Bright Eyes is the moniker of modern folk icon,Connor Oberst. He started putting albums out in the mid nineties and built up a pretty good reputation before the time he put out I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning in 2005. Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of Bright Eyes; that's not to say that I don't enjoy anything else in Oberst's discography, but I just find that most of his other material is far less passionate and a bit more mopey than this LP. However, this album is also easily one of my favorite modern singer-songwriter LPs, so I'm a bit biased.
Luckily, that bias is justified, because Wide Awake is an incredibly consistent and heartfelt album, and it manages to pull together a lot of different emotions in it's ten song length.
The opening track for example starts with Connor telling a short story about a man and woman on a plane that crashes into the sea. The way he tells it, and the eventual fevered strums of acoustic guitar are the perfect way to start this LP. The lyrics throughout this track show that Oberst is able to throw out a lot of imagery and political ideas without coming off as preachy (a quality that is sorely lacking from most of his other work).
The following song is a slower moment, but is evened out by a nice female vocal accompanying Oberst, who really goes for broke with darn near every one of his vocal performances on this LP, leading to a lot of passionate, though slightly strained lead vocals. The track "Lua" has one of my favorite vocal concepts on the entire album with a series of lines describing the way the morning and evening can affect a person's outlook on the world around them.
Other tracks that stick out are the marginally popular "First Day Of My Life", a pretty somber love song that throws around a lot of heartfelt lines like, "Yours is the first face that I saw/ Swear I was blind before I met you".
Really, every single track on this album is worth discussing and analyzing, but I'll leave that to you, because I really do think you should give this album a listen if you haven't already, and be prepared to feel a lot of sad, but life affirming lyrics backed by some very simple, but moody instrumentation.
9.5/10
