persona is not so sure himself and, as the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, interested in maintaining his doubting

31 This line is taken from the song “I Must Belong Somewhere” published on Cassadaga (2007).

32 Compare once more to the opening line of “The Big Picture”: “The picture is far too big to look at, kid. Your eyes won’t open wide enough/ and you’re constantly surrounded by that swirling stream of what is and what was.” 45 position with some ironic resignation, knowing that he will not resolve this mystery. 33 Therefore he sings in “Nothing gets crossed out”, another song from the Lifted album: If everything that happens is supposed to be and it is all predetermined, you can’t change your destiny. Then I guess I’ll just keep moving and someday, maybe, I’ll get to where I’m going.

When scrolling through Conor Oberst’s large list of spiritual songs, it seems that the concepts of fate and freewill always argue with each other in a fight that none of the two can win; although it seems that everyone has her/his predestined place (not just geographically) in Oberst’s lyrical world, there is still much we can change for the better or the worse because we can influence our future to some extent. When the lyric persona of “Cleanse Song” sings “don’t forget what you learned, all you give is returned”, the concept of karma echoes through on the Cassadaga LP. In “If the Brakeman Turns my Way”, another song from the Cassadaga LP, the speaker claims that “the scales always find a way to level out” and thus seems to believe in universal justice represented by the probably oldest symbol of compensation, the scales, which we already encounter in the Egyptian Book of the Dead where the hearts of the dead are weight with the feather of Moat, the goddess of truth and justice (cf. Barloewen 1996:26). The idea of karma sounds nice until it reaches the point when terrible things that by no means can be deserved happen to people; if people are born in the poorest countries of the world and suffer and die from hunger, if people have accidents and end up paralysed, it would be strange to blame these people for being responsible for what happened to them. The other way round, it is equally awkward to believe in absolute predestination if this means that whatever good or bad we do will not have any influence on our future. No wonder that Oberst plays with both concepts and tries to find a balance between them, finally choosing “the grey areas” in his brilliant song “Middleman”. Although this song from Cassadaga does not explicitly refer to the destiny vs. freewill discussion, its second chorus describes how Oberst or his lyric persona prefers to oppose taking sides in every sense:

33 In “Predestination, Freewill and Determinism“, the second chapter of his outlook on western philosophy, Antony Flew cites a part of Hume’s Inquiry , in which the rational philosopher argues that “she [reason] will find difficulties enough to employ her inquiries without launching into so boundless an ocean of doubt, uncertainty, and contradiction” (cited in Flew 1971:236). Oberst, however, seems to enjoy the plunge, even though he is left with no solution. 46

So I have become the Middleman The grey areas are fine The ‘I don’t know’, the ‘maybe so’ Is the only real reply Is the only true reply.

A cage called life While the optimistic and comforting ‘part of the puzzle’-songs of the former chapter would probably be rated as ‘visionary’ by Waggoner since they “see us as participants in the world, part and parcel of it, neither objective observers of it nor homeless in it,” (1982:7) the songs investigated in this chapter usually feature a lyric persona plagued by alienation from society and by the boundaries resulting from being human. Rather than feeling free and unlimited because of the possibility to transcend the self to become one with everything, the lyric personae of the following songs feel encaged within society and within their own limited perception. Consequently, a frequently employed metaphor to describe this state of mind is to picture some unlimited and immortal essence in a cage that restricts it somehow. On the folksy album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning (2005), we encounter this metaphor in the three- chord song “Landlocked Blues”, which Oberst duets with the famous country singer Emmylou Harris. The melancholic title of the song already suggests the feeling of being encaged, literally meaning the blues coming from being surrounded by other countries or states and thus having no coast, no sea, no means of escape. After the lyric persona’s melancholic lines on love, war, confusion, and alienation, we encounter a concrete realisation of the prison-metaphor in the twelfth stanza followed by the last part of the song, the melodic chorus: You’ll be free child once you have died. From the shackles of language and measurable time. Then we can trade places play musical graves. ‘Til then walk away walk away walk away.

So I’m up at dawn, putting on my shoes. I just want to make a clean escape. I’m leaving but I don’t know where to.

Prison imagery was already used by Plato in his Phaedo , in which he talks of death as the liberator of the soul that is encaged within the human body. From the dialogue between Socrates and Cebes, we derive Plato’s - or Socrates’- belief in an invisible immortal part which corresponds to the divine, encaged in the mortal part, the human body (cf. Phaedo 48

78B-79C and 80A-B and Flew 1971:129-130). This soul, however, can only find out the truth of existence when free of the body and its distracting needs. For Plato, we can just get closer to the universal truth, which he believed to exist apart from all the constructed ‘truths’, if we distance ourselves from our bodies as much as possible. However, in his Phaedo , Plato further argues that only death can truly free us from our bodies and take our pure soul to the absolute truth (42F) 34 . Clinging to Plato’s imagery, Oberst’s lyric persona feels encaged within the restricting boundaries of language and time, metaphorically seen as a wall of shackles built around him – a wall that will only be torn down by death. In her thorough studies about carceral imagery, Monika Fludernik claims that prison metaphors of what Lakoff and Johnson would call the type ‘X IS PRISON’ (in our case language and time are prison) “deploy metonymic props to symbolize the carceral scenario […] which frequently stand in metonymic relationship to the prison setting – references to chains, fetters, bars, etc” (2005:16), or, as in the twelfth stanza of “Landlocked Blues”, the ‘shackles’. In the same essay, “Metaphoric (Im)Prison(ment)”, Fludernik further argues that the prison metaphor is a topos of Christianity with Heaven or Hell being the future home of the imprisoned soul (cf. 2005:1). Christian theology, however, took over the body/soul duality from Plato (cf. Barloewen 1996:28) who already advertised the soul’s immortality as well as its eternal pre- existence as a logical consequence of the concept of immortality (cf. Flew 1971:126ff). 35

Returning to the above-cited stanza of “Landlocked Blues”, we encounter the dialogic form since the communicative situation is somebody talking to the lyric persona of the song, addressing him as “child”: You’ll be free child once you have died. From the shackles of language and measurable time. Then we can trade places play musical graves. ‘Til then walk away walk away walk away.

This somebody, one might interpret him or her or it as God or also as Death, assures the lyric persona that death will free him of his limited human perception so that they will be able to “trade places”, probably meaning that once dead, the lyric persona will be on the same eternal level with God, free not only of measurable time but also of measurable space. The phrase “play musical graves”, however, is difficult to interpret. On the one hand, the word ‘play’

34 Cf. “Platon: Phaidon” (2005). Encarta [CD Rom]. Seattle: Microsoft.

35 Resulting from a belief in the eternal existence of the soul, Plato does not believe in a beginning or ending of the soul, which means that what was created by God was only physical, material. Plato further believed in eternal reincarnation as we find it in Eastern religious systems. 49 evokes the lightness of children’s games, while, on the other hand, the word ‘grave’ literally means ‘serious’ and ‘tomb’. Oberst might have derived this ‘game’ he plays with God/Death from the party game ‘musical chairs’. According to the OED, this expression can also be used figuratively describing “a situation in which a number of people continually change or exchange positions or roles”. Interpreted from this perspective, a graveyard serves as playground for the ‘souls’ of the dead. Another possible reading is that the line “we can trade places play musical graves” is not meant to make sense at all since language is supposed to have lost its restricting power in the aftermath of this song. In any case, until the lyric persona reaches this timeless and unlimited sphere, he is told to “walk away”, which is strongly emphasised by the triple repetition.

Escaping life To walk away from what? This is the question that arises in this context; maybe from the blissful vision that is said to await him after death which might make him fall in love with the idea of suicide. Among the philosophers, Karl Jaspers writes of suicide as a means of salvation for persons who are “[g]epeinigt in der Welt, ohnmächtig, den Kampf mit sich und der Welt fortzuführen“ (2000:202). However, the lyric persona is told to escape the thought of death as salvation until it comes naturally: “’Til then walk away walk away walk away.” Following this advice, he finally moves on, although he neither knows the direction, nor the destination: So I’m up at dawn, putting on my shoes. I just wanna make a clean escape. I’m leaving but I don’t know where to.

Consequently, the possible moral message of the last stanza and the last chorus of this song is that even if you sometimes have the feeling that life is without meaning, and even though sometimes all movement fails to lead to progression, you still cannot give in to the idea of suicide. Suicide could but should not be the solution to earthly problems. That is why the second speaker of the song tells the desperate and despondent lyrical ‘I’ to leave the seducing thoughts of suicide when he advises him to “walk away walk away walk away”. The reasons for the speaker’s despondency and despair can be found in the previous stanza: I’ve grown tired of holding this pose. I feel more like a stranger each time I come home. And so I’m making a deal with the devils of fame, Saying let me walk away, please.

Here, the lyric persona is identified as somebody famous who seems to suffer from the alienation coming along with fame. He feels that he can no longer play this role and thus wants to make “a deal with the devils of fame”, trading for another and probably more ‘normal’ life which is free of alienation. The reference to Faust’s deal with the devil is obvious here, although it is reversed; while Faust sells his soul to obtain knowledge and fame, the lyric persona of “Landlocked Blues” would rather return his fame in order to live an ordinary life. However, in the next stanza, the “devils of fame” answer that only death will be able to change his situation. Addressing him as “child” and in this way implying that he is bound to obey, they tell him that they will only trade places with him after his death. This interpretation excludes suicide and the voice of God has become the voices of the devils of fame. Nevertheless, the lyric persona also embraces death as a means of escape from a life that has become lonesome and almost insupportable.

Cures for the blues – alcohol, writing, and singing Taking another step back in the song, the lyric persona claims in the first chorus to have found “a liquid cure” for his “Landlocked Blues”, which makes him confident about the future: I found a liquid cure. For my landlocked blues. It will pass away like slow parade, It’s leaving but I don’t know how soon.

The first association one might have with “liquid cure” is alcohol, especially when informed about Oberst’s drinking habits (cf. Sakamoto 2000; Maack 2005; Frere-Jones 2005). Here, however, we again face the problematic character of a biographical interpretation because the lyric persona and the artist who created the lyric persona are seen as the same person. Moreover, the immediacy of speech in “Landlocked Blues”, in which the ‘I’ directly speaks to the audience, might seduce the listener to fuse the lyric persona and its creator. However, even if this speculative autobiographical connection is wrong, alcohol can still be the “liquid cure” of the lyric persona since it is generally known as a drug that makes its user feel less intensely because of its numbing effect. Consequently, alcohol also numbs the dominating feelings of imprisonment, loneliness, and pain. In other songs, Oberst alludes to alcohol as a sort of cure; in “Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come”, the lyric persona “get[s] a lighter head for a heavy heart” in his favourite bar, in “The Big Picture”, the boy praises his “clouded mind” resulting from the liquor he drinks. In the “Landlocked Blues”-forum, the reading of alcohol being the “liquid cure” is mentioned twice, while the interpretation of the 51 liquid medication being the ink the lyric persona writes his songs in in stanza seven is not mentioned: I keep drinking the ink from my pen. And I’m balancing history books up on my head. But it all boils down to one quotable phrase: If you love something give it away.

Writing could thus be interpreted as having a therapeutic function helping the lyric persona to dismiss his blues of restriction, of nihilistic attitudes towards life, at least for a certain time. As in other Bright Eyes-lyrics, the ‘I’ seems to be a writer, a poet, a songwriter, or a singer who claims, “all I know is I feel better when I sing./ Burdens are lifted from me that’s my voice raising” (“Method Acting”) and who “trie[s] to find some comfort in written words” (“Nothing gets crossed out”) when he feels life’s weight on his shoulders. Writing and singing are his cures, or at least some sort of alleviation for his pain and sadness. Apparently, there is a parallel between the lyric persona and the ‘real’ author and singer of these songs. Nevertheless, the “Landlocked Blues” stays with the lyric persona who is aware that whatever he writes cannot change the transient course of life (also represented by the history books) where “anything beautiful fades away, and anything ugly fades away, too.” (Oberst in an interview with Edwards in 2002). Love and joy and pain and loss are necessarily interconnected – the more we love something or someone, the more it hurts when this something or someone departs. 36 The positive side is that the mental suffering caused by the “Landlocked Blues” is only temporal as well, a victim to transience just as beloved persons or things as in the verse line “If you love something, give it away”. The lyric persona seems incapable of enjoying and appreciating the present since the future is always on his mind, it makes him feel that whatever seems significant and important in the moment will eventually mean nothing. In the Lifted -song “Nothing gets crossed out”, he feels that “working on a record seems pointless now/ When the world ends who’s gonna hear it anyhow?” and in the earlier Fevers and Mirrors-song “A scale, a mirror and those indifferent clocks” he is equally desperate about time’s mercilessness:

36 The crux of transience is echoed in “June on the West Coast”: “You see sorrow gets too heavy and joy it tends to hold you/ with the fear that it eventually departs.”

And these clocks keep unwinding and completely ignore Everything that we hate or adore. Once the page of a calendar is turned it’s no more. So tell me then what was it for? Oh, tell me, what was it for? 37

Flee from the “horror vacui” At an earlier stage of “Landlocked Blues”, in stanza six, the speaker’s confusion about the world and its transient ever-moving course that never seems to arrive anywhere in the metaphor of a spinning carousel 38 : The world’s got me dizzy again. You’d think after 22 years 39 I’d be used to the spin. And it only gets worse when I stay in one place, so I’m always pacing around or walking away.

In this stanza, what Lakoff and Johnson would call the ‘confusion is dizziness’-metaphor makes the lyric persona feel disoriented and lost. Nevertheless, he prefers to stumble around because if he stops moving, the dizziness and maybe also the feeling of imprisonment and consequently the “Landlocked Blues” are felt even stronger. This effect is actually felt by everyone who has tried out turning around quickly: while turning one does not feel as dizzy as when standing still afterwards, which might mean that the speaker prefers doing something and keeping on moving to not doing anything and thus creating space for what Kant calls the “horror vacui”, translated by Safranski as “das Bewußtsein von Leere, Nichtigkeit und Nichts” (2007:203). According to Pascal, the fear of this emptiness is what makes us search for things that keep us busy (cf. Safranski 2007:205). Safranski argues that the Romantics enjoy these ‘empty moments’, rejecting to surrender to the feeling of modern nihilism:

37 While Oberst presents himself as a designated victim of transience, William Shakespeare sought to conserve beauty and youth in his famous sonnet XVIII. Probably addressed to the young man Shakespeare dedicated the first half of his sonnets to, the poet announces that “thy eternal summer shall not fade,/ Nor lose possession of that fair thou grow’st/ […]/ So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” ( The Complete Works 1987:1201).

38 Compare to “Nothing Gets Crossed Out” (Lifted): “My head’s a carousel of pictures. The spinning never stops. I just want someone to walk in front and I’ll follow the leader.”

39 Here one could argue for an autobiographical lyric persona since, when Oberst performs live, he usually adapts the number to his actual age, as he does on the live recording of the song on the album Motion Sickness , on which we hear “after 25 years.” On the other hand, in this version recorded for I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, he sings “after 22 years” as in the song’s original version “One foot in front the other” which was released on the Saddle Creek 50 compilation when Oberst was 22. Again it is a weird contradictory case and autobiographical reference is worth mentioning but not granted. 53

Sie [the Romantics] erfinden Konstellationen und Personen, die einen hineinstürzen lassen in die große Leere, wo man das Grundrauschen der Existenz hört, sie fixieren Augenblicke, da es um nichts mehr geht, kein Weltgehalt sich anbietet, woran man sich festhalten oder mit dem man sich füllen kann, Augenblicke des leeren Verstreichens der Zeit, die Zeit pur, ihre reine Anwesenheit, Momente also, da man bemerkt, wie die Zeit vergeht, weil sie gerade nicht vergehen will, da man sie nicht vertreiben, nicht herumbringen, nicht, wie es heißt, sinnvoll ausfüllen kann. (2007:206-207)

Oberst’s “Landlocked Blues“, however, seems to stem from modern nihilism; the lyric persona does not see any sense behind moving just for the sake of moving. He feels as if he was moving on a cyclic path (carousel) without destination, hoping that death will free him from this circle (“You’ll be free child once you have died”) but aware that he should not try to escape it by committing suicide. Thus, in the last part of the song, the second melodic chorus suggests trying to flee from this feeling of living a life without purpose: So I’m up at dawn, putting on my shoes. I just want to make a clean escape. I’m leaving but I don’t know where to. I know I’m leaving but I don’t know where to.

Finally, the lyric persona of “Landlocked Blues” seems to support Pascal’s theory of human beings trying to escape Kant’s “horror vacui”. In this way, he rejects what Safranski claims to be the Romantic enjoyment of these moments – not because of their emptiness but because of the possibility to fill them with what Novalis calls “das Romantisieren”. This means to create moments of pleasure by using imagination and aesthetic language and not to give room to nihilistic sadness and senselessness.

“Landlocked Blues”: Modernist or Romantic? If we return to Keightley’s categories of Modernistic and Romantic features in music and apply them to “Landlocked Blues”, the song could be labelled as modernist as far as its despondent lyrics and the lyric persona’s attempt to escape the “horror vacui” are concerned. Musically it is basically a folk song managing solely with a Spanish guitar softly played by Oberst in the background of verses one to five, which is joined in the first melodic chorus by Jesse Harris’ acoustic guitar and Tim Luntzel’s bass. There are two instrumental parts, one after the first melodic chorus (a country melody played by the two guitars and the bass) and one that divides the anti-war-stanzas nine and ten from stanza eleven, in which the lyric persona meets “the devils of fame”. This second instrumental part follows Oberst’s advice to run away from war and from the army and it makes us picture some soldiers blowing a ‘military melody’ to recruit the lyric persona. Instrumentally, this part is dominated by Nate 54

Walcott’s trumpet solo. As far as its musical composition is concerned, Keightley would certainly label the song as belonging to the Romantic category since “Landlocked Blues”, as well as the album in which it is embedded, does without sonic experiments and relies on traditional instruments. Also, the communicative situation is rather Romantic since it invites us to think of the author as the lyrical ‘I’ and of the song as ‘confessional’ to some extent because it is possible to make a direct reference from the song’s subject to the singer- songwriter – according to Reinfandt’s study a typical feature of Romantic communication (cf. 2003:328).

