Bright Eyes - Cassadaga
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Bright EyesEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2007-04-10
Music Label: Saddle Creek
Soundtracks:
- Clairaudients (Kill or Be Killed)
- Four Winds
- If The Brakeman Turns My Way
- Hot Knives
- Make A Plan To Love Me
- Soul Singer In A Session Band
- Classic Cars
- Middleman
- Cleanse Song
- No One Would Riot For Less
- Coat Check Dream Song
- I Must Belong Somewhere
- Lime Tree
Free Music Notes for Cassadaga
Free Music Review: An Old Soul
Hit: 5 Stars
After experiencing his own `dark night of the soul' Conor Oberst went through a period of introspection and transition. Cassadaga is a result of this process, and the album clearly has a spiritual dimension.
It opens with the voice of a clairvoyant advising the inquirer to spend some time in Cassadaga, a small town in Florida, inhabited by an unusual high percentage of psychics. This opening has been characterized by many as New Age nonsense, but is in fact essential, as it opens a window on the album's landscape: "Casadaga may be just a premonition of a place that you're going to visit..." Oberst uses the name as a metaphor for a process of growing awareness. Key words are: journey, transformation, change, new era. He explores this mystic world with healthy scepticism, but also with empathy and sincere interest. One must separate the wheat from the chaff, but at the same time be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water! Cassadaga is full of references to spiritual matters. You can look upon the album as it being merely a collection of beautiful popsongs, but in a broader perspective they form a unity and a concept, and they can be seen as reflections of a process of liberation and self-realization.
Our world is a grim place: "It's kill or be killed!" Conor Oberst paints a world of shallow erntertainment and blind fundamentalism, a world full of `Peter Pan's. Many sell their souls (Soul Singer), sacrifice love to greed (Make a Plan to Love Me), or choose an existence of grey mediocrity (Middleman). Classic Cars tells of lost love, and Coat Check Dream Song shows the twisted mind of the terrorist. The skyscrapers on Manhattan, the financial heart and soul of western civilisation, are `the new pyramids', symbols of an Empire which ended on 9/11 (Cleanse Song). Death hides in many and unexpected corners, and we'd better not waste our precious time (No One Would Riot For Less). "The Bible is blind, the Torah is deaf, the Qur'an is mute, if you burned them all together you'd get close to the truth" is another pregnant statement. Institutionalized religions offer no solutions anymore, we must start from scratch and find our own truth. The brilliant Four Winds leans on one of the most beautiful poems of W.B.Yeats - The Second Coming - with one big difference: Yeats talks about the rise of the evil and destructive powers which threatened the world in the first half of the last century, while Conor Oberst refers to the powers of Good, which will gain space to manifest themselves where Evil has collapsed. Yeats's `gyre' of history has reached it's widest stretch and will collapse, the centre cannot hold any longer: "And when Great Satan's gone... the Whore of Babylon... she just can't remain with all that outer space, she breaks... she caves." Opposites are a theme in the album, and by reversing the meaning of Yeats's poem Oberst creates a new balance, and in doing so he promotes an optimistic view of life in spite of all evil in our current world. "Awake, Baby awake, but leave that blanket around you, there's nowhere as safe..." The message is clear: wake up, but keep going inward (the blanket imo being a metaphor for meditation), stay with your Self, that's the only safe place! The solution to all our problems lies within us, and our ultimate task is finding unconditional love and compassion within ourselves. Only then the history of this planet will turn for the better. The message is not new, it is spread by all great religions and gnosticism, but religions are frozen solid in dogma's and inconsistent behaviour, and do not appeal to most people any longer. It's up to us now!
In I Must Belong Somewhere Oberst speaks of accepting the world as it ís; in this world everything has it's place, and we should no longer resist to whatever we cannot change, because our resistance causes our negative attitude. Our meddling is pure arrogance, for: "... the world requires no audience, no witnesses..." We must surrender to The Greater Scheme, the continuous evolution of the universe, a process which is beyond our comprehension. It means living in the here and now, fully aware, and with a compassionate heart. This submission to the Infinite (or Divine for religious believers) Plan obviously originates from buddhism, but is also elemental in, and in fact connects, all main religious philosophies. Insight and submission (enlightenment) are hindered by our daily worries and problems, our cravings and our denial (Lime Tree). Oberst has seen glimpses of liberation, knows that all ado grows smaller the more one enters the Unknown (which is in fact the Known, as this cosmic knowledge lies buried in all of us, we only have to rediscover it). Submission takes place, there is distancing from those who are `pleased with a daydream', and surrender to the Unknown, as is illustrated by the last lines of the album: "I took off my shoes and walked into the woods, I felt lost and found with every step I took."
Oberst' lyrics take my breath away. And the music offers a perfect bedding for those lyrics, as is shown right from the beginning where the voice is surrounded by a swirling vortex of sounds which draws you within. The rising and fading sounds seem a reference to the elemental movements of every particle in our universe: expanding and shrinking, arising and passing away. It is the endless movement Yeats refers to with his `gyres', and Oberst with `as the spiral unwinds.' Circles and cycles often appear in the lyrics, like opposites they are spiritual symbols. Multi-layered lyrics combined with a strong, attractive and supporting production create an artistic unity that is exceptional in the least, especially considering the singer's young age.
