Bright Eyes
The People’s Key (2011)
A so-so album by a generational songwriter—moved to speak his mind, even when he’s running out of things to say.
In typical Bright Eyes fashion, The People’s Key kicks off with a long, obtuse introduction. In the more than a decade run-up to this album, such a move had become a bit of a trademark for the band: before you get to the actual music, you have to endure a spell of unintelligible background chatter or an abstract sound collage or—most notably—a narration of an impending plane crash from the perspective of two of its passengers. In the case of The People’s Key, Bright Eyes’ oft-overlooked ninth album, we’re greeted by a several-minute rant from someone who’s either clairvoyantly perceptive or exceptionally delusional.
Let’s take the opening content of “Firewall,” the album’s first track, with the same boulder of salt you would shouts coming from a guy sitting next to you on the subway. Through mumbles and stammers, we get a scatterbrained screed about how there’s an inherent balance to all things in the universe and how we’re constantly progressing; our unspecified narrator is also sure to make mention of ancient aliens, Sumerian tablets, and the charism of Hitler, among other pseudo-deep topics you might encounter in the third hour of a Joe Rogan episode. Eventually, the ramblings fade out and go unresolved (with the safe assumption that they would otherwise never end) when bandleader Conor Oberst enters.
Considering the lyrical content that follows, the opening tirade serves as the perfect introduction to this album. After the narrator has given his nonsensical piece, you could easily be tricked into thinking that what comes out of Conor’s mouth is cogent and sharp, even though his literary, historical, and biblical references all feel a little hollow. With some cover earned, he sings about buying a macaw and naming it Jules Verne—just one line that might suggest a deeper meaning but fails to really check out under further scrutiny. The non sequiturs pile up on “Firewall,” and even though the song’s desolate guitar and vaguely sinister mood make for an entrancing listen and remind me of Spiderland’s classic opening track (down to the theme park setting), it seems like we’re starting to see chinks in Conor’s lyrical armor.
Conor Oberst is truly a generational songwriter, for better and for worse. He began releasing music when he was just thirteen years old and was immediately branded as wise beyond his years. With his talky, emotional folk sound and his prolific output, he received early comparisons to legends and presumptive inspirations like Bob Dylan. And although this created significant pressure for Conor and understandably made him uncomfortable, he eventually embraced the attention and used it to his advantage, especially when it came to the political nature of his work.
Bright Eyes’ ascent more or less lined up with the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency, and Conor established himself as one of the administration’s most aggressive and outspoken critics. The invasion of Iraq, in particular, gave us the impassioned protest songs “Road to Joy” and “When the President Talks to God,” both of which remain all too relevant (and both of which also subverted mainstream audiences via their radical performances on late night television). But as our country entered the Obama years, and outrage was generally traded for a degree of blind optimism and HOPE™️, the band’s material became less guided.
This is not to say that Conor’s songwriting was ever exclusively political—in fact, much of his early music featured canny reflections on his feelings and his relationships and other evergreen topics that were clearly resonating with the sizable listenership he’d amassed—still, this shift naturally caused some source material to diminish, and all sorts of anger and heavy emotion started to feel unjustified and uncouth. Though Conor was able to express some lingering discontent under separate monikers (see this 2009 banger from the short-lived Mystic Valley Band), him navigating Bright Eyes’ future at this moment feels representative of the many other indie artists who similarly struggled to find their voice.
So now here we are in 2011, the year of The People’s Key’s release. What do you write about when the outlook is generally better, but things still kind of suck? As Conor grapples with this question, he’s incidentally also made to face his fading wunderkind status. Youth had long given him the benefit of the doubt when it came to being on the cutting-edge, even if he rightfully earned that status more times than not. But with both political protest falling out of fashion and Conor no longer being a voice of the youth, where to look for inspiration became unclear. As a result, this album really feels like Conor—for the first time in his career—not knowing what to say.
Looking back on his early success and ahead with uncertainty, Conor reveals a lot on the second track, “Shell Games:”
I was dressed in white, touched by something pure
Death-obsessed like a teenager
Sold my tortured youth, piss and vinegar
Still angry with no reason to be
To his credit, Conor is incredibly self-aware: there’s really no other songwriter I can think of who’d be able to write such poetic expressions about how they don’t know what to write about anymore. And despite feeling aimless, he’s clearly compelled to continue putting out music. Beyond “Shell Games,” we find Conor looking back at his youth on the song “Beginner’s Mind,” where he addresses his “inner child” and asks it to “stay a while,” presumably hoping to summon the sort of outlook he once had, before tides turned and reality bit. More than just contemplation of when things were simpler, these themes fit as a meta-commentary on what he thinks his function as a songwriter should be at this particular juncture.
Although this album is loaded with these complicated feelings and a certain degree of ennui, quite a few of the tracks are huge and fun. Truly, The People’s Key has many makings of a great record—from the beautifully layered vocals and grand instrumentation to the instantly catchy songs with singable choruses (“Jejune Stars” and “Triple Spiral” being the best examples). What’s maybe most exciting about this is that these aren’t elements you usually get from a Bright Eyes record, save for the band’s more upbeat Digital Ashes in A Digital Urn several years prior.