Problems of fragmented reading It is a pity to have to reduce the rich and complex lyrics of “Landlocked Blues” to some fragments dealing with death, transience, and transcendence since the song is, as a whole, a beautiful puzzle of philosophical thoughts and poetic imagery. However, for the sake of topical analysis, any interpretation not obtained through the ‘death and transcendence-filter’ would diverge from the theme and make this paper far too long. Fortunately, in “Landlocked Blues” as well as in many other Bright Eyes songs “every verse is an observation standing on its own”.40 So even a fragmented reading can be rich in meaning, even though the German Romantic theorist August Wilhelm Schlegel despises disjointed analysis. He claims that it is the poetic context which renovates imagery that might have been used a thousand times before: Allein die wahrhaft schönen Bilder sind unsterblich, und mögen sie noch so oft gebraucht worden seyn, unter der Hand eines ächten Dichter verjüngen sie sich immer von neuem. Sie sind an ihrer Stelle geboren, und man glaubt daher nicht, sie schon zu kennen. Man sieht daher, daß auch in dieser Hinsicht die Prüfung der Gedichte nach einzelnen Stellen zu nichts führt: denn wie leicht wäre es, aus dem göttlichsten Werke Bilder herauszureißen, die man, an sich betrachtet, für trivial ausgeben könnte. (Allegorie und Symbol , 1972: 173)

Although I believe Schlegel is right when claiming that a poem, which in our case is a song, loses some of its beauty when analysed and interpreted in a fragmented way, I believe that the immediate context of the stanza coupled with references to related aspects of other parts of the same song and sometimes to the context of the album and other songs, will not make the discussed imagery seem ‘trivial’ but almost as aesthetically pleasing and innovative as when provided as a whole.

40 Forum contributor ‘numbskull’ posted this commentary in the “Landlocked Blues”-forum. 55

Oberst’s lyrical development: Abandoning ‘Todessehnsucht’ When looking at the development of Oberst’s lyrics, it is striking to find his lyric persona(s) flirting with the idea of death as a liberator from a painful, confusing and senseless life until his most recently published album Cassadaga on which the motif which one might call ‘Todessehnsucht’ is finally abandoned and replaced by a positive although maybe more resigned attitude to accept what cannot be changed and not to take things too seriously. In “Cleanse Song”, lighter verse lines such as “if life seems absurd what you need is some laughter” replace despaired verses such as “I want to scream out that it all is nonsense” (“Waste of Paint”, Lifted ). Oberst’s lyric persona also seems to have accepted the transient quality of life where “time [is] marching on like a madman’s drum”, having replaced his doubt and confusion by ideas of redemption and karma. 41 On Cassadaga , he seems happier in life, he no longer wants to escape it, and to think of death as a liberating force seems to have lost its attraction. In his older songs, however, Oberst’s lyric persona tends to be heavy- hearted and frequently searching for a ‘pure identity’, for the sense of life and for answers to his metaphysical questions. Despondency, senselessness, and feeling trapped within confusion are often the results of his odysseys for understanding. They are developed in the previously discussed “Landlocked Blues”, but also in the songs “Train Under Water”, in “Waste of Paint”, in “June on the West Coast”, and various other Bright Eyes songs which will have to be relegated to a short reference in the footnotes. All these songs contain artistically metamorphosed versions of the ‘clouded mind’ or the ‘caged mind/self/soul’ as metaphors for the lack of understanding and for human confusion and restrictedness. As already mentioned, these songs contrast with those songs in which the lyric persona feels that he is becoming one with the universe, which enables him to transcend the boundaries of space and time.

The “clouded mind” in search of clarity and purification Having discussed the cage metaphor thoroughly, it is time to take a closer look at the motif of the confused mind; besides “Landlocked Blues”, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning features another song that captures this confusion and search for clarity and understanding in beautiful imagery: If I could tame all of my desires. Wait out the weather that howls in my brain. Because it seems that it’s always changing, the wind’s indecision, the sorrowful rain.

41 e.g. “Cleanse Song:” “Don’t forget what you’ve learned/ all you give is returned.” “If the Brakeman Turns My Way:” “First a mother bathes her child then the other way around/ The Scales always find a way to level out” 56

I was a postcard, I was a record, I was a camera until I went blind. Now I’m riding all over this island looking for something to open my eyes. (“Train Under Water”)

Here, the rapid cyclic movement of the spin is replaced by the image of a tempest in the brain. The metaphor’s vehicle is the wild wind, the common ground on which it builds is the fast and unpredictable movement which is shared by the vehicle and the tenor, the lyric persona’s mind. The postcard, the record, and the camera might suggest that he used to be able to catch one thought and to stick to it and be convinced of it and believe in it. Then, however, he lost his eyesight, which might suggest his total lack of clarity, which makes him suffer and search for something to make him see clearly again, even if it is just for an instant. When compared to “Landlocked Blues”, the weather howling in his brain clearly alludes to the confusion reigning in his mind and echoes the dizziness resulting from the world’s spin in “Landlocked Blues”. Both images illustrate this vexed state of a mind that longs for clarity, for linear movement that leads somewhere. In the fourth stanza of “June on the West Coast” from the 1998 LP Letting off the Happiness, which was published when Oberst was only eighteen years old, the lyric persona also searches for clarity and purity: And I went to San Diego, the birthplace of the summer, and watched the ocean dance under the moon. And there was a girl I knew there, one more potential lover, I guess that something’s got to happen soon. Because I know I can’t keep living in this dead or dying dream and as I walked along the beach and drank with her I thought about my true love, the one I really need. With eyes that burn so bright, they make me pure. They make me pure. They make me pure. I long to be with you.

In this song, the lyric ‘I’ connects purity with the true love of his life, which he has probably not found yet. Again, he involves the eyes in his search for a ‘pure’ identity, for liberation from confusion, for purification. Musing about the band’s name, the ideas of cleansing, truth and innocence could certainly have been swirling in Oberst’s mind when choosing the name ‘Bright Eyes’. In “June on the West Coast”, one possible interpretation of his “true love” with the “eyes that burn so bright they make me [the lyric persona] pure” is death itself since it might be the only one able to free him out of his “dead or dying dream” by making it real. In this interpretation, we encounter death as his long-awaited love and thus the first example of the connection between Eros and Thanatos. A Christian interpretation of this true love might be the wish for an encounter with Christ, the one who freed human beings of their sin by making them pure again in front of God, a figure who loves without restriction. In “Don’t 57

Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come”, the lyric persona even slips into the role of Maria Magdalena asking, “And if I dried his feet, with my dirty hair, would he make me clean again?” The true love he “really needs” in “June on the West Coast” is actually the wish to see clearly, to be healed from the blindness of “Train Under Water”. It is also the wish for cleansing, for something (“Train Under Water”) or somebody (“June on the West Coast”) that releases him from confusion and that helps him to become a new and better person. Death, in the sense of Plato’s liberating force, is certainly only one possible interpretation of this something/someone. Certainly it could also be another person or an event in life that might cause his awakening from this “dead and dying dream” in the simple and relaxed song “June on the West Coast”.

The last example of intellectual despair that will be provided here is probably the saddest song of the Lifted album; in the episodic “Waste of Paint,” the lyric persona is again plagued by feelings of alienation and senselessness of busy human activities in the fifth stanza: So, I have been hanging out down by the train’s depot. No, I don’t ride. I just sit and watch the people there. And they remind me of wind-up cars in motion. The way they spin and turn and jockey for positions. And I wanna scream out that it all is nonsense. And your lives are one track and can’t you see how it’s pointless? But just then, my knees give under me. My head feels weak and, suddenly, it is clear to see that it is not them but me, who has lost my self-identity as I hide behind these books I read, while scribbling my poetry, like art could save a wretch like me, with some ideal ideology that no one can hope to achieve. And I am never real; it is just a sketch of me. And everything I have made is trite and cheap and a waste of paint, of tape, of time.

Despair and sadness are reinforced by Oberst’s weeping voice at the point when the lyric persona starts feeling unreal because all his intellectual occupation, even his writing, seems as pointless as everything else. He comes to this sad conclusion after having evoked the individual vs. society opposition: his lyric ‘I’ is the lonesome poet in search of meaning who distances himself from the ignorant mainstream conformist society, who do not seem to notice the absurdity of their busy and automatic lives. However, after reflecting about the travellers at the train station, he realises that he is not any better, although clearly different since he dedicates his time to intellectual occupations such as reading and writing poetry. Implicitly, he thus considers himself more intelligent than the others since his mind is able to see the absurdity and purposelessness of human actions, reinforced by the concluding refrain: “And everything I’ve made is trite and cheap and a waste… of paint…of tape… of time.” 58

The (im)mortal soul In the following and last stanza, he goes to church and wants to sing with the choir but cannot hit the high notes. One could argue that even if he tries to live like ordinary people in society, like the people at the railway station or the choir singers and even if he tries to believe in God, he still feels alone and lost in his purposeless life with all his questions remaining unanswered. He then leaves the church “with [his] broken heart and [his] absent God” and says that he has no faith and all he wants is, “to be loved… and believe… in my soul…in my soul”. Having arrived at the climax of despondency and at the end of the song, he bursts into a desperate cry for faith in his soul. It seems that if he does not believe in the existence of his soul, there is nothing that will be able to find out what it all was for after death because there would just be the transient human being dissolving into nothing. A similar hope for an existence of an immaterial and immortal soul that will finally be able to understand life and death can be found in another song on the Lifted album; in “Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come”, the lyric persona asks at the end of the song: And if I sold my soul for a bag of gold, to you, which one would be the foolish one? Which one of us would be the fool? Which one of us would be the foolish one? Which one of us would be the fool?

Could you please start explaining? You know I need some understanding. Could you please start explaining? You know I need some understanding. Could you please start explaining? You know I need some understanding. Ah, could you go and start explaining? You know I want to understand.

In these lines, the person the speaker addresses could be interpreted as the fallen angel, evil in the world, or as the devil, who is finally requested to explain what the human being cannot understand. Basing his imagery on a fusion between the legend of Faustus (soul-selling) and the biblical betrayer Judas (bag of gold/money), we find the lyric persona in the position of the sceptic who, like Faustus, is doubting whether he would be the fool and loser selling his eternal soul or whether he would be the winner since his soul cannot be saved because it does not exist at all – at least not as some immortal essence. He just asks “which one would be the fool?” and thus maintains his doubting in-between position, not sure whether there is some kind of recompensing equality in the world. “Which one of us would be the fool?” is the lyric persona’s ardent request for understanding the injustice we find in the world.

Concluding the “cage metaphor” and introducing the idea of returning home One conclusion that can be drawn in this chapter is that carceral imagery of the soul being trapped within the body and metamorphosed versions of it such as the self being trapped within the limits of human perception is an essential part of Oberst’s earlier work. However, other lyricists as well as other poets and writers have been using this metaphor throughout history. Among the singer-songwriters, we find Sting as a prominent example; he has even entitled one of his less-famous albums The Soul Cages , which is said to be an attempt to cope with the death of his father .42 As in Sting’s lyrics and Plato’s Phaedo , death is supposed to be the ultimate saviour, the way out of an individual’s painful existence. Death is the only one able to free you and even if you try to change your entire personality to achieve a kind of ‘auto-rebirth’ in life, you will still be a restricted human being and carry that cargo with you until your death, as Oberst’s suggests in “From a Balance Beam”. In this song from the spiritually loaded Lifted album, we find the probably most obvious prison metaphor; the lyric persona feeling held “inside that cell that is myself”, for which only death, personified as a guard, has the keys: It was in a foreign hotel’s bathtub I baptized myself in change. And one by one I drowned all of the people I had been. I emerged to find the parallels were fewer. I was cleansed. I looked in the mirror and someone new was there. Still I was as helpless as a chess piece when I was lifted up by someone’s hand and delivered from the corner my enemies had got me in. But in all of my salvation I still felt imprisoned inside that holding cell that is myself. So I wait for the day when I’ll hear the key as it turns in the lock and the guard will say to me, “Oh my patient prisoner you have waited for this day and finally… you are free! You are free! You are freezing! 43

One of the logical consequences of depicting death as a liberating force is that death is not something to fear but to be expected with open arms in the hope that things might change for the better – confusion might finally stop and a reunion of two loving parts, often the father

42 Throughout the title-song, the narrative voice sees the souls of people who have died in factories, in wars and on the sea. Finally, the speaker sees the opened cadaver of a fisherman and comments “one less soul in the soul cages” before he turns to a boy who dreams of sailing to “the island of souls” with his father. For the lyrics, see http://sting.lyrics.info/thesoulcages.html. The information about Sting is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_Cages.

43 The reason for the lyric persona’s freezing could be traced back to the earlier 2001 song “If Winter Ends”, the first track on the Letting Off the Happiness LP where he “scream[s] for the sunlight” and asks to “just get [him] past this dead and eternal snow.”

60 and son might be achieved. The father, however, while in Sting’s song rather interpreted as the boy’s literal father, is ‘death’ or ‘God’ in Oberst’s songs. Obviously, all the discussed songs have an escapist quality, celebrating death as a better state of being or non-being, as what Volkmer-Burwitz calls “das Reich des absoluten Nichts, als Befreiung von weltlicher Sorge, körperlichem Schmerz und metaphysischem Zweifel” (1987:135). In her doctoral thesis about death in Romantic poetry, Volkmer-Burwitz further argues that poems centring on the motif of ‘Todessehnsucht’ are all connected on a metaphorical basis via the image of the “peregrinatio, der kreisförmigen Lebensreise, die in Harmonie beginnt und über einen Irrweg des Suchens zurückstrebt zur Harmonie” (1987:135). In the following subchapter, we will therefore investigate whether this cyclic metaphor also applies to Oberst’s songs by again looking at the more thoroughly discussed “Landlocked Blues“ and the other song extracts that have been treated so far.

‘Peregrinatio’: Returning ‘home’ and realisations of the circle metaphor Volkmer-Burwitz defines ’peregrinatio’ as ”der triadische Weltentwurf von ursprünglicher Harmonie über eine Trennung zurück zu harmonischer Einheit“ (1987:300). This idea certainly applies to the lyric persona in “Landlocked Blues” who claims “I’m leaving but I don’t know where to”. He finds himself walking on the “Irrweg des Suchens” until he is finally supposed to arrive ‘home’ after death to be reunited with the second speaker who assures him, “You’ll be free child once you have died.” Calling him “child,” this second speaker may here be pictured as much older and wiser than the first speaker, and images of a reunion with God as a loving father are evoked when we interpret the song in the context of the motif of ‘peregrinatio’. Thus, the father and son harmony is reinstalled – but only by the second speaker. Although the “child” seems to trust in this godlike speaker’s words since he moves on as he is told, he seems to do it to avoid the second speaker’s being disappointed in him and not because he really sees the sense in moving on: So I’m up at dawn. Putting on my shoes. I just wanna make a clean escape. I’m leaving but I don’t know where to. I know I’m leaving but I don’t know where to.

In the last melodic chorus, the lyric persona definitely decides to live on and to move on; here, the reason for going on, however, is the commitment to a loving person who would not 61 want the speaker to take his life to an end earlier than necessary. 44 In “From A Balance Beam”, the second person involved in the act of freeing the lyric persona is the guard who opens the prison’s door. If interpreted as God, who at the same time could be Death, we could again suggest a reunion with a father-figure who lovingly calls the lyric persona “my patient prisoner”. Finally, an obvious example of ‘returning’ is to be found in “Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come”, where the speaker suggests that one day “it will all go black it will all go back to the way it was before”. In this song, everything merges into blackness, into nothingness, into an immaterial sphere. In contrast to “Landlocked Blues” and “From A Balance Beam”, “Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come” evokes the existentialist concept of coming from nothingness and returning to nothingness (cf. Tillich cited in Edwards 1994:47) and rejects the idea of an ongoing individual existence and worldly images of reunions in the aftermath by painting it all black, in the colour or anti-colour that is supposed to devour all other colours and might therefore be interpreted as absolute non- existence. 45 Nevertheless, the song does not claim that nothingness also swallows immaterial essences or souls since the lyric persona, at the end of the song, doubts the existence of such an immaterial part or at least its immortality and existence when he asks, “And if I sold my soul for a bag of gold, to you, which one of us would be the foolish one?” Moreover, the speaker does not even claim that he believes that the day “when there won’t be a moon and there won’t be a sun” will arrive since Oberst put the words into the mouths of some unknown people in the second stanza when he sings “ they say they don’t know when but a day is gonna come.” However, in stanza ten the pronoun ‘they’ is replaced by the lyric ‘I’ who now seems convinced that “it will all go back to the way it is supposed to be.” In the words of the African American writer James Baldwin, the song could be about the “terrifying darkness from which we came from and to which we shall return” (cited in Edwards 1994:45). The mood of the song, however, does not suggest fear – it is rather mysterious because of its haunting melody and the introductory part that sounds as if someone was playing an old and dusty piano in the

44 In the song “Let’s Not Shift Ourselves (To Love And To Be Loved)“ on the 2002 Lifted album, the lyric persona wakes up after a suicide attempt “weak from whiskey and pills” when he sees his father and feels tremendously sorry and selfish for what he did because he hurt those he loved with his action. In the last lines of the song the lyrical I sums up what he has learned from the incident: “How grateful I was then to be part of the mystery, to love and to be loved. Let’s just hope that is enough.”