In an interview with a Dutch magazine Conor Oberst remarks: "The album is neither about a quest nor about the town of Cassadaga. I like to think Cassadaga reflects the feeling I experienced when returning from there: authenticity, peace of mind. Ever since I was there I feel I no longer carry any suffering with me." Isn't that what we all would wish: peace of mind and liberation from suffering? It is what buddhists call enlightenment - if it is permanent - and temporary glimpses may be a big step towards this enviable state. Oberst also says: "I would like to see my songs interpreted in a million different ways. Then the magic of music stays intact." I agree with him there. Observing the album from a spiritual view is just one way of interpreting it. But even the packaging of the CD seems to indicate we should put on different glasses and look for the invisible: the textbook shows a grey cover, apart from a few twisting lines. But when you place the enclosed focal decoder on the cover it turns out a world is hidden behind the grey! Cassadaga, and all its implications, only becomes visible through different eyes. I don't think Conor Oberst would ever do anything at random in his work. I think every detail has its meaning!
Cassadaga is an awe-inspiring album. With every spin it reveals more of its richness, and Oberst has firmly placed himself among the few Gods who reign from the top of my musical Olympus. After the equally monumental Lifted - Or the Story Is In the Soil, Keep Your Ear To the Ground, his much more accessible I'm Wide Awake It's Morning was a slight disappointment to me, even though that album certainly exceeds the average. I hope his future work will continue to be of the same outstanding quality as Lifted -... and Cassadaga.
Cassadaga Poster
Once tagged "rock's boy genius" by the music press, Conor Oberst turns 27 on February 15th and even without that in mind it's hard to listen to Cassadaga without hearing a newfound sophistication to the Bright Eyes sound. Producer, multi-instrumentalist and permanent band member Mike Mogis has crafted a swirling, euphonious record, at times bursting with bombastic confidence and country swagger, and at others loose-limbed and mesmeric. Trumpet and piano player Nate Walcott, a Bright Eyes player since 2003 and now the third permanent member, is responsible for the cinematic string arrangements. Other than a handful of live appearances and the release of a collection of B-sides & rarities, Bright Eyes kept mostly out of sight in 2006 after the busy 2005 which saw the simultaneous release of the sister albums Digital Ash In A Digital Urn and I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. Should you have looked for them you'd have found them tucked away in various studios around the country. Recording for the first time outside of the Lincoln, NE studio belonging to Mogis, the Bright Eyes cast of players were busy in studios in Portland, OR, New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. The result is the band's most confident work so far, an album so full of soaring strings and female harmonies that it feels almost buoyant in comparison to previous releases. While many latched onto the smattering of political commentary in 2005's I'm Wide Awake..., Cassadaga is less blunt in its depiction of youthful exasperation in the Bush era. References to Hurricane Katrina, holy wars and polar ice-caps may crop up, but they're buried deep amongst the ruminations on life, love, history, death and the afterlife. If I'm Wide Awake... was "the New York City album", then Cassadaga is "the America album", in which Oberst diaries his travels around the country and articulates his sense of history in the landscape. In first single "Four Winds" he is "off to old Dakota where genocide sleeps/in the Black Hills, the Badlands, the calloused East/I buried my ballast, I made my peace." Cassadaga itself crops up in the same song. The town, a community for psychics in central Florida, is visited in order to "commune with the dead". This wandering spirit is crystalized in "I Must Belong Somewhere" a song which was already a staple of live shows by the end of the 2005. "Hot Knives" is particularly spirited, bringing to mind the true energy of a Bright Eyes show. Likewise, "Soul Singer In A Session Band" - a rousing paean to an oxymoronic profession - enlists all of the elements which make the Bright Eyes live band such a euphoric experience. "Make A Plan To Plan To Love Me" is Bright Eyes at their most playful; a straight-up love song, replete with girl group vocals and Burt Bacharach strings. Oberst, the fumbling guitarist whose impassioned prose tumbles out under stark stage spotlights, is still recognizable in every track, but the songs are rich with elaborate production, cinema-sized orchestration and, at times, sprawling, almost psychedelic, atmospherics. The line up of Bright Eyes players includes Andy Lemaster (Now It's Overhead), Ben Kweller, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Janet Weiss (ex-Sleater Kinney), Jason Boesel (Rilo Kiley), John McEntire (Tortoise) M.Ward, Maria Taylor and Rachael Yamagata.On their sixth and most straightforwardly clean album, Nebraska's Bright Eyes once again integrate a revolving cast of players to the mix, including Portland tunesmith M. Ward and alt-country queen Gillian Welch. But the band remains at the helm of forever-wunderkind Conor Oberst, and the fruitful songwriter has one-upped 2005's I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning with a proficient and accessible ensemble of expansive pop orchestrations and ornate folk songs that chronicle his traverses across the American panorama. Oberst's voice quakes and wanders through South Dakota lore and Sunshine State chicanery, always the perfect vehicle for his threadbare lyrics. "Take the fruit from the tree/Break the skin with your teeth/Is it bitter or sweet/All depends on your timing," he forewarns in "Cleanse Song," a psychedelic merry-go-round of a soundtrack that joins the Scottish-tinged "Soul Singer in a Session Band" and singalong single "Four Winds" as Cassadaga's finest. The 13-song-record is certain to open more doors for a band whose recognition has soared with every release since Oberst was just 14. --Scott Holter
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