This piece in Paste Magazine about Conor Oberst’s recent run of shows in NYC and LA is a good read. I didn’t realize how complicated and ambitious the shows were:

For the last eight weeks, he’s been playing one show a week at the Teragram and Bowery Ballrooms, respectively—performing with new musicians every night and drafting setlists that draw from not just Bright Eyes, Monsters of Folk and Better Oblivion Community Center, but the entire Conor Oberst songbook.

He outsourced the setlists to friends and pretty much gave them carte blanche to plan the night:

 For each show, Oberst elected one “music director” who would help create the setlists and assemble the bands. This title was bestowed upon folks like Macey Taylor, Nate Walcott, Maria Taylor, Jim Keltner, Miwi La Lupa, James Felice and Nick Zinner—all of whom proved to be beyond crucial to the tour’s success. “As much as I would like to be, I’m not as organized as I would need to be to pull all of this off by myself,” Oberst admits. “It was great to have a point guard for each week.”

There weren’t many rules or restraints for these gigs, except for one massive bullet point: “I wanted to make sure that none of the songs repeated in L.A. and no songs repeated in New York,” 

I’d seen tons of video from different shows on Instagram and YouTube, like this impromptu Better Oblivion reunion:

There’s also a bit about the Phoebe connection to the song Lua that I thought was interesting:

“In the summer of 2016, we played on the same bill, and then she came out a couple months later to Omaha and we did a little show at my bar, Pageturners,” he says. “It was the first time we actually sang on stage together, and we did that song. [It was] a full-circle situation and, the next year, we went on tour for Ruminations, my record, and it was just me and Neely [Jenkins] onstage playing and Phoebe was opening. But she ended up singing every night with us. It’s been a really good, long, winding road.”

Here’s that performance from the recent run:

He’s one of my all-time favourite artists — I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning was one of the first LP’s I bought when I started doing that — and I’ve never seen him play live. Here’s hoping that changes soon. From the article:

…even though there are some musical savants in the world who can remember every single song they’ve written without so much as a single practice, he and his band can’t do that. “When someone yells out a song, it’s like, I literally can’t play it. You don’t want to hear me attempt to play it, because it’ll be terrible,” he adds. Instead, he and Bright Eyes will rehearse for a week before every tour and put together a collection of 30 songs to choose from.

Read the whole thing, and while you do, hit play on this live performance of Ruminations, featuring Miwi La Lupa, one of the music directors mentioned above:

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