45 Wikipedia’s article “Color symbolism and psychology” suggests that Western cultures tend to associate, amongst others, absence, mystery, death (as opposed to eastern cultures!), and unity with the colour black. Logically, it represents darkness and the unknown since we cannot see in absolute darkness in the absence of all light. See http://en.widipedia.org/wiki/Color_symbolism.

62 attic of a ghostly house 46 when suddenly a spherical sound fills the room. Gone is the neat studio sound to give way to an extraordinary haunted and uncanny melody and the Bible- drenched lyrics in which Oberst philosophises about human existence before he finally arrives at the big question of whether there is an immaterial essence, or a soul, that survives death or not.

In “At the Bottom of Everything”, we also encounter the image of a cyclic structure of existence in the first melodic chorus – in the direct speech of the first or second narrator’s father who suggests that we return to God “just like the setting sun/ Is returned to the lonesome ocean” while he loads his gun and while his wife waters the plants. Whereas the action of watering plants is clearly symbolic of life, the loading of the gun, which is performed by the father, recalls death. Certainly, there are various ways to interpret this first melodic chorus. Forum-contributor ‘jvenrick’, for example, detects pure sarcasm in it: It seems insanely funny that his father and mother are doing this busy work, and talking about getting back to god. His father is loading his gun, and it doesn't seem as if he's really trying to do anything really, he's being a hypocrite in a sense.

Certainly, ‘jvenrick’ has a point when he detects some absurdity between the father’s acting (loading a gun) and his words (returning to god). ‘Jvenrick’s’ reading therefore portrays a crazy American Dad who justifies killing by converting it into a euphemistic return to God.

I, however, prefer to think that the narrator is recounting an anecdote about his parents to comfort the woman next to him (and himself) by imagining death as going home to where we came from with the option of returning to the world again as the sun rises again. In a broader sense, when focusing on the role of mothers and fathers in general and not on their actions in this particular song, they are both needed for giving life. Metaphorically, this means that life and death are necessarily interconnected. The father’s firm belief in God and in an ongoing existence after death is reinforced by the image of the sun that becomes one with the ocean when setting. The setting sun relates to our soul while the ocean is compared to God; both, the sun and the sea, are usually associated with endlessness, mightiness, and calmness. However, the simile of the sun setting into the ocean as our souls return to God could also imply an

46 Strangely, the introductory part is recorded at the end of the previous track, “Bowl of Oranges”, rather than at the beginning of “Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come”. The reason for this unusual placement of the introduction might be that the listeners only realise the connections if they listen to the entire album. Thus, one often feels like an explorer when listening to Lifted , trying to dig down deeply not only into the songs separately but into their interconnectedness to comprehend the album as a whole. 63 endless circle of death and rebirth since the sun will rise again the next day. Thus, the cyclic wandering of the sun from east to west is a symbol for life from birth to death – or for the immortality of the soul since the sun, the fixed point of our solar system, never really moves and does neither rise nor set. Finally, it would be interesting to investigate why Oberst put the faithful lines of the chorus into the mouth of the lyric persona’s father. Since the lyric persona is rather identified with the songwriter than a third person, Oberst might have used the father as an extraneous instance to distance himself from the belief in an immortal soul. One could thus argue that the introduction of a mediator is a simple technique to avoid autobiographical interpretations.

The imagery of the sun indicating the stages of life is frequently applied in literature, for instance, in the poetry of the English metaphysical poet John Donne. In his poem “Hymn to God, my God, in my Sicknesse”, which was written in the early 17 th century, the dying lyric persona lies on his bed, flat like a map waiting for cosmographers to show him his west. However, he says that he is not afraid of death because west and east are one in all flat maps if put on a globe and “death doth touch the resurrection” ( Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the 17th Century . Ed. Herbert J.C. Grierson. 1921. No 78). The metaphor of sunrise and sunset as beginning and ending of life closely relates to the metaphor of the seasons as the stages of life where spring usually represents youth, summer and ripeness the zenith of life, autumn the decline of life, harvest, and preparing for winter whose coldness is frequently linked to death. One of the most famous poems based on the seasonal allegory is certainly John Keats’ ode “To Autumn”. We also find the seasonal circle metaphor in the early Bright Eyes song “If Winter Ends”, in which winter represents a depressive mental state whereas spring stands for a happy and joyful new start when the lyric ‘I’ sings: And I scream for the sunlight or a car to take me anywhere, just get me past this dead and eternal snow. ‘Cause I swear that I am dying, slowly, but it’s happening. So if the perfect spring is waiting somewhere just take me there… just take me there… just take me there… and say…and lie to me and say…and lie to me and say… it’s going to be alright. (9x)

Moving on in the song “At the Bottom of Everything”, the chorus, where human life is compared to the setting sun, is followed by a transitional bridge in which the narrator of the 64 introduction seems to have returned to describe the crash of the plane into “the deep blue sea” with a weirdly joyful voice uttering “it was a wonderful splash”. In this way, he mirrors the father’s simile of death as the sun returning to the ocean. After the bridge, stanzas three and four return to the conformist society-motif, which is finally followed by the second chorus - the last part of the song, in which we find the narrator(s) reborn - either in a literal or in a metaphorical sense: Oh my morning’s coming back The whole world’s waking up All the city buses swimming past I’m happy just because I found out I am really no one

If we recall the first chorus with its setting sun as the symbol of the end of life, we here see the sun rising again in the morning, suggesting a rebirth of some kind. Eventually, the lyric persona (either the narrator or the man on the plane) feels happy because he has found comfort in being “no one”, in being just a small part of the big puzzle. The message of this song might thus be that the world does not need us to the extent we think it does – it still works if we reduce all the ‘must dos’ for the sake of living and if we do the things we really want to do.

Last but not least, to close this circle, we will return to the first song discussed in this paper – “The Big Picture”. Its message of the reunion with the soil, which is the Old Testament idea of women and men turning to dust (cf. Tillich 1956:743), from which new life will spring again, also makes use of the circle as its metaphorical basis. There is comfort in this naturalistic ‘fact’ because we will always contribute to the universal puzzle in some way, even if as stopping a beer barrel, as Hamlet suggests in the ‘gravedigger scene’ (230-234): Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam, and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer- barrel? ( The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Ed. W.J.Craig. 1987: 976)

In the animated music video of “Bowl of Oranges”, the same naturalistic principle supersedes death’s absolute finality: the soil literally soaks up and ties down a young man. His girl then lies down at the place where he has disappeared and waters the earth with her tears of love. After the winter, a flower grows in the same place, carrying the boy’s dust inside it. 47 In Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass , the grass is the “hair of the dead” and death touches new life.

47 The official Bright Eyes music video of “Bowl of Oranges” directed by Cat Solen is available on http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=XUym7n7fJTQ. 65

Apocalyptic writings Searching the internet for a definition of “apocalyptic literature”, one immediately stumbles over Wikipedia. It informs us that it is “a genre of prophetical writing that developed in post- Exilic Jewish culture and was popular among millennialist early Christians”. Etymologically, the term derives from the Greek word for “revelation” which means “to reveal something hidden”. As a sub-genre of prophetic literature, it distinguishes itself from the umbrella term because it despairs of the present, of humankind’s non-ethical behaviour, and prophesies a major change of the world. While the prophet usually predicts “a definite future arising out of […] the present”, the apocalyptic prophet “directs his hopes absolutely to the future, to a new world standing in essential opposition to the present”48 .

Apocalyptic quality immanent not only in the Book of Revelation, in the prophecies of Isaiah and Ezekiel, but also in the texts of many writers and poets. The difference between biblical prophets and writers who produce prophetic literature is that the latter usually present their writings as art, as fiction, and not as truth. However, there are many borderline cases, such as the early English Romantic writer William Blake, who, in a letter to Thomas Butts, claimed to be “under the direction of Messengers from Heaven, Daily & Nightly” (Blake 1958:231). He is probably one of the most prominent but most difficult examples of what in literary studies is often called ‘the poet as prophet’. In his apocalyptic and mythological work Jerusalem , the heavenly city’s destroyed harmony is finally reinstalled in the furnace of Los, the anthropomorphised figure of imagination and art. Los, who is reminiscent of Jesus as well as of Blake, has to fuse together the four-divided and originally sexless giant Albion, of whom he once was himself a part of, in order to save Jerusalem. William Butler Yeats, who felt strongly inspired by Blake’s mythological writings, is another prophetic writer whose doomsday-poem “The Second Coming” will be of major importance for the analysis and interpretation of Oberst’s catchy first single release “Four Winds”, from the commercially successful Cassadaga LP, which entered the Billboard charts as number one in the categories

48 Cf. “Apocalyptic Literature” on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalyptic_literature [6 Aug 2008].

‘Top Indie Album’ and ‘Top Rock Album’ 49 .

The winds of change The wind has always been a powerful metaphor to suggest changes and as such it also works in the world of the song “Four Winds” from the most recent Bright Eyes album Cassadaga. Although the title recalls Neil Young’s final track of his LP Comes A Time (1978), it neither resembles “Four Strong Winds” musically nor lyrically since in Young’s song, whose lyrics were written by Ian Tyson, the wind symbolises stability, one of nature’s everlasting forces that “never change, come what may”. Conor Oberst’s “Four Winds”, however, blow for an upcoming change of the whole of mankind. Throughout the history of literature, as well as in religion and mythology, the wind has been conceived as a strong force able to destroy and at the same time provide place for renewal. In his essay “The Correspondent Breeze”, M.H. Abrams presents a list of literary works involving the powerful ‘mover of air’ and observes that ‘he’ can be found in Ezekiel’s prophecies, in Greek and Roman mythology with its wind gods, in the Middle Ages in the writings of Saint Augustine, and as one of the key metaphors in the writings of the Romantics (cf.1975: 37-53) where “the lyre of Apollo was often replaced in Romantic poetry by the Aeolian lyre, whose music is evoked not by art, human or divine, but by the force of nature” (1975:38). In the poetry of the Romantics, the wind’s force is often supported by the rhythmical patterns of their verse creating the effect of onomatopoeia, as in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”, or by imagery that involves a harp or lyre playing in the storm, as in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”. Musicians have the further possibility to emphasise the intensity of the wind with real instruments playing some wild and howling melody. In the Bright Eyes song “Four Winds”, an ecstatic violin played by Anton Patzner is responsible for the catchy melody of the instrumental introductory part and the instrumental bridges between the chorus and the verse. In contrast to its guitar-based predecessor I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and its experimental twin Digital Ash in A Digital Urn (both released in 2005), Cassadaga presents a wide range of instruments including

49 Links to the Cassadaga peak positions in the Billboard charts: ‘Top Rock Album’: http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/esearch/chart_display.jsp?cfi=408&cfgn=Albums&cfn=Top+Rock+Albums& ci=3083413&cdi=9234393&cid=04%2F28%2F2007 [20 Sept 2008]. ‘Top Indie Album’: http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/esearch/chart_display.jsp?cfi=326&cfgn=Albums&cfn=Top+Independent+Al bums&ci=3083393&cdi=9233978&cid=04%2F28%2F2007 [20 Sept 2008].

67 fiddles, horns, and full orchestral sound as in “Make a Plan to Love Me”. During their Cassadaga tour, Bright Eyes have even performed with the L.A. philharmonic orchestra, for which Nate Walcott wrote the scores for strings and horns (cf. Bouza 2007). The album version of “Four Winds” ranges from Oberst’s guitar, Mogis’s electric guitar, mandolin and 12-string, Walcott’s organ and electric piano, to McCarthy’s bass, Boesel’s drums, and, last but not least, Patzner’s violin creating the song’s musical leitmotif that goes hand in hand with its lyrical leitmotif – the winds of change.

Oberst’s wasteland The desolate end-of-the-world scenario is already evoked in the first two verses of “Four Winds” following the unusually long violin introduction: Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe There are people always dying trying to keep them alive There are bodies decomposing in containers tonight In an abandoned building where

The squatters made a mural of a Mexican girl With fifteen cans of spray paint in a chemical swirl She is standing in the ashes at the end of the world Four winds blowing through her hair

We obtain the image of an abused Mexican girl “standing in the ashes at the end of the world”, in a wasteland where everything is destroyed and where cadavers are “decomposing in containers”. The girl’s abusers, the squatters who make a graffiti painting of her, might be fanatical racists, some of those people who are “dying trying to keep [their race] alive”. Finally we encounter the four strong winds “blowing through her [the girl’s] hair”. Spending his high school years in a catholic school in Omaha, Conor Oberst seems to be well acquainted with the Bible and possibly also with the four winds showing up in the book of Ezekiel. In the passage “The Valley of Dry Bones” (37:1-14) whose title also echoes in the line “She’s standing in the ashes at the end of the world”, Ezekiel finds himself in a valley filled with bones where he is accompanied only by the voice of God, who gives him the order to prophesy to these bones that God will resurrect them. Then “there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone” and “flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them”. So God commands Ezekiel to ask the breath, which finally gives life to the people, to “come from the four winds”. In this context, the winds are the life-giving force after the desolate apocalypse. In Oberst’s song, however, the apocalypse arrives with the four winds “blowing through [the girl’s] hair”. The winds are 68 announcing a change of the current state of things, of the wasteland, which she finds herself in. Certainly, the Mexican girl can be seen metonymically for all the suppressed people in the world, for all the victims of racism, violence, and greed. Her symbolic character becomes clearer once we get to the enigmatic chorus. In its first version, it introduces a pronoun of unclear reference, which causes some trouble since it allows many interpretations: When Great Satan’s gone…the Whore of Babylon… She just can’t sustain the pressure where it’s placed She caves

Oberst foregrounds the words ‘Satan’ and ‘Babylon’ by stretching the vowels of these words which are usually associated with ‘evil’. According to Wikipedia, the ‘Whore of Babylon’ is “a figure of supreme evil mentioned in the Book of Revelation in the Bible”, often associated with Satan or the Antichrist as well as with the “Beast of Revelations […] with seven heads and ten horns”, which is supposed to be responsible for the Whore’s downfall. 50 Bearing this in mind, the chorus then hypothetically suggests the absence of evil of whatever nature while the pronoun ‘she’ either refers back to the Mexican girl, or to the “Whore of Babylon”. Due to the syntax, it rather seems that ‘she’ is not referring to the whore herself since she is obviously placed in the same grammatical position as “Great Satan” and together they seem to be those who have gone and not ‘she’, the one who is left suffering after their departure. Satan and the Whore embody ‘the evil side’ – but what does the word evil connote if applied to the Whore and Satan? It could be the sexual, the rebellious, and the ‘animalistic’ side of men which balances the scales with the ‘angelic’ side of man – a duality we have already encountered in “The Big Picture”. The duality of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ actually lies at the bottom of many religions and spiritual doctrines. The old Christians, for example, ornamented the authoritarian Old Testament God - a dictator - with the adjective ‘good’ while they labelled the rebellious Luzifer as ‘evil’. Similarly Jews and Moslems, the Grimm’s fairy tales, as well as contemporary conventional Hollywood films, have always relied on this dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and in this sense “locked the devil in the basement and threw god up into the air” (cf. “I Must Belong Somewhere”, Cassadaga ). If the Mexican girl is the one behind the mysterious ‘she’ pronoun, she might represent the whole of mankind, which would cave in the absence of their rebellious, sexual, their ‘animalistic’ side.

50 Read “The Whore of Babylon” entry on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whore_of_Babylon. Edmund Spenser also used the seductive and immoral connotations of the word ‘whore’ as well as the ‘sinful’ city of Babylon in his The Fairie Queene to emphasize his denunciation of the Catholic Church.

However, ‘she’ might also stand for institutionalised religion with ‘her’ doctrines of ‘good’ and ‘evil’; once the latter is gone, religion loses its power, its control over people because of the power vacuum that is left by the absence of moral categories. This idea could well be supported by the following stanza, which openly criticises the holy books of three world religions by describing them as blind, deaf, and mute and therefore incapable of presenting ‘the truth’: The Bible’s blind, the Torah’s deaf, the Qur’an’s mute. If you burned them all together you’d get close to the truth But still they’re pouring over Sanskrit under Ivy League moons While shadows lengthen in the sun

By proposing to burn the holy books of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the lyric persona expresses his disbelief in finding a universal ‘truth’ in them. Between the lines, one could read that everyone has to find his/her personal spiritual and ethical system 51 ; or it could be read metaphorically as reducing the three books to their essences which, at the core, are the same – “truth”. In the next image, scholars of the Ivy League, the elite universities of Northern America, are studying Sanskrit, the origin of Indo-European languages, which is of special importance to the religions of India since the Vedas, the oldest writings of the Hindu, were written in Sanskrit. In this way, Sanskrit represents Eastern religions. On the one hand, they seem to be equally rejected by the narrator because of the ironic undertone in Oberst’s voice, which evokes the interpretation that the scholars are doing something ridiculous and useless while the end of the world is looming. On the other hand, the narrator might be shedding positive light on the Sanskrit teachings since the scholars have not given up finding truth in them – the truth that might save the world?

