Conor Oberst’s Mystical Awakening

The Bright Eyes leader and his new band seek inner peace—and find LSD-gobbling bikers, Aztec pyramids, and Leonard Cohen.

Rolling Stone

Conor Oberst peers out from beneath the five-inch brim of a gaucho hat at a sea of bobbing eyes and digital cameras. His new Mystic Valley Band have just played a set of songs from their latest disc, Outer South, cranking out vintage, Jim Beam-and-reefer roots-rock at an all-ages club in Pomona, California. But now, after a nerve-settling Parliament Light in the bathroom, Oberst has retaken the stage just as he began his career 16 years ago: alone with an acoustic guitar. His elfin face glistening, the 29-year-old surveys the crowd with large dark eyes. “You’re all the same,” he says. He looks from face to darkened face. “I just wanted to say that. Look at the person to your left. Look at the person to your right. You’re exactly the same person. The sooner you learn that, the happier you’ll be.”

The Gospel of Conor Oberst—best known as the leader of Bright Eyes, though he’s now made two albums in a row under his own name—is an ever-evolving belief system gleaned during the singer-songwriter’s spiritual journey of the past four years, from a Florida town full of psychics to the mystical Mexican valley that gives his current band its name. Oberst, who admires Bob Dylan as much for his nomadic lifestyle as his songs, keeps moving, because moving keeps him sane. “Dylan's obviously a great example of keeping everything fluid, never staying in one position,” Oberst says. “I totally adhere to that philosophy.” 

Oberst has spent more than half his life writing hundreds of songs that parse his fraught inner world with breathless, wordy dispatches that have been tattooed onto fans’ bodies. Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska—son of an insurance-company manager dad and school-principal mom—he learned guitar at age 10 and began songwriting shortly after mastering his second chord. In 1993, he made a cassette-only debut titled Water – recording it on a four-track, releasing it on a tiny not-quite label, and singing on one song, “Everything, to me, is a gun/About to go off.” He was 13.

On a starry night in the Southern California desert (where the Mystic Valley Band will play the Coachella festival) Oberst still seems like a kid surrounded by loaded guns. Eating vegan take-out in a hotel courtyard, he describes a general psychic allergy to the modern world. “I get more and more paranoid with each passing year,” he says. “I think, like…people are watching me.” He shoots a theatrical sidelong glance at potential surveillance gadgets in the courtyard’s potted plants. “Not necessarily because of who I am, but just because there are cameras everywhere."

Other obsessions run from the karmic debts of our nation’s past  (“slavery and the genocide of Native Americans—that’s why we have a country”) to the narcissistic mania of our hyper-connected present.  “I never fuck with Facebook,” he says. “I absolutely despise social networking. I think it’s truly going to result in the destruction of mankind.” He takes a swig of water. “Sometimes I just wish I didn’t live in this time. Before, there was so much more freedom and privacy, and you could truly escape places.”

For the past four years, escape has been Oberst’s prime objective, his driving force. He first sought an exit strategy in 2005, at the peak of his celebrity, when the singer began seeing scores of Bright Eyes concertgoers dressed and coiffed in identical Conor Oberst drag—boxy sweaters, girl jeans, self-cut swoop hair—and flipped out.  

“I felt like I wasn’t me,” he says. So after years of living in New York's East Village—marching in anti-war protests,: sharing the stage with Bruce Springsteen and R.E.M. on the Vote for Change tour, popping up in nightlife columns, chronicling druggy urban debauchery in songs like 2005’s haunting “Lua” (sample lyric: "You're looking skinny like a model with your eyes all painted black/Just keep going to the bathroom, always say you'll be right back")—Oberst began compulsively wandering.

He recently gave up his apartment in New York (he still keeps a place in Omaha, but visits it rarely, and in 2006 touched down in the Florida town of Cassadaga – known for its 100-year-old community of spiritualists – where he grew his hair long, got his fortune read (“She told me, ‘You think you’re on the wrong path, but if you stick to what you’re doing, things will work out”) and composed songs for Bright Eyes’ seventh studio record. While the former folk prodigy explored lush musical sophistication on Cassadega—whose orchestrations he reprised onstage with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2007—Oberst clearly grappled with the transitional period referenced in that album’s liner notes: When “mighty Saturn enters your eighth house”—the late-20s threshold between youth and adulthood, when friendships die and beliefs change. He ended his relationship with the label he cofounded, Saddle Creek. He broke up with his longtime girlfriend, singer-songwriter Maria Taylor. (He remains single.) He even decided to end the studio-based band of rotating sidemen, Bright Eyes, his main musical outlet since age 18. “It’s such a big part of my life,” he says. “But it does feel like it needs to stop at some point,” which he plans to achieve with one final record. “I’d like to clean it up, lock the door, say goodbye.”

