Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, CONOR OBERST started making music when he was a young boy. A cassette recorder and an acoustic guitar would be the beginning of his career as international appreciated musician, songwriter and founder of numerous musical projects such as BRIGHT EYES, DESAPARECIDOS and MONSTERS OF FOLK.
CONOR OBERST‘s new record Upside Down Mountain will be released on May 19. NOTHING BUT HOPE AND PASSION met the 34-year-old in Berlin and talked with him about his new songs, the incompatibility of love and freedom and the mystery of creativity.
When I was about 14, your our song ‘Lua’ was the first song on the first mix CD I ever made and it reminds me of my youth and of a very formative time. Do you have such a song or a record?
Yeah. Absolutely. A lot of them. I remember being really into SUPERCHUNK, a band from America. They had this album called No Pocky for Kitty. It is a kind of pop punk music. I remember being about that same age when I got that record. I was freaking out and wanted to make music like that. I don’t know if I ever quite made music like that but it was inspiring.
If you listen to it now is it like going back to this time and getting a little bit nostalgic?
For sure. Whenever I hear SUPERCHUNK I’m nostalgic. They still play sometimes and they are great. I’ve seen them play a lot. I like a lot of that stuff from the early nineties. I really got into music like PAVEMENT. They are all doing reunions so I can see them all again.
Nowadays there are many comebacks. Some say it’s just for the money or to get the fame back.
It could be for the money or the fame but I remember Coachella Festival 2004 when the PIXIES got back together. I love the PIXIES but I was a little too young to ever see them play before their breakup. So I was just over the moon that they were reuniting and playing there. I couldn’t be more excited – I was jumping up and down. I don’t care whether they were doing it for the money or not. For me it was wonderful.
In your songs ‘Time Forgot’ and ‘Lonely at the Top’ you mention the incompatibility of love and freedom. You sing ‘everyone has a choice to be loved or to be free’ and ‘freedom’s the opposite of love’. Is that a thing you experienced?
That line is about the idea that if you love someone in a real way, more than yourself, then you’re no longer free because all your decisions are gonna be factored into their happiness and their well-being and you want to preserve that love. You have something to lose and you are scared to lose it. It is like in that KRISTOFFERSON song: Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
And what do you choose – freedom or love?
(thinks a few seconds) I think I would choose love. I don’t know, what about you?
I think love is one of the most important things and I think it’s not always that bad to give some of your freedom away because instead of that you get security.
Yes, you get something back from that. In the end you maybe are rewarded. But of course there are people who would choose freedom and that’s okay too.
I like the idea that there are moments of transformation or that you have opportunities. This kind of leap of faith that makes your life going to change. What comes with that is fear. Everyone is somehow afraid of change and so this song is a bit of pep talk or something like ‘yeah, don’t look down, don’t focus on the fear. Just go for it and you’ll probably be happy.
On your album ‘Upside Down Mountain’ there are those hopeful and cheerful songs and then there are others which have a rather depressed tone. What was influencing you when you were writing the songs?
They were written over a pretty long period of time, 3 years. Which is a little different to my other records where the songs were written closer together and are more conceptual. Life in general was influencing me. The ups and downs and everything. To me songs are weird because a lot of times they don’t come directly like ‘I have an experience and now I write a song about it’. It’s a little more mysterious than that. I make observations all the time through life and collect little moments or little diamonds in my mind. Then I’m patient and wait for it to come back out through the mystery of creativity. It’s like a blender, all these things get mixed up in my subconscious. Some of them could be a direct experience or some of them could be a conversation I have with someone or a film I watched or a book I read. Sometimes I don’t even know what I am talking about or where it came from. Later I’m like ‘Oh maybe that’s why that is connected to that’. There is still a lot of mystery to it to me. If could sit down and write a perfect song every day, I would do that but it’s not like that at all. You have to be patient and wait for the lightening to strike.
Can you give an example when you wrote a song and then wondered where it came from?
There is a song on the new album called Enola Gay. That song was weird. I started writing it with one person in mind and when I finished it, I realized it is about this other real person I know. It has totally switched. In the back of my mind I must have been heading that direction.
My goal is never to convey that this has happened to me and that this is my story. If I wanted to do that, I think writing memoirs would be a better choice. To me songwriting is getting some sort of universal… I mean universal truth sounds a bit profound. But you know some sort of universal something that can stand outside of me as a singer. And hopefully other people can relate to it.
I also often forget which pronoun I used. A lot of times I’m singing ‘I’ because you got to sing something. But that’s the least important part of the lyric. The rest of the line is where the message is.
In 2012 you collaborated with FIRST AID KIT for the song ‘King of the World’, now the girls have joined you on your album – how did this come about?
They were making their new awesome record again in Nebraska with Mike Mogis. So the fates were in our favour because I was in the other room of the studio working on my record. All they had to do was walk down the hall and sing on my songs. I was trying to find little musical things that come back throughout the album and make it more cohesive. I just liked that idea that these voices return, like your friends are back. I also feel like I have a pretty ragged voice. So they are like the honey we apply to it.
If there would be two ways with two signs, one says hope, one says passion. Which way would you go?
I guess I’d go hope. But maybe it’s a love and freedom situation. You want to have both but only get one. Probably I would be hoping for passion or be passionate about hope.
—