The metaphor of the “shadows lengthen[ing] in the sun” implies that the end of the day is imminent; the dusk might be announcing the end of this world. We have already encountered similar imagery of the sun’s decline and the rise of dusk as symbolic of impending death in the song “At the Bottom of Everything” 52 discussed in chapter two, which partly deals with

51 Oberst already has mused on the ‘truth-problem’ in songs such as “Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come” on the Lifted LP where he sings, “If I could just speak up I think that I would say that there is no truth. There is only you and what you make the truth.” The Lifted predecessor I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning expresses the same idea in “We Are Nowhere And It’s Now”: “And if you swear that there is no truth and who cares, why do you say it like you’re right?”

52 Lakoff and Johnson would call this metaphor experimental and conceptual since darkness brings coldness with it and people turn cold when they die. Therefore, in contrast, the sun often signifies life whereas shadows suggest the decline of life. 70 the circle as a base for the majority of metaphors connected to death. An enjambement links this stanza to the fourth stanza and casts either the lengthening shadows or the sunlight itself like a spotlight on “a school of meditation”: Cast on a school of meditation built to soften the times And hold us at the center while the spiral unwinds It’s knocking over fences crossing property lines Four winds cry until it comes

While a dim view is taken of Christians, Jews, and Moslems who blindly take their holy scriptures as life instructions, spiritual schools practising meditation and alternative ways to find their personal spirituality and harmony with the world are presented as positive establishments which “soften the times”. We have already found this escape from Western thought to Eastern spirituality celebrating the “primitive oneness of the universe” in the writings of Whitman, Emerson, and the early German Romantics. Imposing no moral system and tolerating everything, this cosmic oneness is also “the absence of oppressive categories” (Pattison 1987:72) such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Even in T.S. Eliot’s modernist Western apocalypse The Waste Land, we encounter this “flight from Western thought” in the utterances of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (cf. Pattison 1987:70). Probably, the school of meditation softens the times because it celebrates this Eastern way of thinking, of just being “grateful to be alive in this particular universe” (Pattison 1987:27). As the world is getting more and more chaotic and violent, the feeling of being connected to everything and everyone might be the force that “holds us at the center while the spiral unwinds”. The word ‘meditate’ is worth a closer look in this context: on the one hand, it means to consciously observe thoughts and feelings passing through our minds without evaluating them in order to find peace with ourselves and all other beings, to dissolve feelings of hate and anger and to feel the common energy of the universe sweeping through our bodies in the form of our breath (cf. Wikipedia’s article “Meditation”). On the other hand, if derived from the Latin word ‘meditatio’, it means to think deeply and seriously about something (cf. Duden). In both cases a great personal effort is necessary and it does not mean to follow someone else’s religious path blindly. Finding ourselves and our personal spirituality might thus be another interpretation of what “hold[s] us at the center while the spiral unwinds” – it is only in the eye of the hurricane that is “knocking over fences crossing property line” that we might be safe. If we feel part of the universe, the unwinding spiral, the hurricane, which ignores all our attempts of separating ourselves from the whole through our concepts of ownership (e.g. 71 fences, political boundaries), we will not be affected by the major changes brought about by the four winds.

An eponymous “school of meditation” Probably, the lyric persona is alluding to a concrete “school of meditation” named ‘Cassadaga’, which is explicitly referred to in the fifth stanza, after the second chorus: “I went back […] to Cassadaga to commune with the dead.” ‘Cassadaga’ is not only the name of several spiritualist camps in the U.S., it is also the name of a camp of mystics and psychics in Florida, where Oberst stayed for some time and which he enjoyed because “[t]here’s a very peaceful feeling that exists there and the people there, for my mind, are very much in tune with the energy of nature, or spirituality, or whatever you want to call it” (Oberst in the interview with Smith 2007). Curiously, an ancient picture from the Cassadaga camp- homepage provides the basis for the Bright Eyes animation on their homepage. 53 ‘Cassadaga’ means “rocks beneath the water” in the language of the Seneca (cf. Wikipedia’s article “Cassadaga (album)”) and it is also the namesake of the album “Four Winds” appears on. Its name might allude to the fact that there is something beyond the world we can see. The unique album cover is like a three dimensional image that can only be seen through a special “spectral decoder”, which is to be found inside the CD. Only by layering it on the grey sprinkled cover of the album’s booklet, one can see a circle with three pyramids behind the sea out of which palm trees grow and in which a parted snake swims. Over the pyramids little stars and a comet create a mystical nightly atmosphere – like the Star of Bethlehem did more than 2000 years ago, the comet might be announcing a sort of ‘Second Coming’, a second major religious change. On the left side of the pyramids we can read the sentence “Mighty Saturn enters your eighth house”. This constellation symbolizes transformation, change, growth, rebirth, and leaving past relics behind, and thus matches with the message of “Four Winds”. Leaving aside the possible spiritual changes, Bright Eyes have obviously changed their musical style and Oberst has left behind his lyrics of alienation and self-regret with Cassadaga . Thus, the lyric ‘I’ of “Four Winds” declares, “I’ve buried my ballast, I’ve made my peace/ Heard four winds levelling the pines.” Returning to the booklet, the words on the right side within the circle ask in French, “Est-ce midnuit 54 ou midi?” which means “Is it

53 Compare the picture of the old spiritualist camp on www.cassadaga.org/Pix_from_Past.htm to the one on the Bright Eyes homepage www.thisisbrighteyes.com/content/?cat=2?reload.

54 Spelling mistake; probably interference from English. 72 midnight or midday?” Depending on the angle from which you look at it, the holographic cover shows the scenery either by day or by night. In the centre of the circle, it says “Rocks beneath the water”, which is, as has been mentioned before, the translation of the word ‘Cassadaga’. The most enigmatic part of the cover’s three dimensional picture is the Latin inscription round the circle and the four items in the corners outside of the circle: a witch’s cauldron on a fire with a figure looking out of it, a crown and a sceptre, a chalice with flames coming out of it, and a winged urn. While the supernatural winged urn might be interpreted as a symbol of life after death, the flame-spitting-chalice might suggest religious change (the wine having turned into flames). Positioning these icons in the four corners on the outside of the circle, the cover is reminiscent of old maps of the earth, where the wind gods blow from each corner as in the Book of Revelation . To reveal the meaning of this enigmatic cover (if there is one) in detail could be the attractive aim of another investigation.

Parallels between “Four Winds and “The Second Coming” It is not before the second chorus that we find out for sure that “Four Winds” is referring to William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, although there have already been some striking parallels between Oberst’s “Four Winds” and Yeats’ poem: Turning and turning the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 55

55 Source: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem). 73

The ‘it’ that knocks everything down in “Four Winds” could be the unwinding spiral, the apocalyptic tornado, but it could also be Yeats’ sphinx that “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born”. Forum-contributor ‘extremeleygripping’ argues for the interpretation of the Greek sphinx behind the ‘it’ in ”Four Winds”. He/she claims that the vengeful sphinx approaches Bethlehem to punish humankind. At the same time, the “rough beast” is responsible for a renewal of unknown dimension. Since it is only the second coming to earth after the coming of Jesus, it has to be of major importance. It might also be the beast of the Book of Revelation that is said to cause the downfall of the Whore of Babylon, the figure that could signify, as we said before, ‘evil’ or, in a metaphorical sense, blind institutionalised religion. Oberst’s reference to “The Second Coming” becomes even more obvious when we look at the first line of the second chorus of “Four Winds”: It’s the Sum of Man slouching towards Bethlehem A heart just can’t contain all of that empty space It breaks. It breaks. It breaks.

While in Yeats’ poem the beast is the one that is “slouching towards Bethlehem to be born”, in Oberst’s lyrics it is “the Sum of Man” who are probably in need of a new spirituality, of a rebirth of faith which they hope to find in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. It is likely that Oberst intended a word play with the expression “Sum of Man”, which sounds just like “Son of Man”, which is one of Jesus’ names in the Bible.

On closer examination, there is much more of Yeats’ apocalyptic imagery in “Four Winds”; we find the “widening gyre” in Yeats’ poem and the ‘unwinding spiral’ in Oberst’s song. We find anarchy ruling the world and drowning “the ceremony of innocence” in “The Second Coming” and the equally terrifying squatters who “made a mural of a Mexican girl/ With fifteen cans of spray paint in a chemical swirl” in “Four Winds”. Curiously, Mexican girls celebrate their ‘Quinceañera’, their fifteenth birthday, as the coming of age, the transition from childhood to adulthood. Still a girl, her innocence is drowned by the squatters in “Four Winds”, who urged her to mature in their racist ceremony ironically involving “fifteen cans of spray paint”. However, the centre in Yeats’ poem “cannot hold the things falling apart” while in “Four Winds” the centre is the meditation school, a place of relative safety from the deadening spin, from the hurricane announced by the four winds that “cry until it comes”.

Cassadaga: The lyric persona’s personal place of rebirth In the penultimate stanza, the instruments are reduced to some softly played drums and Patzner’s characteristic violin. This effect creates a contrast to all other stanzas and foregrounds the lyrics as being of special importance: Well I went back by rented Cadillac and company jet Like a newly orphaned refugee retracing my steps All the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead They said you’d better look alive.

For the first time in the song, the lyric persona becomes what might be called an ‘overt first person narrator’. He leaves his role of the passive observer and commentator and becomes active, searching for his own truth and for a safe place in the eye of the spiral via communication with the dead in Cassadaga, which evidently refers to the spiritualist camp Oberst visited before he wrote the song. Either the dead people tell him to “better look alive” or the people living in the spiritualist camp are giving him this strange and unclear advice. In the last stanza, Oberst’s voice is again supported by a large range of instruments accompanying the lyric persona’s drive through the American Midlands: Now it’s off to Old Dakota where a genocide sleeps In the Black Hills, the Badlands, the calloused East I buried my ballast. I made my peace.

Heard Four Winds levelling the pines 56

The first line is likely to refer to the massacre of the Lakota Indians, who the US Cavalry had transported to Omaha, Oberst’s birthplace, before the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota. According to ‘benjam326’, some Native Americans claim that the Black Hills are “the spiritual center of the world, the ‘axis mundi’, something like Jerusalem for Christians and Jews”. It is the place where the speaker buries his ballast, where he frees himself from everything that lay heavily on his mind before. 57 This “ballast” could be numerous metaphysical things such as never-ending confusion and the feeling of life’s meaninglessness that have dominated the earlier Bright Eyes albums. Cassadaga , however, has left these ‘old feelings’ behind. Bright Eyes seem to have entered “the eighth house” heading for a change towards a lighter, more positive attitude towards life and Oberst seems to have abandoned his

56 Spacing according to the Cassadaga booklet.

57 One of the main purpose of spiritual camps like Cassadaga is to “get rid of the old stuff”, as the woman in the introduction to the first song, “Clearaudients”, calls it. We find this idea of purification prevalent in Eastern spirituality, especially in Buddhism and Hinduism. Interestingly, it is these religions that Oberst makes neither blind, nor deaf, nor mute in the third stanza of “Four Winds”. 75 sometimes depressing nihilism. While, on the 2002 Lifted record we find his lyric persona completely desperate when looking at the purposelessness of life (“And I want to scream out that it all is nonsense” in “Waste of Paint”), five years later we find songs such as “Cleanse Song” suggesting that “if life seems absurd what you need is some laughter. And a season to sleep and a place to get clean”. This is what the lyric persona of “Four Winds” aims at when ‘burying his ballast’ even though the world is in bad condition. Supporting this transformation, the “four winds levelling the pines” prepare the way for his personal renewal before the song lapses into the chorus again: When Great Satan is gone…the Whore of Babylon… She just can’t remain with all that outer space She breaks. She breaks. She breaks. She caves. She caves.

Personally, I tend to interpret the message of the song as humanity being in need of some kind of spirituality in order to cope with all the terrible things happening in the world. There is so much unknown “outer space” which human beings cannot understand that humanity, metonymically captured in the figure of the Mexican girl, “breaks” and “caves” unless filling these blank spaces with imagination and spirituality. In this interpretation, ‘evil’ in the human being and in the world works like Blake’s ‘evil’ from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell : Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell. (Plate 3, William Blake 1958:94)

Here, we find the connotations of ‘evil’ changed significantly, namely as the opposite of reason and thus including concepts such as imagination, fantasy, and energy as the active force working in us. All these abstract qualities are essential for human nature and it is necessary to maintain them and to keep the balance. Interpreted in this way, the song is a sort of prophecy of the apocalypse of the world if science and pure reason start to rule humanity and if imagination and passion disappear. This is certainly a very Romantic reading since it was one of the main targets of the Romantic movement to save the world from too much rationalism. The Romantic way is to keep secrets alive, to mystify the unknown, to prevent rationalism from converting “die unendlich schöpferische Musik des Weltalls zum Klappern einer ungeheuren Mühle” (Novalis cited in Safranski 2007:194). We find this threatening 76 apocalypse of the imaginative world also in Michael Ende’s Die unendliche Geschichte , where the young Bastian, the main character, has to save Phantasia, the world of stories and imagination, from ‘nothingness’ (“das Nichts”), which spreads out over the country and threatens to make all the beautiful products of imagination that bloom in our minds disappear. In Blake’s apocalyptic Jerusalem, Los can only save Jerusalem by reviving Albion, the self- divided giant, in his furnace of art by fusing himself (imagination) with Albion’s other parts, one of them being human reason (cf. Bloom 1971/1975:98-111).

Image 3 : “The Man Sweeping the Interpreter’s Parlour“; white-line etching, c. 1822.

Blake’s etching might portray representatives of Heaven and Hell. Clearly, the ‘devil’ or ‘Satan’ – figure symbolises strength , energy, and creativity. Blake connects these attributes to ‘Hell’ in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell .

Political readings of “Four Winds” Numerous possible interpretations of “Four Winds” have been proposed, which could all be more or less summarised under the umbrella terms ‘religious readings’ and ‘Romantic readings’. In this subchapter, we will focus on the song from a political perspective. In the song’s forum, the lyrics are frequently linked to the Iraq war and, more generally, to how governments abuse religion to gain more power, which finally causes the downfall of countries. Forum-contributor ‘rapunzel32’ argues that the United States are the Whore of Babylon and the ‘it’ that is “knocking over fences crossing property lines” in its greed for more power. ‘andru84’ interprets the US as “Great Satan” in the eyes of Islamic fundamentalists and vice-versa. ‘breakmylimbs’ even cites a newspaper article from April 2007, in which Oberst is said to have intended the following meaning for his song: “On a micro level, it’s about America, its greed and its inevitable implosion. But you can extend it to the human race. How it can’t live in harmony with the planet and its inevitable implosion.” ‘indiecouchette’ comes up with a slightly different interpretation of the chorus. He/she argues that now that the US (Satan, the Whore) have attacked and destroyed Iraq (Babylon), they 77 cannot leave the country since their departure would immediately result in the rise of a new dictator.

Oberst vs. Dylan Concluding this chapter, I will briefly contrast and compare Oberst’s apocalyptic imagery in “Four Winds” to Bob Dylan’s ballad-like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” from his Freewheeling Bob Dylan album. I chose Dylan’s song to set foot in the formerly mentioned Dylan-comparison and because I believe Dylan’s song, which is known to have been inspired by the old Scottish ballad “Lord Randall”, to be one of the finest examples to prove that pop songs58 can be brilliant works of imaginative literature. Dylan has of course already been identified as a poet, not just because he declared himself as such (cf. Carl Weissner cited in Faulstich 1978:68), but because his poetic lyrics full of intertextual references are attractive and apt to be subject to literary studies. However, whereas numerous writers have analysed and interpreted the songs of Dylan and have honoured him with various Nobel Prize nominations (cf. Detering 2007:12), other singer-songwriters, especially of the younger generation, are still largely ignored by philologists as contemporary poets. In 1978, Faulstich presented a somewhat shocking survey from 1967, which showed that poetry and ‘Christliche Unterhaltungsromane’ were the worst-selling literary genres in Germany. Consequently, Faulstich suggested that printed poetry was about to become extinct in the future (cf. 1978:66). Referring to a 2006 enquiry conducted by the magazine Bücher , Hugo Keiper presents a more recent study about German reading habits; only seven percent claimed ‘poems’ to be their favourite reading matter (2007:167). However, there is this huge corpus of ‘musical poetry’ which is consumed every day by millions of people all over the world. It is the poetry of the masses, creating pleasure and influencing the masses in their ideological thinking – Robert Pattison even called rock “the ideological currency of the Western masses” (1987:30). Nevertheless, songwriters and musicians are still treated as stepchildren in traditional academic literary studies, although they have been a cultural as well as literary treasure since the emergence of the singer-songwriter movement in the 60s and 70s (cf. Elicker 1997:30). Popular music before this ideological and artistic movement was simply designed for mass production and consumption. During this so-called Tin Pan Alley era, the business of writing lyrics and singing and performing was rarely practised by the same person

58 ‘Pop music’ is here understood in its simplest definition, as popular music with lyrics (cf. Faulstich 1978:19). This avoids any kind of a priori evaluation and the lengthy discussion about the differences between rock and pop music, summarised briefly in Werner Faulstich’s Rock-Pop-Beat-Folk on page 18 and 19. 78

(cf. Reinfandt 2003:333). However, during the last few decades, this assembly line production of songs has been reduced and singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Sting, Prince/TAFKAP, Jim Morrison, but also younger writers and musicians such as The Eels, The Decemberists, and Conor Oberst might be called the popular poets of today. By labelling Conor Oberst “the next Bob Dylan” (cited in Bouza 2007), Rolling Stone magazine has initiated numerous comparisons and contrasts between these two exceptional songwriters. Although I will be incapable of going into detail in this comparison – Dylan’s more than 50 years of songwriting would take years to be studied thoroughly – I will try to point out some parallels between Dylan and the much younger Oberst since I agree with Brenda Paro’s conclusion that there is a basis for the comparison.

