02/12/2022
This is a long running Omaha-based music blog, and this story includes a description of Bright Eyes’ latest music project. They are re-releasing 9 albums along with companion EPs with new recordings, paired up with a huge tour this spring and summer. Exciting news for mega-fans (including myself), and their business partners at Dead Oceans, bc that will be a whole lot of merch!
“The other big announcement this morning is that Bright Eyes has booked two nights at The Admiral (the newly refurbished Sokol Auditorium) July 2 and 3. The concerts aren’t so much in support of their last album, 2020’s Down in the Weeds. Where the World Once Was, as much as the reissue of nine Bright Eyes albums, in chronological order, in groups of three, beginning this spring. But that’s not all.
There will also be nine companion EPs released. From the event Facebook post: ‘Or as Oberst puts it, ‘the supplemental reading’ for the primary reissues: One six-track EP per reissued album, each featuring five reworked songs from that album. ‘My thing was they had to sound different from the originals, we had to mess with them in a substantial way.’ Plus one cover that felt ‘of the era’ in which that particular albums was made – a song that meant something to the band at the time. To help the EPs come alive in the fullest way, Bright Eyes called in lots of old friends, like Phoebe Bridgers, M. Ward, and Welch and Rawlings, as well as new ones like Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee. It was the band’s way of reframing, rediscovering, and renewing the past. It was also a hilarious amount of work. ‘I thought it was a cool concept,’ Oberst says. ‘Then I realized its nine records, six songs a piece, so that’s like 54 different songs you have to record!’’“
It’s hard to think about it with Douglas County boasting a COVID-19 positive-test rate of 36%, but summer is coming and this ever-lasting pandemic will eventually be behind us. The folks who put on the Maha Music Festival believe that, enough so that yesterday they announced their 14th annual fest...
