Kelly Erin Gray is a writer and English PhD candidate at Boston College. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Maudlin House, The Shore, Up The Staircase Quarterly, and The River. She can be found online @kelly_erin_.
Time moves like heat in the summertime, at once both weather and metaphor. You don’t notice the incremental changes so much as you bear witness to the waves, and you can only see it through a slanted gaze—as a mirage, lifting up from sweating asphalt. As June settles in around us, it carries with it this uncanny understanding: time holds us throughout all its cycling seasons. It’s there even when we don’t see it as a slow simmering. It’s all coming back again though, now. It’s the summer of 2024, but I could be convinced otherwise.
Soon, it’ll be election time. And, right on schedule, we’re back to witnessing livestreamed atrocities at night from our tilted screens, as wide as our eyes and as narrow as our attention spans. And, then, scrolling away. Scrolling past bloodshed in the same breath as we do advertisements. Watching till our eyes dry out in their sockets like frayed wiring in outlets or till we get bored, replace a small screen with a larger one, or split the blank screen of our minds between two at once, playing subway surfers over casualty counts written in the passive voice. It’s easy to feel beaten down by it all. It even feels bad not to feel bad.
How, then, do we endure? What do we do with the monotony of our days, the rhythm of our lives, when we know very well what lies behind the veil of our averted gaze? Bright Eyes’ 2002 album LIFTED Or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground not only reckons with but reels from this question, veering wildly between the death drive of nihilism and the euphoria of existentialism. It’s an album that calls out to lift the veil, lift your voice, lift out of darkness and or into the clouds. In its repeating and self-referential lyricism, LIFTED also cycles through options for its title’s meaning, as if it could ever get it right or mean just one thing. Though I listened to this album for my five good hours this week, I feel as though I’ve probably spent closer to five hundred hours with it over the years (the 10-minute-long closing song “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And To Be Loved)” was in my most top 5 most listened to songs on Spotify last year – much more on this song later). Still, holding it close this week has lifted something new in it and within me. What has crystallized most for me in this cycle of listening has been how contemporary this album remains, both as a meditation on our endless moment and as a means of making it through to the next one, come what may.
Conor Oberst is no stranger to this struggle. For all the endless war in the Middle East, Oberst seems to have written endless political songs in protest. Beyond LIFTED, Brights Eyes has released many other works under the Bush administration, including the explicitly political single “When The President Talks To God” in 2005. Here, Oberst responds directly to Bush’s claim to speak to God every night by asking “does he fake that drawl or merely nod?” And, in the same year, their album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning explores what it means to live in the West against this backdrop of war in the Middle East in songs like “Land Locked Blues.” The cognitive dissonance of everyday life manifests best in the tender moments this song shares: “We made love on the living room floor/ 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.”” The band has written so many political songs as to even become a source of parody. In a 2020 skit on CONAN, for example, Oberst plays a production assistant who cannot stop singing to this same tune: “Start a new war each time that you’re bored/ George Bush sent our boys to die in the war.” In response, a writer on CONAN yells back at him, ““George Bush is not even the fucking president anymore, Conor!” Though satirical, this joke raises a valid question. Why continue listen to Bush era music when Bush is not even the fucking president anymore?
After listening to the album on repeat as much as I have, I’ve found that LIFTED lifts above its own circumstances. It’s not missing the forest through the trees; it’s keeping its ear to the ground to learn the historical fault lines as a way of rising above them. In other words, this album carries in it a dialectical understanding that the path toward the universal is marked by the particular. And, here, this universal truth comes in the form of struggle. When the album first begins in “The Big Picture,” Oberst teases this truth, though it’ll take the full album for him to arrive at it himself. “But I’ve seen the day of your awakening, boy/ and it’s coming soon.” He’s speaking to himself as much as he is to us here, as he at once warns of and promises a coming revelation. Even more, this truth is repeated: “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.” In the album arc that follows, however, Oberst struggles to assume his own position in the very world he questions. The structure of fantasy is at work here. As Freud notes of the fetishist, one is able to hold two competing truths at once in both believing in a fantasy while also understanding that it is nothing more than that: a fantasy. Or, as Žižek puts it, a paradoxical logic follows: “I know very well, but nevertheless.” In our tired time, Oberst’s struggle with and against nihilism mirrors our own, resting as we are somewhere in the purgatory between no longer believing in the fantasy and understanding what to do now. Only through listening to the full album can we emerge from out the other side.
In keeping with its uncanny lesson, LIFTED then foreshadows a larger truth in its second song. In the first verse, Oberst speaks again toward history’s repetitions: “There is no beginning to the story/ A bookshelf sinks into the sand.” This is a struggle that he knows “goes on and on and on and on.” The title of the song, “Method Acting,” suggests the presence of fantasy, as we struggle against ourselves in knowing very well that our day to day world is radically contingent in all of its constructed meanings but nevertheless having to carry on living within it anyway. As Oberst proclaims in the bridge, “We have a problem with no solution/ but to love and to be loved.” Sound familiar? This lesson will be repeated in the title of the closing song on the album and identified as “the mystery” of life itself. Even though he mentions it in this early song as a solution, he will first engage with it as a problem. This is the minimal but absolute difference between the existentialist asserting that life has no inherent meaning and the nihilist embracing the same.