Brenda Paro, a music critic writing for the Crawdaddy! magazine, generally despises labelling “sensitive boys with guitars […] the next Dylan”. In her article “Freewheelin’: Bob Dylan vs. Conor Oberst” (2008), she lists three points that should support why she believes that nevertheless the particular Dylan-Oberst-connection makes sense to her. Firstly, she mentions the originality of their meaningful imagery, secondly, she claims that the timing of their rise was perfect since something had been missing in the music scene before in both cases. Finally, their “walking out of one sound and straight into the next” shows their constant process of innovation. While I agree with the first and last point, the second definitely lacks further explication of what had been missing before Oberst made himself heard. On the other hand, there are also music critics who reject the idea of Conor Oberst being “the new Bob Dylan”. The New Yorker - journalist Sasha Frere-Jones argues that if “there were a new Bob Dylan, he would make people uncomfortable right away,” (Frere-Jones 2005) which is, she argues, something that Conor Oberst never does. On the contrary, she claims him to be very charming to journalists, trying to answer every question. Bob Dylan, on the other hand, often refused and probably still refuses to give coherent answers to questions he dislikes.59 When Conor Oberst was asked about his opinion on critics calling him “the next Bob Dylan” in Craig Ferguson’s Late Late Show , Oberst responded timidly that “there are certainly worse things to be called […] but I don’t see it myself”. He has never mentioned Dylan as an

59 In support of Frere-Jones’s point, watch Martin Scorsese’s brilliant Dylan documentary No Direction Home .

79 influence but claims to feel inspired by the music of Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and Simon Joyner, a fellow singer-songwriter from Omaha (cf. TV interview with Ferguson in 2005).

Without a shadow of doubt, Dylan and Oberst are both extraordinary US-American songwriters whose imagery-laden lyrics often catch the listener’s attention in complex communicative situations. Dylan, for example, frequently invents protagonists communicating in his songs and thus subverts the listener’s tendency to identify the artist with the lyric persona. In “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall”, for example, one speaker asks the questions and the other speaker, the lyric ‘I’ who is called the “blue-eyed son” gives the answers. If we read the ballad “Lord Randall” and transmit the speakers’ identities to Dylan’s lyrics, a mother is talking to her son. In “All Along the Watchtower”, another of Dylan’s apocalyptic songs, Dylan is a sort of ‘covert narrator’, retelling the conversation between the joker and the thief and not giving away anything about himself. While many of Oberst’s older songs might seem rather ‘confessional’ in the sense of revealing Oberst’s personal thoughts and feelings, the Nebraskan singer-songwriter also likes to distance himself from his lyric personae. His confusing use of different levels of narration with different people operating on each level as in “At the Bottom of Everything”60 and his framing strategies as in “The Big Picture”, often impede autobiographical readings as well. Similarly, Oberst’s use of the personal narrative situation in songs such as “Hot Knives” and in parts of “Classic Cars” stresses his recent tendency to keep the song’s subject covert. This tendency to break with immediacy by introducing mediating instances could be labelled as a modernist technique (cf. Reinfandt 2003:328). A second reason for the comparison might be that Dylan’s and Oberst’s songs are often highly philosophical and spiritual, dealing with the big questions of existence. In addition, they both openly criticise modern western societies, especially the US regimes’ war policies. It has to be said that this last point generally seems to be one of the main criteria for every songwriter who has ever been labelled ‘the new/next Dylan’, since Dylan was probably one of first lyricists whose ideology was to produce highly ideological texts. My third reason in support of the comparison is the quality of their distinctive voices which would not be labelled as ‘beautiful’ in the conventional sense. Rather, people would call their voices ‘authentic’ because of their flaws and their occasional breaking. Especially when he was younger, Oberst often seemed to have difficulties to hit the higher ranges and his voice

60 For an in-depth analysis of the levels of transmission in “At the Bottom of Everything”, turn back to chapter 1, where Oberst’s album introductions are discussed. 80 trembled and broke at times. In “Road to Joy”, the last song on I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning , he ironically comments on his voice: “I could have been a famous singer if I had someone else’s voice/ But failures always sounded better, let’s fuck it up boys, make some noise.” Their imperfect voices are not only approved of as ‘unconventional’ and ‘authentic’, they also foreground the lyrics as the most important and most appreciated element of their music. Musically, both Dylan and Oberst love to experiment with styles and sounds and in this way ‘reinvent’ themselves over and over again. At heart, however, they seem to be rather faithful to the folksy ‘American’ style and to their beloved acoustic guitars.

This comparison, which could certainly be the main concern of a more comprehensive study, will now become more concrete in the direct confrontation of the two apocalyptic songs I have chosen. Oberst’s end-of-the-world imagery in “Four Winds” mirrors T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land , where everything is dry and rotten like the “bodies decomposing in containers tonight”. The Mexican girl is “standing in the ashes at the end of the world” and the barren outside corresponds to the “empty space” in the hearts of human beings. In contrast, Dylan’s apocalypse in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” clearly involves water and recalls the punishment the angry God of the Old Testament prepared for all the sinners, except for Noah and his family. Dylan’s “blue eyed son” hears “the sound of a thunder that roared out a warning” and “the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world” as the necessary consequence to all the injustice and suffering he has seen and heard on his journey around the world. Finally, he becomes a Jesus-figure claiming, “I will stand on the water until I start sinking/ But I know my song well before I start singing”, obliquely implying that the message of his song is the song itself. Similarly, Oberst’s persona comes to terms with himself after he has visited the spiritualist camp. Both songs’ lyric personae, however, do not mention explicitly what kind of truth they have found for themselves – neither does Dylan’s blue-eyed son tell the listeners what ‘his song’/’message’, is about, nor does Oberst’s “newly orphaned refugee” tell us what his ballast was and how he found his peace. Thus, both songwriters reject the idea of allowing their listeners to be lazy passive consumers of a clear message. What is more, they motivate them to think for themselves, leaving endless space for all kind of imagination and interpretation.

Cruel heartless Death in “No One Would Riot for Less” I have already provided a short insight into Oberst’s political agenda in the introductory part – his anti-war and anti-Bush commitment is exemplified by the folk song “Landlocked Blues” while the country-driven “At the Bottom of Everything” criticises the busy, capitalistic, and conformist Western mainstream society in which “you better shop and eat and procreate/ You got vacation days when you might escape to a condo on the coast” (“Easy/Lucky/Free”). Both songs are from the I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning LP and feature metaphysical ideas; “Landlocked Blues” suggests an afterlife after having been freed “from the shackles of language and measurable time” and the father in “At the Bottom of Everything” suggests a return to God “just like the setting sun is returned to the lonesome ocean”. In both songs a happy reunion, a return takes place and the fear of death disappears. However, Oberst can also be very final and existential in his lyrics. The apocalyptic “Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come” suggests a return to nothingness and doubts the existence of an individual essence that outlives the death of the body. “The Big Picture” gives the advice to seize the day because what happens after death is unpredictable. In this song, the lyric persona finds comfort in a sort of ‘natural religion’ suggesting that our ashes return to the earth from which new life will spring again. 61 What all these songs have in common is their relatively optimistic attitude towards death. To show the cruel side of death and the sadness it causes does not seem to be Oberst’s target except in one of his lyrically simplest songs, “No One Would Riot for Less” from the Cassadaga LP. Like most songs of the latest Bright Eyes album, which has been denounced by some long-time Bright Eyes-fans for its musical accessibility to the mainstream, the apocalyptic “No One Would Riot For Less” is structured classically: verse one and two, first melodic chorus, verse three and four, second melodic chorus, transitional bridge, and a final bridge which forms the musical and lyrical climax of the song. In the first two verses, the narrator describes the different shapes in which we might meet death anytime and anyplace: Death may come, invisible Or in a holy wall of fire In the breath between the markers On some black I-80 mile

From the madness of the governments To the vengeance of the sea Everything is eclipsed By the shape of destiny

61 For a visual illustration of this idea, watch the Bright Eyes music video of “Bowl of Oranges” on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUym7n7fJTQ [20 July 2008]. 82

These stanzas suggest death’s unpredictability which might be experienced in many different ways; in a fire, in a car accident between the white road markers, in wars and in tsunamis or hurricanes causing floods of water. On a micro-level, Oberst might refer to concrete incidents that have caused the deaths of hundreds of people, such as the Iraq war and the literal I-80 mile, a major interstate highway connecting the East Coast and the West Coast of the United States. ‘Delysid’ provides a concrete reference to a collective accident that took place on this highway near Pennsylvania before Christmas in 2001. 113 vehicles were involved in a chain reaction that cost the lives of nine people. Behind “the vengeance of the sea”, ‘chadth34’ suggests hurricane Katrina which killed 1 836 people in the summer of 2005, two years before Bright Eyes published Cassadaga . The “vengeance of the sea”, however, is a catastrophe that has meaning; it is nature taking revenge for humankind’s disrespectful behaviour. The line “Everything is eclipsed/ By the shape of destiny” gives a total of the world’s apocalyptic situation that varies significantly from the one we encounter in the more hopeful song “Four Winds”. Again, Oberst plays with the concept of destiny, which has been influenced by negative actions; otherwise the sea would not have taken revenge since an action involving venegeance is a reaction, which means that humankind can influence its destiny. Thus it is not predestination in its hardest form, but a mixture of the concepts of destiny and karma. However, at the present point of the song, the world’s destiny seems to be unchangeable – it is doomed to be “eclipsed”. In the omnipresence of death, the only comfort that is left for the narrator is the love between him and the unknown addressee: So love me now Hell is coming Just kiss my mouth Hell is here 62

We see “hell” approaching the earth and transforming it into a place of suffering, a place without any shelter. Similarly, the lyric persona in “Easy/Lucky/Free” (Digital Ash in a Digital Urn ) laments that we are in “another century spent pointing guns at anything that moves”. However, in “Easy/Lucky/Free”, he soothes the addressee by telling him/ her not to weep because “there is nothing as lucky…as easy…or free” as we will be when we have escaped this horror scenario by dying, when lying “in bags as dead as leaves/ Altogether for eternity”. As in chapter two, death is the only possibility to escape and the narrator in “No

62 Writing these chorus lines, Oberst might have been inspired by scene 5.1. of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus , where Faustus asks Helen to make him immortal by sucking out his soul with a kiss. 83

One Would Riot For Less” knows this when he soothes his “baby” by finally telling him/her that they will leave “this place” together in the last part of the song: Wake, baby, wake Leave that blanket around you There's no where we're safe

I'm leaving this place But there's nothing I'm planning to take

Just you (6x)

It suggests that in his desolate world, the only innocent person that is left is the narrator’s “baby”, whom he tries to protect from experiencing and seeing the death and destruction surrounding them. In contrast to “Four Winds” where the people in the eye of the wind spiral are protected, there is absolutely no place of comfort and safety in “No One Would Riot For Less”. Therefore, the lyric persona announces that he will leave “this place”, which could either be a concrete place on earth where war and destruction are ruling, or the desperate condition of our planet as a whole. In the latter case, it implies that he will take his “baby” to another place by taking away their lives. As observed by ‘redXscare’, Oberst’s voice has a “soothing quality” in this last part of the song, just as in the chorus of “Easy/Lucky/Free”.

Earlier in the song, the stanzas three and four illustrate the hellish state of the world by zooming in on the concrete situation of a soldier in a war: Little soldier, little insect You know war, it has no heart It will kill you in the sunshine Or happily in the dark

Well, kindness is a card game Or a bent-up cigarette In the trenches, in the hard rain With the bullet and a bet

By calling a soldier an insect and further posing the diminutive ‘little’ in front of the soldier and its metaphorical counterpart, the lyric persona emphasises the insignificance of a life in a war. He anthropomorphises the abstract concept of ‘war’ but at the same time takes away its heart – the symbol of goodness, of love, and compassion. “War” is the cruel murderer that might attack anytime, ignoring the sunlight as well as the repose man needs at night. In a war, “kindness is a card game/ Or a bent-up cigarette” because, as ‘iloveyouyesyou’ nicely puts it, “in such terrible situations as war, kindness is embodied by the smallest actions, such as the 84 normality of a card game and the sharing of a bent up cigarette, where life and humanity are at their most fragile”. In the second melodic chorus, the soldier asks for help: He says help me out Hell is coming [satanic laughing in the background] Could you do it now? Hell is here

We are not told how or by whom the soldier might be helped, but probably it is his request for someone to kill him in order to escape the hell of war where he might be stuck in a muddy trench, where he might lie badly wounded. In the background of “Hell is coming”, somebody laughs satanically – probably the personified ‘war without heart’ that kills “in the sunshine/ Or happily in the dark”.

Finally, the narrator moves from the close-up of the soldier to a long-shot of the setting, where nothing can grow anymore, where suffering rules, and life is about to become extinct: Do you see the sterile soil Poisoned sky, yellow water The final scraps of life Bringing new tears

As in “Four Winds”, Oberst’s apocalypse is connected to dryness, to infertility, and to desolation and in this sense very close to T.S. Eliot’s imagery in The Waste Land , where white naked bodies lie on the ground of the Thames, where egotism has made love disappear, and where the brown land’s infertility corresponds to man’s inability to love. The Waste Land ends with the traditional ending of a Hindu fable, with “Shantih, shantih shantih”, which is translated as “the peace which passeth understanding” in Bartleby’s online reprint of Eliot’s poem of the apocalypse. The lyric persona of “No One Would Riot For Less”, however, opts for a flight rather than for seeking shelter in a comforting although resigned philosophy. As has been said before, he prefers to leave for a place where there will be “nothing as lucky…as easy…or free” as he and his baby.

Chapter 4: Death & Love. Personifications of Death. “A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction”, “Hotel California”, and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”.

Eros and Thanatos Phillippe Ariès, the famous French sociologist and historian, dates the origins of the connection between love and death in art back to the end of the fifteenth century. In his short but comprehensible book Western Attitudes toward Death , he claims that towards the end of the fifteenth century, painters started to eroticise death, to associate death with love, Thanatos with Eros. This phenomenon then spread to countless scenes or motifs in art and literature during the following two centuries (cf. 1976/1994:56-57). As one prominent example, Ariès suggests Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet ’s love scene in the Capulet family tomb (cf. 1976/1994:60), where death acquires romantic connotations and is suddenly seen as something beautiful and aesthetic since both protagonists die for love, not wanting to live without the other. However, love/sex and death are not only to be found at the end of the tragedy but throughout the play, in various shapes and forms. In his essay “Love, Sex and Death in Romeo and Juliet ”, Clayton MacKenzie detects the motif of death as a suitor, a bridegroom – and thus the idea of ‘marrying’ death, which to Juliet seems the better alternative to marrying Paris: O sweet my mother, cast me not away! Delay this marriage for a month, a week, Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed In that dim monument where Tybalt lies. (3.5.198 – 201) (Cited in MacKenzie 2007:32)

In her study on death in Romantic poetry, Eva Volkmer-Burwitz also comments on the relation between Freud’s Eros and Thanatos, sex-drive and death-drive. Besides the anthropomorphisation of death as a groom and as a “male authority” (Ernst 1991:190), as implicit in the sample passage of Romeo and Juliet, in Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for death”, as well as in Hans Hohlbein’s emblematic paintings, she discusses the more innovative and feminine personification of death as the “femme fatale”. Volkmer- Burwitz describes her as “weibliche Verführerin und Mörderin, unerreichbar und erhaben“, and claims historical and mythological figures such as Circe and Dido, but also Eve and Salome to be the motif’s ancestresses (cf. 1987:181). Coleridge, for example, plays with the motif in his two magical mystical ballads “Christabel” and “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”. While in “Christabel” it is not made explicit that the enigmatic figure of Geraldine 86 symbolises death, she certainly embodies seduction, sin, and evil and has the power to destroy the relationship between Christabel and her father Sir Leoline. In “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”, Coleridge describes the mariner’s deathly seductress as the white-skinned, red- lipped and blond-curled “Night-Mare Life-in-Death” (cf. Volkmer-Burwitz 1987:184).

Oberst’s “Night-Mare Life-in-Death” Conor Oberst’s dark and foreign woman who seduces the lyric persona in “A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction” on the Letting off the Happiness album (2000) has a similar function as Coleridge’s blond siren. Physically, she is a black-eyed seductive woman, sexually experienced and dominant, as opposed to her ‘victim’, the innocent and passive lyric persona. While she is not a literal personification of death either, she triggers the speaker’s feeling of what Coleridge called “Night-Mare-Life-in-Death” in his “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”. She keeps the lyric persona spellbound, he feels incapable to escape from her, and he assures the listeners that we would experience the same when being with her. Oberst’s use of the pronoun ‘you’ instead of ‘I’ as in the line “And you’re not sure if you’re still alive” transports the information that her seduction ritual is not an exclusive package for the lyric persona but for all her ‘victims’. Actually, the first person pronoun ‘I’ appears only once in the song (“And here I know seduction breeds”, part 4) and is then replaced by ‘you’ in the rest of the song, suggesting that all victims share the same destiny. It is the lyric persona’s warning not to fall prey to her.

