Bright Eyes Opens Up About Just Going For It

When Conor Oberst was growing up, there was only one hip record store in town. Oberst, who was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, a town he continues to call home, found the area to be both a blessing and a curse. Omaha, which is the largest city in the state, is only five-percent the size of, say, New York City. But what the region lacked in infrastructure or volume, it enjoyed in comradery and community. Oberst, whose popular band Bright Eyes released its latest record, Down In The Weeds Where The World Once Was, this summer (the band’s first in nine years), remembers spending hours in that record shop, flipping through albums and observing gig posters thumb-tacked to the wall. 

“There was one cool record store and everything revolved around that,” Oberst says. “That’s where you went to find out about new records and where bands hung their flyers for shows. It was insular but supportive.”