In the songs to follow, Oberst renders himself as a flawed protagonist. The fourth song “You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will.” enacts his internal struggle even on the formal level, as listening and reading the lyrics offer different ways of interpreting their meaning. At large, it’s a song about a wavering relationship wherein his partner tells Conor to go out and “explore those other women, the geography of their bodies.” Still though, she has faith that he will come back as a “boomerang” and return to her. When I would first listen to this song, I didn’t hear the question marks. Though the repetition betrays the shaken faith that “you” ever actually “will,” I still took the refrain away as an anxious affirmation that “you will, you will, you will” come back. We have Freudian slips all the time when we speak, it’s less often we get to experience them when we don’t; but, this reading surely reflects the way I put myself into the meaning I make. In the written lyrics, Oberst instead insists on an ambiguity. Even more, he places the question marks after “you” rather than “will,” thereby revealing the way he also inserts himself into the ways he reads others. Rather than reading his partner’s words for the assertion she presents him about himself, he instead cannot help but question her as his “you.” He confesses also that he’s now writing letters that she’ll never read, meaning that he either did not return to her or has not returned yet. He’s still seeking out the right person to fulfill him as the means to an end; however, this is a struggle that will stretch on endlessly.
As the fourth song ends with a promise to no longer have a future, the fifth song follows in his refusal of love. “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” is one of the more famous songs off this album; and, separated from its context, it presents a vision of absolute defeatism. Oberst is here seeking out exactly what the title claims: a lover he doesn’t have to love. Unlike his counterpart in the last song, however, the woman here shares in her own self-destructive tendencies. When he asks for her name, she asks for the time. It doesn’t matter who they are because they are both only filling in the place of what the other actually wants: “You didn’t care to know, who else may have been you before.” Whereas in “Method Acting,” Oberst presents love as a solution, he instead is method acting as “bad actors with bad habits” alongside his counterpart in this later song, an inverse of what came before. What lies beneath his desire for a lover he doesn’t have to love is then the fear of loving anything at all.
But it’s not that simple, is it? On the next song, Oberst explores exactly this question while wishing life was but a still life painting of a “Bowl of Oranges.” This tonal shift from the brooding “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” to the almost twee tune here is intentionally jarring, as Oberst begins to sing about what it means to grow through pain. In the most tender part of it, he tells of encountering a doctor in poor health and not knowing how to help him. In response, the doctor asks him to just sit with him and hold his hand for a while. Afterwards, the man thanks him, “I think I’m cured/ In fact, I’m sure of it/ Thank you, stranger/ For your therapeutic smile.” From this, Oberst takes away “the lesson/ that everyone’s alone.” While repeated often online in the sort of “you’re born alone, you’ll die alone” school of nihilism, Oberst’s mention of it here strikes me as being more complicated than what it claims to be. For one, he isn’t alone. In the narrative he’s painting out, he’s instead communing with a total stranger in an entirely intimate moment shared by both. To me, this irony betrays his internal struggle again. Everyone may be lonely, but no one is alone. In fact, that’s the rub of it. We’re not alone, though we may wish otherwise. It would be easier to have a lover you don’t have to love than to confront the reality of what we owe one another in this life. As the song progresses, Oberst then describes how we might be able to see the beauty in life if it were but a still life painting, hanging on the wall. But life, of course, is not still. His wish to distance himself from life and to render it as something he can view as a painting apart from himself is revealed to be just that: a wish to be alone. This is how we can understand the prolonged silence that follows this song, as the album asks us to sit in the desire he professes for what it would actually entail.
As much as he tries, Oberst cannot go on believing that we are alone for long. As the album nears closer to its end, his denial gives way to anger. This is when the political context is brought back into focus, as if we’re zooming out on a digital rendering of the world so fast it that the computer processing system lags behind. Nothing he has tried to do to deny the world has succeeded: no amount of drinking, loveless love, or sitting alone has worked. As Oberst himself puts it in the seventh song “Don’t Know When But a Day is Gonna Come,” things are going back to the way they were before. Listening to this album now in 2024, I’m reminded of the summer of 2020 when I felt a similar despair as well as all the summers Oberst had spent prior in the same state, so many cycles back: “it’s hard to ignore all the news reports/ they say we must defend ourselves, fight on foreign soil/ against the infidels, with the oil wells/ God saves gas prices.” Following this, “Nothing Gets Crossed Out” marks a moment of bargaining. Oberst sings of waiting for a hand to come down and lift him up from where he’s been. In another instance of repetition, he calls out, “don’t want to lay here no more/ don’t want to lay here no more/ don’t want to lay here no more/ don’t want to lay here no more.” In looking to be lifted up, he speaks for the album at large in wanting to be lifted out of these repeating cycles.
Finally, what we’ve all been waiting for: a goddamn song for all us goddamn people. LIFTED comes to a close with the ten-minute-long “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and To Be Loved).” This song works overtime in compressing the entire emotional journey of the full alum into this one piece, covering first the despair he finds in witnessing the world around us and then the ways he turns that anger inwards in how he inflicts it upon himself. Now reserving his judgement for all the “cowboy presidents,” Oberst proclaims that we “must stumble blindly forward/ repeating history” under the new slogan “red-blooded, white-skinned, oh, and the blues.” But, then, the world contracts. He finds himself “weak from whiskey in pills in a Chicago hospital” with his father sitting at his bedside, and he can only whisper back to him his regrets, “so sorry, so selfish.” In response, his father cuts him off and assures him he loves him regardless, “and there’s nothing you could do/ that would ever change this/ I’m not angry, it happens/ but you just can’t do it again.” And his father is right; it does happen. When faced with all the hurt in the world, it only makes sense that we try to flee in whatever ways we know how. This has happened before, and it will happen again. He speaks at once to the cycles of life and history at large here, reaching out from where he stands in 2002 to our present now as well as to our future to come. When our eyes also start hurting from staring too long at the screen, we must catch ourselves from blurring over into bitter resignation. These are the seasons under empire that we weather. The wisdom to be gleaned here importantly comes in the form of struggle. Oberst was right to call upon us to assume our place in history at the beginning of the album, and that place is hand in hand. Though these cycles will continue, LIFTED insists we’re not alone and never have been. We’re all we’ve got, let’s just hope that is enough.