Oberst’s voice in this song is extremely emotion-laden; painful cries and screams give additional intensity to the lyrical suffering of Oberst’s narrator, which is characteristic for his early songs of despair. It leaves the listener with the feeling of testifying to another emotional striptease à la “Waste of Paint”. The song’s structure, however, is more difficult to grasp than in other Bright Eyes songs. Unlike the collage-composition of “Landlocked Blues” and the technique of listing applied to “At the Bottom of Everything”, “A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction” is built up like a story with a linear narrative structure that lacks the typical fragmented style of poetry. Resembling a prose story in form and content, it seems impossible to describe the song with the conventional structuring units such as stanza/verse, chorus, and bridge that have been used so far. Therefore, I will divide the song into nine parts corresponding to Oberst’s vocal pauses. The lyrics start immediately and are solemnly accompanied by a softly played steel guitar during the introductory part. Parts one and two 87 describe the setting of the song: dimmed red light, people whispering, soft music and smoke. Parts three and four describe some girls with “swelling breasts” who persuade the visitors “who might have moved” to stay and give in to “intoxicating delights”. Evoking the atmosphere of the inside of a brothel, the song might remind the listener of the Eagles’ enchanted “Hotel California” with its candles and chambers where “you can check out any time you like but you can never leave”. However, musically, the song does not recall “Hotel California” at all. It lacks a clear musical structure, has no catchy melody and becomes intensely loud in the second part after the other instruments (organ, accordion and dominant drums) have joined the guitar with the last line of the first part. Coupled with Oberst’s painful voice, the loud music somehow does not match the word scenery, since it does not correspond to the secret atmosphere and the soft music described in the lyrics. Music and lyrics seem to contradict each other and thus create a rather disturbing imbalance, making the lyric persona’s despair obvious in an instant and breaking with the sensual and fragile suspense built up by the soft introductory part. Part five is a sort of bridge, with Oberst’s voice functioning like a staircase taking the lyric persona deep down to the ‘femme fatale’ of the song: And you watch them take the light from you 63

And you find yourself on a velvet couch Tasting the skin of a foreign girl Her eyes are black and wet like oil And she ties your hands with a string of pearls

The bridge somehow divides the song into two main parts: the lyric persona’s observation of the place and the women in the first four parts, and what he experiences with the dark girl after he has been ‘deprived of light’ in the bridge. He meets her on the “velvet couch” whose cloth not only activates the listener’s tactile sense but can also be associated with brothels. In this and the following two parts of the song, Oberst’s voice regains some calmness and sensuality, resembling the introductory part and matching with the lyrics. As opposed to Coleridge’s blond and tempting siren, the femme fatale we encounter here is dark eyed and sexually dominant and plays with her victim until she has finally captured him/her, making it impossible for him/her to escape:

63 The layout is my attempt to visualise the lyric persona’s down-movement. 88

And you tremble like a frightened bird As she closes in and captures you to place you In a silver cage deep within her poisoned womb So once you're safe inside, she might let you out To fly in circles around the room But it's always night and there is no moon

Comparing himself to a helpless weak bird that has been captured and encaged, we again stumble over the cage metaphor, this time representing whatever hinders the lyric persona from living ‘in the light’ and from progressing. He was seduced and is now condemned to stay and obey forever. The satanic woman and her “silver cage” apparently function as what Coleridge called “Life-in-Death”, if ‘death’ connotes standstill, the end of evolution. As it happens with “conceptual metaphors”, “emotions are conceptualised as if they had a physical impact on us” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003:50); light and darkness usually conceptualise happiness and sadness, awareness and the lack of awareness, consciousness and the subconscious or, in even more general terms, something positive as opposed to something negative. Furthermore, “the light” could also signify reason, as in the word ‘Enlightenment’ since it is certainly the ability to reason or to ‘see clearly’ that is lost with addictions of all kind.

The song’s forum offers a variety of comments, the most popular one being the rather literal reading of a person having casual sex leading to feelings of guilt or greater loneliness. Only three persons read the song metaphorically, interpreting it, for example, as the lyric persona being seduced by drugs and having to suffer from it consequently. One of the comments suggests that the bird’s ‘flying in circles around the room’ relates to the state of being high, which is the only time when the lyric persona feels at least some kind of freedom, although in a very restricted way: “So once you're safe inside, she might let you out/ To fly in circles around the room/ But it's always night and there is no moon.” The ninth and last part of the song expresses the crux of the lyric persona’s situation; on the one hand he suffers from the sick relationship with the dark woman and on the other hand he enjoys the constant melancholic trance state he finds himself in: And you wonder if you are still alive And you’re not sure if you want to be But you drink her sweat like it was wine And you lay with her on a bed of blue And it's awful sweet Like the fruit she cuts and feeds to you

His trapped in-between position is mirrored in the paradox “awful sweet” as well as in the speaker’s doubt whether he really wants to feel more alive than he feels on the “bed of blue”. The colour blue usually connotes melancholy and sadness but also some sort of pleasure when tasting these feelings thoroughly, as it is the case with blues music. The last line might again echo the Bible’s creation myth in which Satan seduces Eve when he persuades her to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge. In “A Poetic Retelling”, the feminine and masculine roles of the biblical creation myth are exchanged; the dark lady becomes Satan, the lyric persona Eve, and the ‘forbidden fruit’ seduces the lyric persona to abandon ‘real’ life by causing the “Life-in-Death” experience. Eve, however, although seduced, is not a passive figure; she decides to eat the apple of the tree of knowledge, whereas the lyric persona of the song is completely passive and incapable of resisting. He just observes and lets everything happen to him – he watches the girls “take the light from [him]” and lets the satanic foreign seductress feed him her forbidden fruit. The ‘venomous’ semantic field including the “intoxicating delights” and the girl’s “poisoned womb” supports the interpretation of the femme fatale being a personification of drugs and the song as an allegory of drug addiction. Similarly, “Hotel California” is often interpreted as a toxic experience with the visitors being “all just prisoners here of our own device”. Once inside the ‘hotel’, they are condemned to stay forever as suggested by the last stanza: Last thing I remember, I was running for the door I had to find the passage back to the place I was before “Relax,” said the nightman, “We’re programmed to receive. You can check out any time you like, But you can never leave.”

As in “Hotel California”, there is no escape in sight in “A Poetic Retelling” either. The addiction causes the feeling of being dead already, deprived of reason and self-identity since all that matters is the addiction that governs the life of the lyric persona in “A Poetic Retelling”, which makes him metaphorically dead although he might be still alive physically.

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” I would like to conclude this chapter by comparing the song and its protagonists to John Keats’ ballad “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”. The eponymous lady has a mysterious power over the speaker of the poem, the embedded first person narrator who is identified as a knight. However, while Keats’ knight meets his fairy lady “in the meads” and describes her as “[f]ull beautiful—a faery's child/ Her hair was long, her foot was light/ And her eyes were wild”, 90

Oberst’s speaker meets his “foreign girl” with the black eyes “wet as oil” in a dark and gloomy place that recalls a brothel. While Oberst’s girl is dominant and very sexual – she “ties your hands with a string of pearls”, and “captures you to place you/ In a silver cage deep within her poisoned womb”, Keats’ “belle Dame” is a “fairy child”, a Lolita that enthrals the knight with tenderness: She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild and manna dew, And sure in language strange she said, “I love thee true!” While Oberst’s femme fatale captures her victim sexually, Keats’ “belle Dame” flatters the knight with sweet words which he does not really seem to understand but rather interprets as an expression of her love for him. Their communication is one-sided, it is the lady who probably says “I love thee true” and, in the previous stanza, it is her that sings “a faery’s song” whose words seem to be intelligible to the knight, but enchant him somehow: I set her on my pacing steed And nothing else saw all day long, For sideways would she lean, and sing A faery's song.

The first line of this stanza suggests that the knight is not as passive and helpless as Oberst’s lyric persona. He lifts the girl on the horse after making “a garland for her head,/ And bracelets too” and finally, after she has led him “to her elfin grot”, he shuts her crying eyes “with kisses four”. It is, however, not revealed why the lady is weeping but it might be her strategy to get his compassion and trust, which then makes her able to lull him asleep. The woman of “A Poetic Retelling” is less subtle and the lyric persona seems to be aware of his destiny from the beginning, when he suggests that she makes “you tremble like a frightened bird”. The knight, however, does not see the danger until his dream in the grot reveals him that many “pale kings and princes” have already been enthralled by the “belle Dame sans Merci”. Suddenly he awakes finding himself in the place where, at the beginning of the poem, somebody asked him what he was doing there “alone and palely loitering […] so haggard and so woe-begone”. The frame closes and suggests that he has escaped, although his resembling the pale and starved kings and princes that warned him in his dream might also be read as the opposite – that the “belle Dame sans Merci” has managed to permanently enchant him. However, he could also have dreamt it all – his encounter with the “faery child” could as well have been part of the dream and the warning royalties a dream within the dream. Now while 91 the knight has probably escaped the “belle Dame”, Oberst’s speaker is not able to leave and finds an ‘awful sweetness’ in his relationship with the “foreign girl”.

I have interpreted the woman as making the lyric persona suffering from “Life-in-Death”, from a loss of reason and reality, and from the inability to progress and change his situation. ‘A sick love’ could probably cause such a horrid state of being, having turned into an addiction that eliminates everything else from the life of the speaker. Therefore, the woman could as well be a metaphor for drug addiction, a reading that is supported by the previously mentioned isotopy of intoxication (“the poisoned womb” and the “intoxicating delights”). Keats’ “belle Dame sans Merci”, however, is usually interpreted in the Romantic context as the embodiment of imagination and the supernatural carrying the knight away from reality until he finally returns realising that it was just an illusion, a deceiving dream. Keats’ famous “Ode to a Nightingale” could fit into same interpretation, leaving the disillusioned and disappointed speaker behind. Applying this moral to “A Poetic Retelling” is rather strange, but one might find delight in thinking that the lyric persona suffers from being trapped by “awful sweet” imagination, seduced by his own art, as it is suggested in the forum by ‘steve82c_my_AIM_sn’. To apply the interpretation of an addiction of whatever kind to Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, on the other hand, is certainly worth consideration: Not realising its power at the beginning, the knight is enchanted and feels loved until he finally realises the danger of the addiction which certainly has no mercy on him. In the end, he has left the addiction behind, but it has turned him haggard and pale and disillusioned with reality, which is represented by the sad place of his sojourn next to dry sedge where “no birds sing”.

This comparison of a contemporary songtext with a poem written nearly two centuries ago shows that there is a continuity of imagery throughout the history of literature and that contrasting and comparing is a source for additional meaning not only for the new piece of literature but also for the classic.

Summary, Results, and Conclusion

The final part of this paper aims at providing a comprehensive summary of the characteristics of Oberst’s song-poetry regarding the themes of death and transcendence before it will finally conclude with the question that has always been present in the background of this thematic analysis: Can Conor Oberst be called “A Hopeless Romantic”?

Characteristics of Oberst’s lyrics of death and transcendence In chapter one, I have focused on Oberst’s epiphanic moments in which the lyric persona transcends personal and human boundaries in order to feel as part of the world, of the universe, to feel safe and comfortable in it like “a piece of the puzzle” contributing to a “The Big Picture”, if we use Oberst’s words. In his conception of time, Oberst sticks to ‘the human clock’, aware that “this lifetime’s one moment” and that death is always present, that we are like fish on the hook of death. This death awareness and the carpe diem motif which results from it, can be traced through Oberst’s lyrics up to his new solo album, where his persona sings, “I keep death on my mind like a heavy crown” and “I keep death on my feet like a basset hound” in the album’s last song “Milk Thistle”.

In chapter two, the numerous lyrics addressing the ideas of being freed by death and returning to where we came from are analysed. The basic scheme underlying these escapist lyrics is that death will liberate us from earthly pains, sorrows, and despair, as well as from feelings of meaninglessness and confusion. The imagery that expresses this state of despair usually involves the eyes and the loss of clear-sightedness – either the narrator cannot ‘see’ clearly because his “head’s a carousel of pictures, the spinning never stops” or because “the world’s got [him] dizzy again”. To escape this constant struggle with confusion and life’s meaninglessness, he either opts for “the clouded mind”, the effect of “the liquid cure” alcohol, which makes him get a “lighter head for a heavy heart”, or for the therapeutic function of writing and singing (“burdens are lifted from me/ That’s my voice raising”). The third possibility to escape modern nihilism, confusion, and pain is at the same time the only long- time solution: death. Death is the ultimate liberating force because it frees us of ‘the cage of life’, of human restrictedness and feelings. Death is the guard that will finally say, “Oh my patient prisoner you have waited for this day and finally/ You are free.”

In her dissertation, Eva Volkmer-Burwitz claims that all poems on death build on the same metaphorical basis: the peregrinatio, the triangular path from an origin, to human life, and back to the origin. This cyclic structure underlies all of Oberst’s songs of death – there is always a return to something, even if it is to nothingness, or blackness, as in “Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come” or to the soil from which new life can spring again as in “The Big Picture”.

The third chapter of this paper investigates death on a global level since it deals with the collective death of humankind, of the world, or of the universe. Oberst has always been a counter-culture figure, protesting against the negative changes a technological capitalist society brings with it. His portrait of the world’s status resembles Eliot’s The Waste Land – he sings of “sterile soil”, “poisoned skies” and “final scraps of life”, of “refrigerators full of blood” and people who are “pointing guns at anything that moves” in a world where people are advised to “better shop and eat and procreate” until they finally “lay in bags as dead as leaves […] for eternity”. On a political level, he ironically sings “Into the face of every criminal strapped firmly to a chair, we must stare, we must stare, we must stare” to illustrate the way we always “take eye for an eye” and will thus never attain peace on earth. Oberst’s lyrics are certainly idealistic but at the same time he seems aware of the comforts society provides to him and that he has “some ideal ideology which no one could hope to achieve” (“Waste of Paint”): I guess I am an idealist in a lot of ways. I believe that people have the capacity to be as good as they can be to one another, but when it comes down to it, would I want to live like that? I don’t know. I’m a fucking American, you know? I like my convenience. Like all the shit I talk about giving up, would I really give it up? Who knows? And I think that’s the crux of it all. There’s the theory of change, and then there’s actual change. And there’s such a huge divide between the two. (LaGambina 2007)

The apocalypse dooming in “Four Winds” promises space for rebirth, for change and transformation and is therefore very hopeful and optimistic towards life whereas the narrators of “Easy/Lucky/Free” and “No One Would Riot For Less” do not see the possibility of improving the current situation of the world. The only hope is found in “leaving this place”, which takes us back to the escapist quality of the songs discussed in chapter two; again death is the only real comfort because when we are dead there will be “nothing… as lucky…as easy…or free”.

The final chapter deals with the connection of love and death, focusing on the anthropomorphisations of death, the main allegorical figures in literature being the bridegroom and the seductive woman who is often referred to as “femme fatale” or “la belle Dame sans Merci”, who we encounter in “A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction”. Since Oberst is a heterosexual male, the female figure might be more appealing to him than the bridegroom. In an erotic allegory, Oberst’s lyric persona recounts how he feels trapped by a “foreign girl” who is a symbol of addiction of whatever kind. She urges him to move in a circle and this cyclic movement impedes progress, which is why the lyric persona feels paralysed, “not sure if [he is] alive”, as if his life was already sacrificed to death.

Concluding the thematic summary, it can be said that death appears in a fairly positive light – as part of the ‘circle of life’, as life’s engine, as a means of escape from meaninglessness and sadness because it not only puts an end to all the joys of life but to all the sorrows as well. In Oberst’s lyrics there are no fears of hell, of punishment after death. On the contrary, redemption in whatever form is taken for granted and non-existence is also seen as a sort of redemption since it excludes pain, confusion, and despair. In the concert Conor Oberst gave in Vienna on September 9 th , 2008, he performed an unknown song for which he ‘stole’ a metaphor from the field of baseball. With a very smooth voice accompanied only by the keyboard he played himself, he sang that he liked baseball because he likes “it when they steal and still get home”. It supports my earlier conclusion that the idea of punishment is despised in Oberst’s song corpus on death and transcendence as it supports the feeling that death is generally not feared by Oberst’s personae. However, Oberst never writes about ‘the death of the other’, the death of a beloved person, and in this way, death is rarely ever seen as something ‘negative’, or something painful. Focusing on imagining his own death, the experience of suffering brought by the death of close friends or family members seems to be missing in Oberst’s songs.

The song-poems of “A Hopeless Romantic”? To answer the title-question of this paper, one would have to define ‘Romanticism’ first. This task seems almost impossible since hundreds of books have been written about Romanticism and the Romantic idea – let alone the enormous corpus of primary literature. Critics of literary history have spent lifetimes on defining, contradicting, and re-defining the characteristics of this literary and cultural movement, which is why a 23-year-old student like me is still far 95 from being a specialist in the study of Romanticism. In all my imperfection, I have decided to reduce this contrastive comparison to some features of Romanticism in connection to the themes of death and transcendence and in connection to popular music and communication. Hence Conor Oberst’s lyrics have been contrasted and compared to the characteristics of the originally Eastern philosophy of universal oneness in the poetry of Walt Whitman, whom Robert Pattison calls the “purest spokesman” (1987:25) of Romantic pantheism. Wordsworth also plays a significant role because of his ideological influence on what we consider ‘authentic’ in rock music. Finally, Keir Keightley’s suggestions about Romantic and Modernist elements of music as well as fragments of Reinfandt’s definition of Romantic communication have been considered in this interdisciplinary attempt to find out whether Conor Oberst can be labelled “a hopeless Romantic” or not.