After untethering himself from so many things at once, Oberst felt adrift. “I didn’t want to go to Omaha, didn’t want to go to New York, didn’t want to be around anything that I’d known before,” he says. “The idea of going to another universe sounded fantastic to me.” So last year, Oberst travelled to the Mexican mountainside village of Tepoztlan, in the Valle Mistico, which he first visited after a tour stop in Mexico City. Known for its UFO sightings, huge Aztec pyramid, and birthplace of the feather serpent god Quetzalcoatl, the place seemed to offer. “It’s a magical, magical place,” Oberst says. “If you go down to the Pyramid of the Sun, climb that thing and stare out – it’s hard not to feel something. To me, that Native American idea that you can see the reflection of everything in nature and in each other seems really true.”

Oberst chose this valley to open a new musical chapter in his life. He found an adobe building and had instruments and a special 16-track recorder brought in. “I really wanted this particular machine that M. Ward records on,” says Oberst. “It’s like this magical, super-mellow sound, like a warm old quilt.” Then he called some friends: Bright Eyes keyboardist/arranger Nate Walcott, Rilo Kiley drummer Jason Boesel, bassist Macey Taylor, pro-skateboard-photographer-turned-singer-songwriter Nik Freitas, and Taylor’s friend from Birmingham, Alabama, guitarist Taylor Hollingsworth. Together in the adobe cabin, this group—soon to be dubbed the Mystic Valley Band—cut the 2008 disc Conor Oberst, his first record not credited to Bright Eyes since he was 16.

Whereas Bright Eyes albums mostly hewed to spare folk settings or audio impressionism, Conor Oberst recalled ramblin’ roots-rock production from the early ‘70s—think Flying Burrito Brothers—only led by a high-strung, hyper-verbal singer fretting about death and moral decay. “I don’t want to necessarily make retro records,” Oberst says. “But there’s a certain flow to things, and music is all completely tied together. Blues, folk, rock’n’roll, country—that’s American music. And we’re Americans playing music.”

While in Mexico, Oberst embarked on informal vision quests around the region like some Nebraska-raised Carlos Castenada – hiking up the Aztec Pyramid of the Sun, communing with his bandmates in a ritual sweat-lodge. “I think the whole Judeo-Christian-Muslim thing takes such a suspension of disbelief to even wrap my head around their ideas,” says Oberst, who was raised Catholic. “Whereas I think some of those more native religions, I guess, just sit better with me. Some Eastern, Buddhism and stuff like that, those are sort of the same ideas, oneness and connectedness. It’s something tangible, in a way, like Mother Nature and the idea that the earth is incredibly important, and we’re all part of it, all creatures, we’re part of it.”

As a token of this all-embracing spirituality, Oberst collects talismans of various faiths: these days he's wearing an Aztec calendar medallion around his neck. For a while, he wore a a silver-and-turquoise Hebrew ring a fan gave him, which he then had blessed by a shaman on a pyramid. But he gave the ring to a stranger he met in a bar. “I have this tendency where if I get a little too joyous at night, I’ll give away my favorite things,” he explains, adding that his huge-brimmed pilgrim hat is a replacement for the one he gave a fan standing outside a club in Albuquerque.

Having spent nearly half his life on tour, Oberst has learned to seek potential soulmates everywhere. “I think I get a lot out of different experiences and meeting people that are—at least I believe them to be—connected to whatever that is. Call it God, the universe, nature, whatever.” And some of these people are his fellow travelers in the Mystic Valley Band. “Once you get to the part of the day where you get to play music, it really cures you. It’s not always like that, not every situation, every band I’ve been in, every time, does that happen, but playing with these guys in particular, it just makes me feel good.”

During the lengthy tour supporting Conor Oberst, the Mystic Valley Band found itself short of material. So they started learning and performing each other's songs—first earlier ones by Freitas and Hollingsworth, then new originals from the group. Soon, the bus turned into an informal workshop. “We’d sit in the back, pass the guitar around in circles and play each other songs we were writing,” says Hollingsworth. When the tour ended in Texas in 2008, the band moved into the El Paso studio Sonic Ranch and began recording the new tunes in the same live, straight-to-tape fashion as the previous album, titling it Outer South in a nod to the extraterrestrial-looking realm in which it was created. Oberst had heard of the studio—set in a pecan ranch—from his friend Nick Zinner, of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who recorded there. “He had all these incredible pictures that looked like the moon or something, and I said, “Where is this place?”