In many ways, The People’s Key feels like a big swing, with Conor and the band pulling out bells and whistles aplenty. Is this to compensate for a lack of lyrical ingenuity? Maybe. But as a listener, I’ll take it.
As far as the slower, more stripped back moments go, this album features—in the positive direction—a captivating and mournful ballad in “Ladder Song,” which is composed of nothing more than Conor’s voice, some keys, and the cracks of his piano bench. When you’re in it, “Ladder Song” makes you forget about any complaint you might have about the album. Its musical sparseness is devastating, and the track builds in such a satisfying way. In the less rewarding direction lies much of the album’s middle section. The back-to-back “Approximate Sunlight” and “Haile Selassie” are slow songs that unfortunately just feel like a slog. This album gets by when it can reckon with its lack of source material in a self aware way, or even when the music simply sounds nice; songs like these don’t really fall into either category and are largely unmemorable.
Although we’re not working with the most cohesive theme here, the sort-of title track (“A Machine Spiritual [In The People’s Key]”) revisits the sentiment that’s most central to this album, being Conor’s compulsion to release music despite the whole slew of issues involved in that very process. “Just let me go,” he sings on this song, as if he’s pleading with the listener. Even though Conor is not forced to write or put out music, it seems he still feels a bit beholden to his audience and the larger masses who might end up consuming his work. Writing a song—and an album, really—in “the people’s key” suggests putting out something that’s more broadly and universally digestible, which admittedly does feel like a little bit of a cop-out: what could be a full-fledged acknowledgment that he's beginning to lose his purpose as a songwriter is instead traded for a lazy and disingenuous, “Well, I could write something deeper or more relevant, but you wouldn’t get it anyway.”
Regardless, the album’s sign-off, “One for You, One for Me,” reinforces this attitude. You could say that some Bright Eyes records are really doing something—either by offering cutting points on political issues or putting words to difficult romantic moments. But some, like The People’s Key, apparently just come from Conor’s commitment to making and sharing music.
Even though the instrumentals in the beginning of this closing track kind of sound like that terrible “Good Life” song by OneRepublic, I love it. (And to be fair, the Bright Eyes song came out first.) Its celebratory feel gives you the sense that Conor is on good terms with where he is at this stage in his career, even if it’s ultimately unclear if this one is for him or for the audience to whom he feels indebted. For many years the final Bright Eyes album, Conor seems willing to put aside the uncertainties and end things on a positive note.
As time moves on and The People’s Key era passes, we sadly see Conor face a number of personal issues, particularly in his public struggle with alcoholism. Within just the past few months, Bright Eyes announced the postponement of many of their upcoming tour dates; this followed apparent drinking-induced vocal damage, as well as recent concert footage showing Conor making troubling comments onstage. In 2024, this messiness no longer hits in the tortured poet type of way that it might’ve when he was young. Instead, it’s just a depressing spectacle.
Even though the last decade or so has been checkered for Conor, we have seen quality output from him—such as 2019’s Better Oblivion Community Center, which he collaborated on with then-up-and-comer Phoebe Bridgers. In many ways, this collaboration felt like the passing of a baton; at the very least, it’s understandable what drew Conor toward Phoebe, then a young artist receiving early praise for her musical knack and overall prescience. For someone once considered wise beyond his years, eventually the years moved faster than the wisdom for Conor. Of course, Phoebe will one day face that shift and uncertainty herself, but in the meantime, she’s quite literally wearing the boy genius label that had once been gifted to Conor with pride.
I was interested in this being the first entry on my spanking new platform because it seems like a space best served to discuss content that hasn't already been the subject of too much ink-spilling. Here’s an album that’s not talked about a lot and that I honestly don’t think is definitively good or bad. There’s a lot to chew on, even if some of it actually just amounts to nothing. If I were setting out to only share unfettered praise on this site, I’d probably just end up writing about Death Grips or Halcyon Digest over and over again.
The People’s Key is intriguing and complicated because Conor’s complicated, and the timing of when it came out is complicated, and because sometimes I feel like putting it on and sometimes I don’t. This album is one that objectively doesn’t stand out in the Bright Eyes discography—it’s not their breakout album, it’s not their mainstream success, and it’s not even their eventual comeback; it now sits in the awkward middle of a pretty lengthy discography. With all that being said, it feels significant to me as marking the end of an era for one of the generation’s greatest bands.
These days, as he’s returned to putting out music under Bright Eyes’ name, we see Conor sitting back a bit, putting out nice-sounding but unremarkable music, seemingly inhabiting an elder statesman of indie type position. Right now, this feels like a place where he cleanly and naturally fits, even if there's no shortage of reasons to still be filled with piss and vinegar when you look around the world today. Moving forward, whether Conor’s material will be at all relevant or potent, he clearly remains steadfast in his craft and will continue to share his music with us. And I think he knows that, to some, the output will sound like our narrator from the beginning of this album—impassioned but meaningless droning.
Thanks for reading my musings, Shane-iacs! More to come.