As the reader might have guessed, I cannot provide a clear yes/no answer to the question I have asked in the title of this paper. Just as is the case with his music, I believe that there is no plain literary categorisation Oberst’s lyrics would fit into. However, there are certainly many features about him as an artist and about his poetic output that could be termed ‘Romantic’; firstly, he certainly cares about projecting an authentic picture of himself as he says in an interview with the Omaha Emotive : I do my best to ignore it [the press], but in a way it has affected my Songwriting. I guess subconsciously it’s hard to be as forthright and honest. You become aware of the audience and you know people are gonna hear these songs that you’re writing. (Lewis 2001)

Oberst’s and especially Bright Eyes’ rise via the independent label Saddle Creek further contributes to the “authenticity effect” (Brackett) of making music for the sake of music and personal pleasure in the first place and not for money and fame, although the boundaries between these two motivations, which are sometimes said to divide rock from pop, are not as clear as they might seem. Eight years ago Bright Eyes, for example, signed a publishing deal with Sony BMI to sell more records (cf. Lewis 2001). On the other hand, Oberst has streamed his entire new album for free on his homepage, as did Radiohead with In Rainbows in 2007. Additionally, Oberst’s label Team Love , which promotes small bands, frequently works with what he calls the “honor system”: There’s been a couple of releases where the band didn’t want to put their whole record up, so obviously we don’t force them to. We just put a stream up or a certain number of songs. But most of the records are still available. You can either click on the button to pay for the download, or you can click on the other button and get it for free, with an explanation to the user that, “Hey, we’re trying to pay these artists for their music.” Because at the end of the day, 96

if they want to find it for free, you can pretty much find it for free. But I think if you put in front of them, “Here’s one choice, here’s the other choice,” kind of honor system, hopefully it works. If there’s ever a kid out there that can’t afford to buy the music, I still want them to hear it, and hopefully they’ll go to the show, or buy a T-shirt from the band. That’s the idea. (LaGambina 2007)

Thirdly, the singer-songwriter paradigm also contributes to our idea of an ‘authentic’ artist since he/she is the ‘self-made man/woman of popular music’ doing the composing, the songwriting, and the singing all by him- or herself. In his rock lexicon Rockspeak! , Simon Warner further claims that the acoustic guitar, “that inescapable symbol of rebellion and honest speaking” (Berland 1993:34), which is Oberst’s steady companion, “retained its credibility” because of the Romantic idea to “return to a simpler, rural lifestyle” (1996:248). This recalls Wordsworth’s ideal of poetic language transmitted to the field of music. Therefore, Rousseau could not only be called the father of Wordsworth’s famous Preface to Lyrical Ballads , but also of the “authenticity effect” of acoustic music, which Keir Keightley claims to be part of the Romantic features of music. Thus, it also becomes clear why country and folk music are considered ‘Romantic’: because they signify a return to the old values, to nature and the countryside, and to simple life whereas electronic instruments and music celebrate technology and progress and therefore the city as its place to be. Although Oberst likes to experiment with sounds, he always returns to simpler folk-rock: after Lifted he felt that there was “no space in this music” and that he wanted to reduce the instrumental layers to the guitar and voice only, “going more for those seventies folk records [of] Neil Young or Jackson Browne or Joni Mitchell” (Frere-Jones 2005). The result of this wish was the release of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning in 2005. Two years later, after the instrumentally loaded album Cassadaga , Oberst already predicted that for his next project “it would be cool to do something with a little more space, less instrumentation” (Smith 2007). With his self-titled recent release, Oberst again returns to the core of his music, which is “simple chords and simple melodies” (Bouza 2007). The last interview excerpt I will provide in order to underscore Oberst’s ‘Romantic side’ is his answer to Mariko Sakamoto’s question of how he imagined ‘the perfect world’: It kinda looks like…you know before they got really good at colour television. It’s like Technicolor…it’s like that. It almost looks like it’s painted in instead of actually nice color film. I tend to dwell on the past a lot. There are places and memories I have that all I want to do is go back to those times. There’s definitely some stuff from being a child, just brief moments of happiness and days where everything was just fine. (Sakamoto 2000)

If we conclude considering the dichotomies between past and future orientation, countryside and city, acoustic and electric/electronic music, and generally all dichotomies under the umbrella terms ‘Romantic’ and ‘Modernist’, the Romantic side of the scales seems to weigh heavier for Oberst and his work. However, Oberst also has a strong sympathy for sonic experimentation and innovation, which is why I will exchange the adjective ‘hopeless’ and call him an ‘experimenting Romantic’.

If we again return to Reinfandt’s Romantic Communication , we find the personal confessional mode as opposed to the techniques of distancing the songwriter from the text subject by introducing ‘mediators’ or a certain ‘objectivity’ to cover the lyric ‘I’. The effect of these distancing strategies is the reduction of biographical connections between the artist and his work, a divergence from ‘confessional (song-) poetry’ influenced by Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Lowell (cf. Warner 1996:267). Conor Oberst’s lyrics provide various communication situations. Frequently, his lyrical persona is an overt first person narrator inviting biographic readings as in “The Big Picture” and “Landlocked Blues”. In addition, sometimes the lyric ‘I’ even shares profession and political views with Oberst, for instance in “Landlocked Blues”, “Method Acting”, and “Nothing gets crossed out”. One could conclude that especially Oberst’s enormous corpus of songs on alienation and meaninglessness must have developed out of deep personal feelings. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine after the release of the (sometimes) lighter 2007 LP Cassadaga , Conor Oberst stated: At one point, I lost interest in writing about personal things. You can write so many songs about feeling lost, which is the way I feel most of the time. But I don’t think there is a very deep line in the sand between writing about myself and writing about other people. (Decurtis 2007)

The point is to consider the last thought of this statement – whenever the listener finds him- or herself identifying the artist with the lyric persona, he/she should be aware that the song could be about any other person and that the autobiographical reading is one of many possible interpretations accompanied by the danger of misinterpretation. In a one-sided communicative situation, as is the case with popular music (cf. Elicker 1997: 31), we will never really know the autobiographical truth value of a song, which is why it is impossible to conclude to what extent Oberst’s music is ‘confessional’ and to what extent it is ‘made up’. Nevertheless, if the image of the artist, which the listener obtains through the songs, is not contradicted or violated by the performances or public presentations of the artist, the ideological “authenticity effect” will work at its best, as it is the case with Conor Oberst. 98

The last ‘Romantic’ aspect of Oberst’s lyrics is what Robert Pattison calls “pure pantheism” (1987: 24) in Whitman’s poetry since “it embraces the mass, propounds the wholeness of the universe, makes room for all paradoxical contraries, and reverses the energy of process” (1987: 25). As most of the Romantics, Oberst finds comfort in this originally Eastern philosophy of the “everlasting circulation” (Heraclit cited in Pattison 1987:23), in a world where everyone and everything has his/her/its place. On the other hand, he has a strong counter-cultural feeling as well – he is often plagued by alienation and loneliness and by the by-product of the all-embracing Eastern and Romantic spirituality, in which “everything exists, nothing has value” (E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India cited in this context by Pattison 1987:72). Lost in feelings of nihilism and confusion, Oberst’s persona distances himself from Whitman’s positivism and rather sees the world with disillusioned eyes reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland . Finally, Oberst’s time conception dismisses the Romantic transcendence of time that brings eternity to the moment. Time, for Oberst, is the constant reminder of the transcendence of everything, of life’s brevity, and finally, of death.

In “When the President Talks to God”, Oberst asks, “Is every issue black or white?” The answer to this question is ‘no’. Similarly, I cannot simply label Oberst “a hopeless Romantic” – all I could do was to analyse Oberst’s songs with regard to various Romantic aspects and diverse Romantic poets to see whether there is any affinity. If I had chosen other means of comparison, the result might as well be different. Therefore, my answer to the title-question of this paper is, “No, Oberst is not a hopeless Romantic” - but many aspects of his ideology, of his music, and of his lyrics could be ‘bound together by a thread of Romanticism’.

References

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2.2. Online

2.2.1. Interviews and articles

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Decurtis, Anthony (2007, May 1). “Best Songwriter: Conor Oberst – From Rolling Stone’s Best of Rock 2008.” Rolling Stone . [Online] http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/20274062/best_songwriter_conor_oberst [2008, April 3].

Edwards, Gavin (2002, Nov. 14). “Rock’s Boy Genius: On the road with Conor Oberst and his fourteen-piece indie rock symphony.” Rolling Stone 909. [Online] http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5933642/rocks_boy_genius [2008, April 3].

Frere-Jones, Sasha (2005, Feb. 7). “New Morning – Indie rock’s reigning poet-prince.” New Yorker . [Online] http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/07/050207crmu_music [2008, April 3].

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Hentschel, Joachim (2005, Jan. 27). “US-Songwriter Conor Oberst: Fieber im Blick.” Der Spiegel . [Online] http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/musik/0,1518,338554,00.htm [2008, Sept. 8].

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Maack, Ben (2005). “Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes): Interview”. Revolver Club . [Online] http://www.revolver-club.de/imgespraech/musik_neu_connoroberst_interview.html [2008, April 3].

Paro, Brenda (2008, Jan. 25). “Freewheelin’: Bob Dylan vs. Conor Oberst”. Crawdaddy! [Online] http://crawdaddy.wolfgangsvault.com/article.aspx?id=5152 [2008, May 5].

Sakamoto, Mariko (2000). “Bright Eyes: An interview with Conor Oberst by Mariko Sakamoto.” Comes with a Smile . [Online] http://cwas.hinah.com/interview/?id=30 [2008, April 3].

Sheret, Matt (2007, July 13). “Interview: Bright Eyes enjoys ‘total freedom’.” Sound Generator . [Online] http://www.soundgenerator.com/viewArticle.cfm?ArticleID=17564 [2008, April 3].

Simpson, Dave (2005, March 15). “Bright Eyes.” The Guardian . [Online] http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/mar/15/popandrock [2008, April 3].

Smith, Barnaby (2007, March 18). “Bright Eyes – Burning Like Fire.” MusicOMH . [Online] http://www.musicomh.com/interviews/bright-eyes_0707.htm [2008, April 3].

Spencer, Neil (2008, July 13). “Conor Oberst, Conor Oberst.” The Guardian/ The Observer . [Online] http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/jul/13/folk.culture1 [2008, Sept. 8].

Williams, Paige (2005, Jan. 10). “New Kid on the Block.” New York Magazine . http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/music/pop/10850/ [2008, Sept. 8].

2.2.2. Wikipedia articles

“Apocalyptic literature”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalyptic_literature [2008, Aug. 6]. “Cassadaga (album)”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassadaga_(album) [2008, Aug. 6]. “Color symbolism and psychology”: http://en.widipedia.org/wiki/Color_symbolism [2008, April 8]. “Meditation”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation [2008, Aug 6] “The Soul Cages”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_Cages [2008, April 8]. “The Whore of Babylon”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whore_of_Babylon [2008, Aug. 6].

2.2.3. Youtube videos

“Bowl of Oranges”: http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=XUym7n7fJTQ [2008, July 7].

“Bright Eyes – At The Bottom Of Everything”: http://www.youtube.watch?v=4re_OcSZCRo. [2007, October 20]

“Bright eyes – At the bottom of everything (Live Kilborn)”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFXs_vn7tjk [2007, October 20].

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”Bright Eyes Interview (2 of 2)”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6utOyhpJvU&mode=related&search= [2007, October 3].

“Bright Eyes Road to Joy on Craig Ferguson”: http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=YCU18eCno6E [2008, Oct 7].

“Obama Rally w/ Conor Oberst”: http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=kP-QTjP1MaU [2008, Oct 7].

2.2.4. Forum discussion

‘Actors&Habits’ (2007, Jan. 2). “Re: The Big Picture.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=100279 [2008, April 6].

‘andru84’ (2007, June 3). Re: “Four Winds.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858608161&offset=75&page=4#comments [2008, May 8].

‘benjam326’ (2007, Feb. 28). “Re: Four Winds.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858608161&offset=0&page=1#comments [2008, May 8].

‘breakmylimbs’ (2007, April 13). “Re: Four Winds.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858608161&offset=25&page=2#comments [2008, May 8].

‘chadth34’ (2007, April 19). “Re: No One Would Riot For Less.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858561123&offset=0&page=1#comments [2008, July 12].

‘Delysid’ (2007, Sept. 7). “Re: No One Would Riot For Less.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858561123&offset=25&page=2#comments [2008, July 12].

‘EricFrank’ (2002, June 16). “Re: An Interview With Conor Oberst.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=123425 [2008, April 6].

‘extremelygripping’ (2007, April 6). “Re: Four Winds.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858608161&offset=25&page=2#comments [2008, May 8].

‘Hunter’ (2004, November 14). “At the Bottom of Everything.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858517618 [2008, April 8].

‘indiechouette’ (2007, April 4). “Re: Four Winds.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858608161&offset=25&page=2#comments [2008, May 8].

‘jvenrick’ (2005, Jan. 24). “At the Bottom of Everything.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858517618 [2008, April 6].

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‘numbskull’ (2006, Aug. 12). “Re: Landlocked Blues.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858520540&offset=50&page=3#comments [2008, April 6].

‘rapunzel32’ (2007, April 23). “Re: Four Winds.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858608161&offset=50&page=3#comments [2008, May 8].

‘RazorbladeKiss6677’ (2005, Dec. 8). “Re: The Big Picture.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=100279 [2008, April 6].

‘steve82c_my_AIM_sn’ (2004, Dec. 19). "Re: A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=50840 [2008, Aug 14].

‘the_faint_=_shimmy’ (2005, Sept. 30). “Re: A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=50840&offset=25&page=2#comments [2008, July 12].

‘ToSadToGiveaFuck’ (2007, Jan. 17). “An Interview With Conor Oberst.” [Online posting]. http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=50840&offset=25&page=2#comments [2008, July 12].

2.3. Films

Kulbel and Walters (2005). Spend an Evening with Saddle Creek . Plexi.

Scorsese, Martin (2005). No Direction Home . USA: PBS/ UK: BBC.

Cover: Linocuts by Kaite Murphy for the Lifted booklet.

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APPENDIX 1: LIST OF SONGS

The following list provides the titles of all the songs discussed in this paper. The titles of the lyrics I have analysed and interpreted in detail are printed in bold type.

Fevers and Mirrors (2000): “A Scale, a Mirror and those indifferent Clocks“ (track 2) “Sunrise, Sunset” (track 10)

Letting Off the Happiness (2001): “If Winter Ends” (track 1) “June on the West Coast” (track 7) “A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction” (track 9)

Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep your Ear to the Ground (2002): “The Big Picture” (track 1) “Method Acting” (track 2) “Don’t Know When But a Day Is Gonna Come” (track 7) “Nothing Gets Crossed Out” (track 8) “Waste of Paint” (track 10) “From A Balance Beam” (track 11)

I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning (2005): “At the Bottom of Everything” (track 1) “Train Under Water” (track5) “Landlocked Blues” (track 8) “Road to Joy” (track 10)

Digital Ash in a Digital Urn (2005): “Arc of Time” (track 1) “Easy/Lucky/Free” (track 12)

Cassadaga (2007): “Four Winds” (track 2) “If the Brakeman Turns My Way” (track 3) “Make A Plan To Love Me” (track 5) “Middleman” (track 8) “Cleanse Song” (track 9) “No One Would Riot For Less” (track 10)

Conor Oberst (2008): “Milk Thistle” (track 12)

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APPENDIX 2: LYRICS

All songtexts are reprinted from the corresponding Bright Eyes-booklets, except for the introductory part of “At the Bottom of Everything”, which has been taken from www.songmeaning.net. In many cases, I have modified the layout of the lyrics since in most of the booklets, the lyrics visually resemble prose texts, which makes it harder to grasp the songs’ structure. Sometimes I have also changed the punctuation, and adapted the lyrics to the sung versions of the songs. The texts reprinted here are those that have been discussed in more detail. I have preferred to order the songs according to their position in this paper rather than with regard to the chronological order of release, or the alphabetical order.

1. “The Big Picture”

(Context: Chapter 1: Universal Oneness & Death Awareness)

The picture's far too big to look at, kid stanza/ verse 1 Your eyes won't open wide enough And you're constantly surrounded By the swirling stream of what is and what was Well, we've all made our predictions But the truth still isn't out But if you want to see the future Go and stare into a cloud

And keep trying to find your way stanza 2 Out through that maze of memories It all sort of looks familiar Until you get up close, then it's different clearly But each time you turn a corner You're right back where you were And your only hope is that forgetting Might make a door appear

Is it your fear of being buried stanza 3 That makes you so afraid to speak? An avalanche of opinions Like the one that fell that I'm now underneath It was my voice that moved the first rock And I would do it all again I mean, it's cool if you keep quiet But I like singing

So I'll be holding my note and stomping melodic c horus 1 And strumming and feeling so very lucky There is nothing I know except a lifetime's one moment And wishing will just leave you empty

So you can try to live in darkness stanza 4 But you will never shake the light No, it will greet you every morning Make you more aware with its absence at night When you're wrapped up in your blankets, baby That comfortable cocoon 108

But I've seen the day of your awakening, boy And it's coming soon

So go ahead and lose yourself in liquor stanza 5 And you can praise the clouded mind But it isn't what you're thinking, no It's the course of history, your position in line You're just a piece of the puzzle So I think you'd better find your place And don't go blaming your knowledge On some fruit you ate

Because there's been a great deal of discussion, yes stanza 6 About the properties of man Animal or angel You were carved from bone but your heart is just sand And the wind is going to scatter it And cover everything with love So if it makes you happy then keep kneeling, mama But I'm standing up

Because this veil it has been lifted, yes stanza 7 My eyes are wet with clarity I've been a witness to such wonders I have searched for them all across this country But I think I'll be returning now To the town where I was born And I understand you must keep moving, friend But I'm headed home

I'm going follow the road melodic chorus 2 And let the scenery sweeping by easily enter my body I will send this message in code, underground, over mountains Through forests and deserts and cities song All across electric wire, it's a baited line bridge Yeah, the hook's in deep, boys, there's no more time system So you can struggle in the water Be too stubborn to die Or you can just let go And be lifted to the sky

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2. “At the Bottom of Everything”

(Context: Chapters 1&2: Universal Oneness & Peregrinatio)

So there was this woman and she was on an airplane, and she was spoken introduction flying to meet her fiancé seaming high above the largest ocean on planet earth. She was seated next to this man she had tried to start conversations, but the only thing she had really heard him say was to order his Bloody Mary. She was sitting there and she was reading this really arduous magazine article about a third world country that she couldn’t even pronounce the name of. And she was feeling very bored and despondent. And then suddenly there was this huge mechanical failure and one of the engines gave out, and they started just falling thirty-thousand feet, and the pilots on the microphone and he’s saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, oh my god... I'm sorry” and apologizing. And she looks at the man and says “Where are we going?” and he looks at her and he says “We’re going to a party. It’s a birthday party. It’s your birthday party. Happy birthday darling. We love you very, very, very, very, very, very, very much.” And then he starts humming this little tune, it kind of goes like this: 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4. 64

We must talk in every telephone, get eaten off the web stanza/ verse 1 We must rip out all the epilogues from the books that we have read Into the face of every criminal strapped firmly to a chair We must stare, we must stare, we must stare

We must take all of the medicines too expensive now to sell stanza 2 Set fire to the preacher who is promising us hell Into the ear of every anarchist that sleeps but doesn’t dream We must sing, we must sing, we must sing

And it’ll go like this: spoken bridge 1

While my mother waters plants melodic chorus 1 My father loads his guns He says death will give us back to God Just like this setting sun is returned to this lonesome ocean

And then they splashed into the deep blue sea! spoken bridge 2 It was a wonderful splash.

