The spotlight finds a searching soul

It’s midway through Bright Eyes’ concert at the Henry Fonda Theatre, and the group’s 14 musicians have stopped their percussive, orchestral attack, leaving singer Conor Oberst alone at the center of the stage

The crowd, buzzing from the intoxicating spell the group has cast for the past half-hour, becomes quiet as Oberst plucks a descending modal scale on his guitar, like something drawn from a haunted Appalachian homestead. Whatever it is, it sounds serious.

“Is it true what I heard about the son of God? Did he come to save? Did he come at all?” Oberst’s voice sneers and clenches in the silence, a trembling thing groping for meaning at the center of a void. The verses keep coming, a rolling, tumbling litany in the manner of Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”

“They say they don’t know when but a day is gonna come, when there won’t be a moon and there won’t be a sun.” A tense pause. “It will all go black. It will all go back to the way it was before.”

The audience seems transfixed, and raises a cheer when Oberst adds a line that isn’t on the 6 1/2-minute recording, one about a nation waging war for oil profits. Halfway across the song’s bridge, Oberst breaks into a full scream. “Could you please start explaining? You know, I need some understanding!” Several drummers begin pounding as strings and horns gather in a cathartic crescendo.

You say you’re looking for a new star? The people at the Fonda sure think they have one. As for Oberst, well, he’s not so sure.

On the afternoon of the performance, members of the Bright Eyes touring party drift in and out of the lobby of their Hollywood hotel.

“Waiting for the big man? I mean the little man?”

Matt Focht, one of the group’s drummers, winks and smiles as he passes through, suggesting that the little man’s disappearing act is nothing new.

Finally the front doors slide open and in walks Oberst, an hour late for an interview. He explains sheepishly that he had trouble finding his way here after an overnight visit with his friends in the L.A. band Rilo Kiley. Waiting for the elevator, the slightly built musician looks even younger than his 22 years. His black hair and dark eyes contrast strikingly with his pale skin, giving him a winsome appeal reminiscent of “Malcolm in the Middle’s” Frankie Muniz.

These days, though, it’s more a case of Conor at the controls. After quietly building a reputation in the breadbasket of the U.S. indie-rock world, the Omaha native has leaped into major-league contention this year with two ignore-at-your-own-peril albums: “Read Music/Speak Spanish” by his on-the-side rock band Desaparecidos, and a magnum opus by Bright Eyes called “Lifted ... or the Story Is in the Soul Keep Your Ear to the Ground,” both on Omaha’s thriving independent label Saddle Creek.

There’s a wide sonic spectrum in “Lifted,” but essentially it frames Oberst’s folk-pop songwriting in boldly orchestral structures built on a foundation of marching-band snares and bass drums.

Oberst had drawn a fair degree of attention among serious pop

followers for the records he released under the Bright Eyes name. Much of the fascination stemmed from the fact that he started writing and recording his introspective “bedroom pop” when he was 13.

But with “Lifted,” the door at which Oberst had been gently knocking for nearly a decade suddenly flew open and the rave reviews spilled in, along the lines of Blender magazine’s ecstatic proclamation, “The Ritalin generation may have found its Bob Dylan.”

Up in his room, Oberst settles down at the head of one of the two beds, but a dentist’s chair might be a better choice of furniture for the interview. He answers questions squarely and thoroughly, but without much animation, elaboration or eye contact, and he hunches his body tightly, as if trying to curl into a ball.

“He doesn’t really enjoy [interviews], it’s not the most fun he has,” says his longtime friend Robb Nensel, who runs Saddle Creek. “But I think he recognizes that it allows him to be a creative person and not have to work another job.”

The interview requests and other demands have picked up since “Lifted” came out in August, but Oberst is clinging tightly to his small-city, indie-rock roots.

“As far as fame or something, I don’t know, it’s not something I would ever consider how to get more of,” he says, somewhere between a whisper and a mumble.

The title of “Lifted” suggests transcendence, and while the topics range from boy-girl vignettes to knotty philosophical and theological head-scratching, Oberst continually returns to a theme summarized in the lines “All I know is I feel better when I sing / Burdens are lifted from me.”

“A big part of it was just a celebration of playing music as a physical thing,” he says of the album. “It’s something that is needed by people -- at least it is for me and my friends. But I don’t know” -- Oberst’s voice softens as he tries to surround the concept.

“Just trying to understand, get some kind of clarity. That’s pretty much why I’ve written anything, ‘cause I feel confused all the time. I don’t know, I’m kind of like absent, a space cadet or whatever. So if you can write something down and it makes sense to you even momentarily, you can have some kind of clarity.... It always makes me feel better to write a song, sing a song.”

A boy who worried

“Lifted” also branches into some social commentary, with Oberst at one point uneasily eyeing a “cowboy president so loud behind the bullhorn.” One of the verses in “Day Is Gonna Come ... “ begins, “Now men with purple hearts carry silver guns / And they will kill a man for what his father has done.”

It’s an ominous, apocalyptic view of the world.

“I feel, yeah, terrified,” says Oberst. “And just really, really sad more than anything.... I see pieces falling into place for severe [stuff] to happen.”

It was ever thus.

“When he was a little boy he would ask me if we were going to have a nuclear war, at night before he went to bed,” says his mother, Nancy Oberst. “He did worry about the world a lot. He thought about it and he wrote about it.

“I think he’s sensitive in a way that I’m probably not. He allows himself to feel that way. I always say to him it’s his job to do it for all the rest of us who can’t really do that. It takes so much energy, it wears you out, and he’s willing to do it.”

