Conor Oberst Quotes
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Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.
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I kind of go in waves with reading. Sometimes I read all the time, and sometimes I can't get settled enough to focus.
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Once you realize that everyone is in the same boat, that everyone is just as insecure and childlike as everyone else, that all these jokers in D.C. ruining our world are just greedy kids grabbing for marbles - I think that realization means you're an adult.
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Men with purple hearts carry silver guns and they will kill a man for what his father has done. But what my father did, I don't live it: no, I am not him.
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It's always the negative things that seep through into your consciousness. Most of the positive things just roll off real fast. I just try not to pay attention to it, because I've never read anything about my band that's accurate.
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I think it is more like a ghostthat has been following us both.Something vague that we're not seeing,something more like a feeling.
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The first music I ever got into was the '80s alternative bands that my brother listened to, like The Cure and The Smiths and R.E.M. and Fugazi. I can remember specifically saying The Cure was my favorite band back in second grade.
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I try not to think about the idea of reaching more and more people, because once you get in that mindset, I think you lose the point of why you're doing it in the first place. Still, the best feeling I ever get is when I finish a song, and it exists, and it didn't exist before, and now it's there, and it makes me feel a certain way.
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We, the Desaparecidos, are perfectly prepared for people to hate what we're saying or not like what we're saying.
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The only thing major labels can really offer is money.
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I’m always fascinated when people really fervently believe, because I have such a hard time believing anything. When people have real faith in something, it’s fascinating to me. And the fact that so many people, in surveys, so many people say they do. It kind of blows my mind.
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And your eyes must do some raining if you're ever gonna grow / When crying don't help, you can't compose yourself / It's best to compose a poem, an honest verse of longing / Or a simple song of hope.
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There's a very fine line between one person's reality and another person's fantasy.
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I find that moving keeps me optimistic, the idea of what's going to be down the road a bit or around the next bend.
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Desaparecidos try to be the opposite of apathetic. There are so many young people in America that are apathetic.
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The way my life's structured, I don't stay in a place for more than a couple months.
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We must memorize nine numbers and deny we have a soul.
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The idea of forever is kind of ridiculous, which is unfortunate because its kind of a nice thing to say, you know. I think it softens the blow of mortality and having to say goodbye to everything you know and everyone you love and all that kind of thing.
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When I run into a person or a kid that comes up and gives me the spiel about, 'Hey, I got your record at this time in my life, and it really helped me,' that stuff totally still rings true. If you're standing there talking to someone, it's really easy to tell if they're being authentic or not. And that's great.
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When you look at what people consider success in the music industry, it's just terrible music.
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Every time I finish a song... most of the time it's in my own head, like this sounds too much like a Townes Van Zandt song, or whoever. I realize there are so many melodies and chord progressions in pop and rock music that are so similar that you can kind of trace it back to other things. Most of the time it's just in your head.
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To outsiders it probably seems like splitting hairs, but to me, Bright Eyes is a simply the collaboration between myself and Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. What you hear is definitely the sum of all our ideas and represents all three of us. But I still write the songs myself.
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All those experiences were a chance to learn more about music. Playing with the Valley band is like such a "live" band. I mean, really, in many ways Bright Eyes is really a studio project. We form bands to tour, but it really is - you know, we take the songs and we figure out how to decorate them and it's all in the studio, we build the songs that way. Whereas Mystic Valley Band was the exact opposite, where everybody knows what they are gonna be playing on the song and there's sort of a general stylistic approach, and then it's just plug in and play.
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Our band is different in the sense that we all are involved with a lot of different projects. It's hard to say when we'll record again, but we're not calling it quits right away.