We must blend into the choir, sing as static with the whole stanza 3 We must memorize nine numbers and deny we have a soul Into this endless race for property and privilege to be won We must run, we must run, we must run

We must hang up in the belfry where the bats and moonlight laugh stanza 4 We must stare into a crystal ball and only see the past Into the caverns of tomorrow with just our flashlights and our love

64 The transcript of the introductory part is ‘Hunter’s’ version posted on http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858517618 [2008, April 8].

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We must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge

And then we’ll get down there, spoken bridge 3 way down to the very bottom of everything And then we’ll see it, oh we’ll see it, we’ll see it, we’ll see it

Oh my morning's coming back melodic chorus 2 The whole world’s waking up All the city buses swimming past I’m happy just because I found out I am really no one.

3. “Landlocked Blues”

(Context: Chapter 2: Death the Liberator & Peregrinatio)

If you walk away, I’ll walk away stanza/ verse 1 First tell me which road you will take I don’t want to risk our paths crossing some day So you walk that way, I’ll walk this way

And the future hangs over our heads stanza 2 And it moves with each current event Until it falls all around like a cold steady rain Just stay in when it’s looking this way

And the moon’s laying low in the sky stanza 3 Forcing everything metal to shine And the sidewalk holds diamonds like the jewellery store case They argue walk this way, no, walk this way

And Laura’s asleep in my bed stanza 4 As I’m leaving she wakes up and says “I dreamed you were carried away on the crest of a wave Baby don’t go away, come here”

And there’s kids playing guns in the street stanza 5 And ones pointing his tree branch at me So I put my hands up I say, “enough is enough, If you walk away, I’ll walk away” And he shot me dead

I found a liquid cure melodic chorus 1 For my landlocked blues It’ll pass away like a slow parade It’s leaving but I don’t know how soon

And the world’s got me dizzy again stanza 6 You’d think after 22 years I’d be used to the spin And it only feels worse when I stay in one place So I’m always pacing around or walking away

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I keep drinking the ink from my pen stanza 7 And I’m balancing history books up on my head But it all boils down to one quotable phrase If you love something, give it away

A good woman will pick you apart stanza 8 A box full of suggestions for your possible heart But you may be offended and you may be afraid But don’t walk away, don’t walk away

We made love on the living room floor stanza 9 With the noise in the background of a televised war And in the deafening pleasure I thought I heard someone say “If we walk away, they’ll walk away”

But greed is a bottomless pit stanza 10 And our freedom’s a joke, we’re just taking a piss And the whole world must watch the sad comic display If you’re still free start running away

Cause we’re coming for you! spoken bridge + trumpet solo

I’ve grown tired of holding this pose stanza 11 I feel more like a stranger each time I come home So I’m making a deal with the devils of fame Saying “let me walk away, please” stanza 12 You’ll be free child once you have died From the shackles of language and measurable time And then we can trade places, play musical graves Till then walk away, walk away

So I’m up at dawn melodic chorus 2 Putting on my shoes I just want to make a clean escape I’m leaving but I don’t know where to I know I’m leaving but I don’t know where to

4. “Four Winds“

(Context: Chapter 3: Apocalypse)

Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe stanza/ verse 1 There are people always dying trying to keep them alive There are bodies decomposing in containers tonight In an abandoned building

Where the squatters made a mural of a Mexican girl stanza 2 With fifteen cans of spray paint in a chemical swirl She is standing in the ashes at the end of the world Four winds blowing through her hair 112

When Great Satan is gone…the Whore of Babylon… melodic chorus 1 She just can’t sustain the pressure where it’s placed She caves

The Bible’s blind, the Torah is deaf, the Qur’an is mute stanza 3 If you burned them all together you’d get close to the truth But still they are pouring over Sanskrit under Ivy League moons While shadows lengthen in the sun

Cast on a school of meditation built to soften the times stanza 4 And hold us at the center while the spiral unwinds It’s knocking over fences crossing property line Four winds cry until it comes

It’s the Sum of Man slouching towards Bethlehem melodic chorus 2 A heart just can’t contain all of that empty space It breaks. It breaks. It breaks.

So I went back by rented Cadillac and company jet stanza 5 Like a newly orphaned refugee retracing my steps All the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead They say, you’d better look alive.

Now it’s off to Old Dakota where a genocide sleeps stanza 6 In the Black Hills, the Badlands, the calloused East I buried my ballast. I made my peace.

Heard Four Winds levelling the pines [spacing by author]

When Great Satan is gone…the Whore of Babylon… melodic chorus 3 She just can’t remain with all that outer space She breaks. She breaks. She breaks. She caves. She caves.

5. No One Would Riot for Less

(Context: Chapter 3: Apocalypse)

Death may come, invisible stanza/verse 1 Or in a holy wall of fire In the breath between the markers On some black I-80 mile

From the madness of the governments stanza 2 To the vengeance of the sea Everything is eclipsed By the shape of destiny

So love me now melodic chorus 1 Hell is coming Just kiss my mouth Hell is here 113

Little soldier, little insect stanza 3 You know war, it has no heart It will kill you in the sunshine Or just as happily in the dark

Well, kindness is a card game stanza 4 Or a bent-up cigarette In the trenches, in the hard rain With the bullet and a bet

He says help me out melodic chorus 2 Hell is coming Could you do it now? Hell is here

Do you see the sterile soil bridge 1 Poisoned sky, yellow water The final scraps of life Bringing new tears

Wake, baby, wake bridge 2 Leave that blanket around you There's no where we're safe I'm leaving this place But there's nothing I'm planning to take Just you (5x)

6. “A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction”

(Context: Chapter 4 – Love & Death)

The language in the dimmer rooms part 1 Seems to represent its light source well How soft they speak and seem to be at peace With the movement of the music and the madness that’s pulling me into this

And the shades of the lamps are woven red part 2 The light, it stains and consecrates Anointing all forgotten forms that swirl and smoke And haunt this place

The girls in gowns all nurse the dark part 3 Pulling it near to their swelling breasts And watch as it seeps to their hearts And beats within their virgin chests

And here I know seduction breeds part 4 From wanton hearts that would seduce And grows and spreads it's vines and leaves

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Embracing those who might have moved But now remain to drink the night from vials black and thick With intoxicating delights would leave you drunk inside this dream

And you watch them take the light from you ‘dividing’ bridge

And you find yourself on a velvet couch part 5 Tasting the skin of a foreign girl Her eyes are black and wet like oil And she ties your hands with a string of pearls

And you tremble like a frightened bird part 6 As she closes in and captures you to place you In a silver cage deep within her poisoned womb

So once you're safe inside, she might let you out part 7 To fly in circles around the room But it's always night and there is no moon

And you wonder if you are alive part 8 And you’re not sure if you want to be But you drink her sweat like it was wine And you lay 65 with her on a bed of blue And it's awful sweet Like the fruit she cuts and feeds to you

65 In “No One Would Riot For Less“ as well as in “A Poetic Retelling“, Oberst uses ‘lay’ instead of ‘lie’. In Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English, the following entry has been found: “[intransitive] spoken to be in a position in which you are flat - some people consider this use to be incorrect – synonym lie” 115

APPENDIX 3: SUMMARIES

Summary

This paper investigates how the concepts of death and transcendence are represented in Conor Oberst’s lyrics and tries to filter out various Romantic aspects regarding themes, communication, and ideology. In four thematically structured main chapters, six songs and several song-fragments are analysed and interpreted within the framework of text-oriented and reader-responsive theories.

The first chapter explores the all-embracing Romantic philosophy of universal oneness, which has its origin in eastern spirituality and which can also be found in Walt Whitman’s “simple, compact, well-joined scheme”. This idea of being a small but significant “part of the puzzle” (Oberst) also lies at the core of Oberst’s songs “The Big Picture” and “At the Bottom of Everything”. Taking away much of the weight of life, the feeling of being part of the divine cosmic plan also besieges the finality of death. Rejecting the idea of paradise in heaven (“Arc of Time”), the lyric persona finds comfort in the idea that new life will spring from the ashes, or the “heart[s] of sand” of the dead, which forever contribute to “The Big [cosmic] Picture”. However, whereas the transcendentalists feel eternity in the moments of cosmic union, the Omaha-born singer-songwriter’s personae surrender to the human clock – always aware of time’s transience, they feel like ‘fish on the hook of death’ keeping death on their minds “like a heavy crown” (“Milk Thistle”). On the other hand, this awareness of death motivates them to seize their lives, to fulfill their dreams because they know that ignoring life’s transience cannot prevent their being lifted out of the ocean of life one day (cf. “The Big Picture”).

The second chapter investigates the metaphor of death as the liberator from pain, despair, and confusion – an idea that is rooted in Plato’s theory of the pure soul being freed from the distracting bodily needs after death. Again the concept of transience is of major importance because in a world where nothing ever lasts, nothing really means anything. In the eyes of Oberst’s nihilistic lyric personae, especially busy people are conceived as absurd and ridiculous (cf. “Waste of Paint”). Oberst’s personae long to die in order to find out about the mystery of life and death. Until then, they try to fill up what Pascal calls the “horror vacui” – a sort of inner emptiness – with writing, singing, and alcohol, their “liquid cure” (“Landlocked Blues”) that grants them a “clouded mind” (“The Big Picture”) and “some lighter heads for a heavy heart” (“Don’t.Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come”).

Oberst’s apocalyptic songs are at the centre of the third chapter. The strongly intertextual “Four Winds” is not only reminiscent of Eliot’s The Waste Land but also shows some striking parallels with Yeats’ “The Second Coming”. “Poisoned skies”, “sterile soil” (“No One Would Riot For Less”), and an abused Mexican girl (“Four Winds”) are the results of a capitalist, racist society that always wants more and more power. Oberst’s apocalyptic critique of western society is also compared to Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A- Gonna Fall”, which, in this paper, is the starting point for the lengthy discussion of whether Oberst can be called “the next Bob Dylan” ( Rolling Stone ). Whereas the apocalypse, which sweeps the earth with the “four winds”, makes room for cleansing the mind of the old ways of thinking, the lyric persona in “No One Would Riot For Less” and “Easy/Lucky/Free” sees death as the only means of escape from war and the wasteland that surrounds him.

The last chapter introduces frequent personifications of death. As an allegory of addiction, the motif of the ‘femme fatale’, the dangerous seductress, plays an important part in Oberst’s “A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction”, which recalls the Eagles’ “Hotel California”, where “you can check out any time you like but you can never leave”. Similarly, Oberst’s dark lady holds her victims captured, impedes their progress, and thus functions as a sort of death in life.

Eventually, the Romantic and non-Romantic aspects are recollected with regard to concrete theories of literary criticism, pop music, and communication, especially relating to Rüdiger Safranski’s Romantik , Robert Pattison’s Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism, and Christoph Reinfandt’s Romantische Kommunikation, the latter of which also serves as the basis of the concept of Romantic authorship and Romantic communicative situations.

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Zusammenfassung

Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, die Konzepte Tod und Transzendenz in Conor Obersts Liedertexten aus verschiedenen Perspektiven zu beleuchten und auf diverse romantische Aspekte – thematische, kommunikationstheoretische und ideologische – einzugehen, um letztendlich die Titelfrage dieser Arbeit zu beantworten. In vier Hauptkapiteln werden sechs Lieder und mehrere Liedtextfragmente thematisch zusammengefasst, analysiert und text- sowie leserorientiert interpretiert, während sich die Frage nach dem Romantischen in Obersts Texten wie auch in seinen Auftritten in der Öffentlichkeit (Interviews, Konzerte) als roter Faden durch diese Arbeit zieht.

Das erste Kapitel beschäftigt sich mit der alles umarmenden romantischen Philosophie des „liebenden Verschmelzens“ (Safranski 2007:143) mit dem Kosmos, die ihren Ursprung in den abendländischen Religionen hat und vor allem bei Walt Whitman immer wieder zu finden ist. Dieses „Sicheinsfühlen“ mit dem Universum ist auch in Obersts Liedern „The Big Picture“ und „At the Bottom of Everything“ anzutreffen. Es besiegt die absolute Finalität des Todes durch das ewige Teilsein des kosmischen Puzzles, in dem aus der Asche der Toten, oder dem ‚heart of sand’, neues Leben entspringt und somit eine Wiedergeburt im naturalistischen Sinn stattfindet. Während Whitman und die deutschen und amerikanischen Transzendentalisten in diesen Momenten der ‚universal oneness’ jedoch die Ewigkeit im Augenblick spüren, ergibt sich der aus Omaha stammende Singer-Songwriter dem Ticken der menschlichen Uhr; die Vergänglichkeit ist bei ihm immer gegenwärtig und schon im Leben sieht er sich als Fisch am Haken des Todes, der das Todesbewusstsein entweder als motivierende, treibende Kraft nützen kann oder – vergeblich – versuchen kann den Tod zu ignorieren, um letztendlich doch aus dem Meer des Lebens gezogen zu werden.

Das zweite Kapitel untersucht die Metapher vom Tod als Befreier von Schmerz, Verzweiflung und Verwirrung, die schon Platons Dualitätstheorie von Körper und Seele zugrunde liegt. Wieder spielt der Zeitaspekt eine wichtige Rolle, diesmal allerdings als demotivierende Last, da in einer Welt, in der nichts von Dauer ist, auch nichts wirklich von Bedeutung ist. Besonders das emsige Treiben, das ‚busy life’ wirkt in den Augen von Obersts nihilistischen Sprechern absurd und lächerlich. Sie sehnen sich nach dem Tod um den Sinn von Leben und Sterben herauszufinden und versuchen ihren „Blues“ mit Schreibtherapie und Alkohol – „a liquid cure“ – zu heilen. Obwohl das Schreiben und Singen sowie ein durch Alkohol „bewölktes/benebeltes Bewusstsein“ dabei helfen können („So go and lose yourself in liqour and you can praise the clouded mind“), weil somit „some lighter heads for a heavy heart“ eingetauscht werden, wird der Tod dennoch als die einzig wahre und dauerhafte Erlösung angesehen.

Obersts apokalyptische Lieder stehen im Mittelpunkt des dritten Kapitels. Das stark intertextuelle „Four Winds“ erinnert nicht nur an Eliots The Waste Land , es weist auch unübersehbare Parallelen zu Yeats’ „The Second Coming“ auf. „Vergiftete Himmel“ und „unfruchtbare Erde“ und ein missbrauchtes mexikanisches Mädchen deuten auf die Auswirkungen einer kapitalistischen, rassistischen und machtgierigen Menschheit hin. Diese mit der Apokalypse drohende Art der Gesellschaftskritik wird auch konkret mit einem Dylan-Song verglichen und dient als Einstieg in die unter Populärmusikkritikern heftig umstrittene Diskussion, ob Oberst „the next Bob Dylan“ ( Rolling Stone ) genannt werden kann. Während die Apokalypse, die mit den „four winds“ über die Erde fegt, Platz schafft für ein neues, gereinigtes Bewusstsein der ‚lyric persona’, sieht der Sprecher in „No One Would Riot For Less“ die Flucht in den Tod als einzigen Ausweg, da der umherwütende Krieg bedrohlicher wirkt als der Tod selbst.

Im letzten Kapitel werden die häufigsten Personifizierungen des Todes angesprochen, wobei das Motiv der gefährlichen Verführerin, der ‚femme fatale’, in Bezug auf Obersts Song „A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction“ im Vordergrund steht. Als Allegorie für jegliche Art von Sucht, hält sie ihre Opfer in einem statischen Zustand gefangen, der als eine Art Tod im Leben interpretiert werden kann.

Am Ende werden die romantischen und nicht-romantischen Aspekte der Songs und des 28-jährigen Singer- Songwriters selbst anhand konkreter Elemente aus ausgewählten Bereichen der Literaturwissenschaft, Popmusik und Kommunikationstherorie zusammengefasst, um die Frage nach dem „hopeless Romantic“ mit einem zu erwartenden ‚jein’ zu beantworten.