I didn’t realize the dude was only 24.
If you’re looking for a symbol of the new sincerity, it’s hard to do better than Conor Oberst, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter who has spent the last decade recording audacious hyper-romantic songs under the name Bright Eyes. One early song, “Padraic My Prince,” used the (fictional) drowning death of his baby brother as an analogy for getting dumped. By 2002, he had already amassed a cult of rabid Conorians, who hung on his every lament, but he wanted more. So he recorded “Lifted, or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground” (Saddle Creek), a tangled treatise on love and faith and truth, full of ragged orchestra crescendos and yawping finales. (full story)