Conor Oberst
Conor Oberst
Conor Mullen Oberstis an American singer-songwriter best known for his work in Bright Eyes. He has also played in several other bands, including Desaparecidos, Norman Bailer, Commander Venus, Park Ave., Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, Arab Strap and Monsters of Folk. Oberst was named the Best Songwriter of 2008 by Rolling Stone magazine...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionFolk Singer
Date of Birth15 February 1980
CityOmaha, NE
CountryUnited States of America
I think that, with anything creative, you should have the freedom to experiment, and that experimentation means not feeling totally responsible for how other people perceive it.
There's a small amount of super-wealthy people that want to maintain their billions and billions of dollars. Those are the people who are really making the decisions.
I've given up trying to understand what people think about me. It seems like a lot of people don't like the music we make and don't know me, or something.
It's very strange when people get so focused on what a song means, what actual events inspired a song. That gets people really excited for some reason... But that's what's great about music - however people interpret it, whatever they see, is what I want to be there for them.
I've always been slightly preoccupied with death or whatever those kind of silly big questions people will tell you to not spend your time worrying about.
I try to keep the idea that there's an audience in as little space in my mind as possible, but you can't erase it entirely, the idea that when you're sitting down to write a song, people are going to hear it.
I'll write about myself, or people I know, or archetypal characters, but the goal is to get at some truth, not to necessarily convey my own experience as an individual to the world.
One by one I drowned all the people I’d been.
People resist change; if they like something, then they want you to keep doing it over and over - but I think if you like what a particular band or artist does, then you should want to see what they're going to do next.
Each song [Desaparecidos] has a seed that it came from. We're trying to take that and broaden it out and make it resonate with people.
We [ Desaparecidos] try to be the opposite of apathetic. There are so many young people in America that are apathetic.
We [ the Desaparecidos ] are perfectly prepared for people to hate what we're saying or not like what we're saying.
In a way, to have whatever people talk about as "crossover success," I think it means you start making bad music. I mean, when I'm flipping through the channels and see the VMAs or something, I don't really see any music there.
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.