Conor is the youngest of three sons in a close-knit Irish Catholic family. Nancy is an elementary school principal, and her husband Matt tends to computers for Mutual of Omaha.

The oldest son, Matt, played in bands, and Conor, six years younger, gravitated to him and his circle of friends -- well-adjusted products of liberal families who resisted the pull of the suburbs and enjoyed the more diverse area of their city neighborhood. (The Desaparecidos album is a scathing study of the area’s suburban ennui.)

With that environment, it was natural that Conor would take to music. He and Nensel frequented a coffeehouse called Kilgore’s where singer-songwriters performed, and the youngster was soon playing guitar and composing songs. Teachers had noted his writing ability as early as first grade, and when he grafted that talent with music, things clicked. Finally his friends talked him into singing at the coffeehouse.

“It was always apparent from the first time you saw him when he was 13 up there strumming and singing that there was something going on,” Nensel says. “He’s just a great storyteller and poet, and he puts it all to music and kind of makes you feel like he can express things better than you can about how you’re feeling.”

Oberst released a couple of solo collections on cassette, then worked with the band Commander Venus, launching a series of fluid collaborations with Omaha’s burgeoning rock music community. Boasting indie-prominent bands such as Cursive and the Faint as well as Bright Eyes, the city has become a key spot in U.S. independent rock.

Conor’s dad had exposed him to Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon and other ‘60s-vintage singer-songwriters, while his brothers doted on the Replacements and Sonic Youth, R.E.M. and the Cure. It was the folk side that prevailed in the melancholy confessions of his three Bright Eyes albums (there are also several EPs and singles), which evoke such elders as Elliott Smith and Nick Drake, England’s patron saint of melancholy. His great gift has been to find the soul of loneliness despite being securely embraced by his natural and musical families.

The latest album may have brought him into the spotlight, but it hasn’t taken him out of Omaha. It’s by far his best seller, at over 35,000, but that’s modest by major-label standards. He recently bought a house with two cousins and frequent collaborators. His share of the mortgage is a little more than $300 a month, and though he has a new van, he also drives a ’90 Honda Accord that, he says, shakes.

Not that he has any inclination to relocate from his hometown. Nor, he says, is he likely to leave Saddle Creek, which began as Lumberjack Records to release his first cassette recordings,

“I don’t have a problem with anyone that wants to be on a major label, but for me their expectations of success are so completely different than mine in every way that it’s not logical to do that.

“The nice thing is we can probably continue to make a living and do the [stuff] the way we want to do it and I’ll never feel like I missed an opportunity or something. We’ve always tried to let it take its most natural course.”

Now both Oberst and Saddle Creek are coming to a crossroads. The label is trying to figure out how to deal with its growth while maintaining its independent ideals. In one key step, the company signed a two-year deal last week with national distributor ADA, an independent operation with major-label backing.

Oberst is dealing with similar issues on a personal level. All the attention and new demands “definitely change things,” he says.

“I don’t get too worked up over it. It’s just another force in your life. Keeps me busy, keeps me traveling, keeps me doing things. In that sense I feel like I’ve lost touch with some friends. And even when you are home, you can’t be as good a bro’ to somebody if they know you’re gonna split in 12 months or whatever.

“It’s hard to know what to say sometimes when fans come up to you. Just try to convey a thank you for being interested. ‘Cause I’m definitely genuinely thankful that they like it.”

“I think Conor’s gonna be writing songs till the day he dies, whether anyone listens to them or not,” Nensel says. “He writes songs, and if people want to hear ‘em that’s cool, and if people don’t then that’s fine ....I don’t think he wants to be a rock star or a big public figure.”

Ultimately, that might not be his decision.

A one-day-at-a-time schedule

On stage at the Fonda Theatre, Oberst is about to create a moment dead opposite from the stark isolation he conjured up in “Day Is Gonna Come.” As the sweet-and-sour waltz “False Advertising” wafts through the room like a vintage parlor tune, his voice builds in vehemence. The lyric describes a difficult struggle to remain honest and pure and true to his art, something he’s not sure he can do by himself.

Then a revelation comes in the final lines: “But I found in a song and in the people I love, they will lift me up out of darkness / Now my door stands open I am inviting everyone in, we will laugh until the morning comes.”

Oberst screams the final words -- “That’s what I’m gonna do,” and suddenly he’s surrounded by more than 20 people who have materialized on the stage, band members and friends forming a barroom choir that boisterously joins in on the lilting chorus.

It’s a stirring testament to fellowship and possibility, and it brings to mind something Oberst said during the interview that afternoon, when asked about what he sees for himself five years down the line.

“I’m pretty much on a one-day-at-a-time schedule. If I go beyond that I start to freak out. I just wake up, put on my shoes, play some music, drink some wine, hang out with my friends. Try to laugh as much as possible.”

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A critical view

Desaparecidos: “Read Music/Speak Spanish”

(Saddle Creek, June 30)

“Every rock generation needs a voice against the soul-destroying nature of social conformity, and this generation has at least two candidates in Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and Desaparecidos’ Conor Oberst.... Oberst lashes out with punk-like sensibilities that feel fresh and smart.”

-- Robert Hilburn

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Bright Eyes: “Lifted or the Story Is in the Soil Keep Your Ear to the Ground”

(Saddle Creek, Aug. 12)

” ... A 73-minute assault filled with so many dazzling images and rhymes that you wonder whether his real name isn’t Zimmerman. After all, he’s from the Midwest and he tends to spit out his words the way a young Dylan did. There are times when this cocky young songwriter seems guilty of just showing off, but there’s an independent spirit here that makes him exciting, indeed.”

-- R. H.