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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.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
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.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes
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When you look at what people consider success in the music industry, it's just terrible music.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
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.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
I want to be enriched by the music I listen to. That's the reason it never really exists in the mainstream. Because that's not what most people are after.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
I've never conceptualized much of what I write about. Maybe, once I'm onto something, I'll conceptualize a finished record. I want the songs to tie together and make sense together. I'm not like, "Oh, I want to explore this idea." That's just not how the creative process works for me. It's more like something strikes me, or finds me, and then I wrestle with it after that. I don't sit back in my armchair, like, "What kind of philosophy can I explore today?"
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
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.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
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.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes
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There's nothing that the road cannot heal
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
There's a very fine line between one person's reality and another person's fantasy.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
The way my life's structured, I don't stay in a place for more than a couple months.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
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.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
It's dangerous to buy into praise and criticism for what you do when you're trying to present your music to people. I don't ignore it completely, but I don't dwell on it too much.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
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.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes
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The one recurring theme in my writing, and in my life in general, is confusion. The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you're going to find out you're wrong - that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
Since the songs were written over a five-year period, I think these are little snapshots. Some people call it political or topical, but I think each song is self-contained. I think it fits together as a picture of the last half-decade of time.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my all-time favorite writers. I feel spiritual when reading his words, even though they're translated. I wish desperately that I could read it in its original language. I already feel like I'm going to church when I read him; imagine if I could read it in the original.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
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.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
I mean, you just go down the line, and with any of these issues, it's about rich people staying rich. And using poverty as a weapon against people. That's what we see every day. And I'm not an economist, so I can't speak to the nuances of it, but just common sense tells me the whole thing is corrupt.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
You can't manufacture inspiration, so a lot of it is still a waiting game for me. There's still a lot of mystery to songwriting. I don't have a method that I can go back to - they either come or they don't.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes
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I think there's a weird self-affirmation thing that happens in popular music in general. It seems like every song I hear on the radio is like, "Listen to me roar!" or "This is my fight song!"
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
I kind of go in waves with reading. Sometimes I read all the time, and sometimes I can't get settled enough to focus.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
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. It will just go black. It will just go back to the way it was before.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes -
Rock and roll seems to have had a mellowing in the business where it got harder to sell individual records and make money doing that.
Conor Oberst Bright Eyes