courtesy photo
Editor’s Note: Conor Oberst’s new solo album “Upside Down Mountain” will be released on May 20 on Nonesuch Records. In this piece, Dan McCarthy (McCarthy Trenching) — who has released two albums on Oberst’s Team Love label — lends a songwriter’s ear to analyzing the album. Oberst will tour through Omaha on June 4 at the Sokol Auditorium with Dawes. Tickets here.
by Dan McCarthy
There’s a feeling you get as a songwriter when you’re listening to a master’s new stuff, a feeling that I believe the Bible calls “envy.”
You’ve tried to write about the same scene, or the same feelings. You’ve used those words, you’ve worked those rhymes. But man, the way the master has put it this time is just … perfect. You can’t touch that scene again, or maybe even use those rhymes again, without knowing that you’re a rip-off.
O Envy, I’ve met thee, you’re ugly. Listening to Upside Down Mountain, the new album by Conor Oberst, I’ve encountered many an occasion of sin.
Here are some lines from the song “Enola Gay”:
“Working all day in the control room / Mashing Charles Manson songs up with show tunes / The feelings come quick but they leave as soon / Like music from a passing car.”
Had I written that line about feelings like music from a passing car, I would’ve been happy with a good day’s work and gone to find a cookie. But it’s that line being stacked on top of the Charles Manson line that makes the imaginative sparks fly. Maybe there’s a real producer who is doing these mash-ups (somewhere in California, most likely, there’d be some poor soul doing this infernal work), or maybe he’s made up. Either way, it’s brilliant.
But the line I really love, the one that made me sit up and wish I had written it, is from the last song on the record, “Common Knowledge.” It seems like all four verses are about the same friend, some guy who’s “washed up, bitter, broken, busted,” but the third verse finds him in the Champagne Room: “Where she moves like a chocolate fountain / Pouring, spilling all around him / Makes him wonder what else she can do.”
Damn. I’ve written a couple of songs with strippers as characters, when I was a younger man and thought it was bad-ass to sing about strippers and bartenders. But it’s not like that here. The chocolate fountain is the perfect symbol for this guy’s ersatz decadence. It’s an image so vivid that you can see it moving.
There’s a line from “You Are Your Mother’s Child” that I loved the first time I heard it, and when I mention it to friends who’ve heard the song, they all remember it too. It goes: “Broken bones heal if you set them right / Get your fine-toothed comb from the Barbicide / Our love’s a protective poison.”
You know a metaphor is working when it illuminates both sides of the comparison: Here you get a picture of these parents’ love for their child, and you also better understand that canister on the barber’s counter. I think people remember the line because “Barbicide” is such a peculiar word, but it’s an indelible image, too.
“You Are Your Mother’s Child” first appeared last year on the soundtrack to the film Stuck In Love, so maybe it’s already familiar. I remember that when Conor played the song at the Witherspoon Concert Hall in 2012, he apologized for its sentimentality. It is a sweet song, just guitar and voice, sung by a father to his son, with memories of the child as a baby, a trick-or-treater, a little-leaguer and finally as a graduate. But it’s not a sunny benediction: “Although he’s a bastard, make your papa proud / You’re a fine young man and I’ve got no doubt / That you’re gonna do this better / ‘Cause you are your mother’s child…”
Now, calling himself a bastard is a tough guy’s way of apologizing. You realize that maybe the child belongs to the mother as a matter of legal custody. All the images of the child in the song are snapshots, photos. You think maybe that’s the only way the father has known his kid, from pictures. When you open the sentimental graduation card, there’s a sad and universal story. The father’s final couplet is, “Now that you’re grown / May you never feel this alone.” Not exactly Hallmark.
photo by Bridget McQuillan
(A note about dark themes in lyrics: If you believe that music has the capacity to deal with sadness and death, just as it does with joy and love, then Conor Oberst’s music is for you. If it’s one of those nights when you just need music for your dance mix, there are thousands of super-fun tunes out there.)
And Upside Down Mountain is not without its party tunes. “Kick” is a rock song with a guitar hook, apparently addressed to a hard-partying member of the Kennedy clan. By the time it gets to the chorus — “I thought they shot that Camelot” — you’re singing along.
There are also some surprising musical moments, for instance: In the first song, there is a drum fill that can only be described as Phil Collins-ish. (Seriously, you can feel it coming in the air tonight.) Another one: “Zigzagging Toward the Light” ends in a 30-second guitar solo thick with nasty ’90s distortion. It is the very sound of anguish. Then it stops, all of a sudden, and we hear the happy strums of “Hundreds of Ways” and the line: “What a thing to be a witness to the sunshine.” It’s such a wonderful moment of the music doing just what the words describe.
What should surprise no one at all is the beautiful musicianship on Upside Down Mountain. There are all kinds of guitars — slide, pedal, baritone, nylon- and steel-string — and they all sound lovely, except for the occasional moments of anguish (see above). There’s a bunch of cool, oddly effected piano parts — one of them sounds like it’s being played off a tape machine with uneven speed. The back-up singing, most of it by First Aid Kit, is sublime. The horn section on “Governor’s Ball,” a song about a kid getting lost at a music festival, could be the arranger’s riposte to the preceding lyric: “Why not?” (A: Just for fun.) Probably the prettiest moment is the last section of “Night at Lake Unknown,” featuring what to my ears sounds like vibraphone, flute, clarinet and, um, bubbles.
(This might be a good place to note that I’m reporting these lyrics and instrumentation as I’ve heard them. I can’t guarantee that I’ve got it all correct. I’m working without liner notes. You know what’s the easiest way to get those? Go out and buy the record.)
I’ve been listening to Upside Down Mountain for a month now — it was the best birthday-party-favor e-mail link I’ve ever received, bar none — and as one does when listening to Conor’s music, I’ve been thinking about my feelings. I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe “envy” is not the right word. For of the deadly sins, envy must surely be the least pleasurable. And when a song is so good that you’re driving downtown with your best friend and you say, “This one, you really gotta hear this one,” you’re not sharing your … envy. Call it admiration, or maybe it’s local pride, but certainly it’s a virtue, not a vice.
Dan McCarthy is a Hear Nebraska contributor. He plays the piano most every Thursday at Pageturners Lounge in Omaha, which means he technically works for Conor. Reach him via chancesp@hearnebraska.org.