At the second of two sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall, Bright Eyes delivered a rich set of new songs drawn from The People’s Key as well as older songs spanning the band’s career. Wild Flag and Superchunk, two venerable nineties heavyweights, anchored the show with energetic opening sets, but it was Bright Eyes that brought the whole of Radio City to their feet within moments.
There is something magnetic about Conor Oberst. It’s a real feat that he draws larger audiences today that range from people who were fifteen when Conor (at the age of fifteen) began to record songs under the Bright Eyes nom de guerre, to fifteen-year-old kids who buy Bright Eyes albums on vinyl as a novelty. Once it might have been an overflow of youthful earnestness and emotion; today that profusion has been tempered with experience. It’s no coincidence that Conor, once an outspoken critic of the Iraq war, who wrote a furious diatribe into the singular protest song “When the President Speaks to God,” and who once performed in support of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, remarked last night that Obama had dropped more bombs on Afghanistan than Bush had. (I haven’t bothered to fact-check that.)
In the four years since I last saw Bright Eyes play Radio City (shortly before most of Bright Eyes began to play under the name of Conor Oberst & the Mystic Valley Band), Conor has become more engaging as a performer, above and beyond a musician. Even when he was alone on the stage with a piano (and Nate Walcott) performing “Ladder Song,” he seemed to fill the entire cavernous space. It was almost fortuitous that not one, but two, of his amps blew out sometime before the encore, so that he spent two songs striding back and forth across the stage, touching the hands of adoring fans and hopping into the pit for just a moment.
There was something for everyone: a good proportion of The People’s Key was included, but with a set that clocked in at 100 minutes — not including the encore — there was more than enough time for songs from albums that were released at the beginning of Conor’s career. If it’s true that Conor will be retiring the Bright Eyes name after this album, it would be a shame. The set included songs recorded over a decade ago, such as “Padriac My Prince,” a grotesque story brilliantly narrated when Conor was a teenager, and truly forceful even after all these years. If anything, the show demonstrated that the whole range of Conor’s songs are still alive and incredibly resonant.
Superchunk:
View all photos here.
Bright Eyes set list
Firewall
Jejeune Stars
Take it Easy (Love Nothing)
Hot Knives [dedicated to Wild Flag's Janet Weiss]
An Attempt to Tip the Scales
Padriac My Prince
We Are Nowhere and It’s Now
Shell Games
Approximate Sunlight
Arc of Time
Triple Spiral
Cleanse Song
Trees Get Wheeled Away
No One Would Riot for Less
Beginner’s Mind
Bowl of Oranges
[rant against imperialism]
Old Soul Song
Poison Oak
The Calendar Hung Itself
Ladder Song
Encore:
Lover I Don’t Have to Love
I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning
One for You, One for Me
[...] Bright Eyes at Radio City Music Hall on March 9, 2011. View the full CLOG post here. [...]