Hanging out in El Paso, Oberst encountered a father-son pair of “full fledged, wild, acid biker guys,” who helped organize a benefit concert for a Juarez orphanage that the band played at the world’s largest Harley Davidson dealership. They also left Oberst with some cosmology that found a surprising amount of traction. “Some of their ideas are pretty far out,” he says. “Like a reptilian overlord race that controls people’s minds. But one [idea] I do like is that there’s eight universes that are rotating counter-clockwise around a void. Our universe is at roughly 3 o’clock, so it’s turning this way,” he says, drawing a circle in the air with his right hand. “So a lot of paranormal things that happen are because you can see the universe ahead of you and the universe behind you. That doesn’t seem that crazy to me. Maybe it does to other people.”

Boesel attests to his band mate’s occasionally remarkable suspensions of disbelief. “He said the other day, ‘I’m starting to think that whatever anyone says is as true as what anyone else says,’” he recalls. “Which struck me as a pretty crazy statement. But that thinking comes from the same place you hear in the line, “Not all my boys believe in science,” from the [Conor Oberst] song "Souled Out!!!"—“I think in that song he was being genuine.”

Sitting by the dark hotel pool, Oberst unveils one more lesson he picked up on his journey. “My whole thing is having heat,” he says. “Where melody, poetry, and sound all meet as one fiery liquid thing—that’s heat. It’s in the kind of music I’m drawn to and it can be in any genre, from any time. John Prine has a lot of heat. Even T-Rex—it’s a weird kind of heat, but it’s heat. Then you have someone like Leonard Cohen—who’s basically the sun.” He takes a swig off a bottle of water and sits back—twenty hours from playing right before the Sun himself.

Late the next afternoon, the Mystic Valley Band takes the stage at Coachella. Oberst performs in aviators and his massive gaucho lid, the still blazing sun giving him the air of a Mennonite missionary. “I like wearing disguises and hats,” he says later. “I like to find weird articles of clothing that seem confusing.  Maybe it’s just an identity crisis.”

If so, the crisis affects his vocal chords too, since, four songs in, Oberst greets the massive crowd in the high voice of a crotchety Old West prospector. “Thanks Coachella,” he creaks. “My name’s Conor. This is the Mystic Valley Band, come to play fer yoo.” (“Talking in a funny voice or wearing some ridiculous outfit,” Oberst says. “For some reason, it makes it easier.”)

Hours later, long after night falls over Coachella, Conor Oberst shows up in the VIP section, visibly altered. In a black military-style jacket, tightly-rolled jeans, and the same huge hat, he stands stock still and tries to convey the ineffable quasi-religious experience he has just had: watching the living-legend Leonard Cohen play before a crowd of thousands—from ten feet away. He pushes his hat back, lets a tuft of hair flop down on his forehead, and closes his eyes. “I don’t necessarily believe in God,” he says at last.  “But I do believe that we’re all traveling on this same path together and when you hear music and poetry that’s that truthful and spot-on, you kind of… Well, you just don’t feel as alone, you know? That’s—that’s it. The highest form of art.”

As Oberst talks, friends come up, one after the other, and greet him.  Jessica Dobson, the 24-year-old guitarist for Beck and leader of the band Deep Sea Diver shows up. Oberst puts his hat on her head, and snaps a shot for her BlackBerry’s photo ID. Singer-songwriter Jenny Lewis gives Oberst a hug, sharing that when her band and the Mystic Valley Band toured together, “we were like the Jets and the Sharks.” Sometime Bright Eyes drummer Matt Focht ambles over in a jean jacket and porkpie hat, leaning in to share some sound bite that makes Oberst crack into a brilliant smile. More people come by for a hug, a photo, a laugh—fruits of a career spent roaming town to town, making friends at every stop, giving prized possessions to strangers, and realizing, on some gut level, that they’re all the same person.

As the moon rises over the desert, a dense crowd fills a grassy incline to watch the night’s headliner appear a quarter mile away. Soon, Paul McCartney's boyish face fills the giant screens on either side and for two hours, the history of pop plays right there on the main Coachella stage—epochs falling away with references to the defunct U.S.S.R., to two fallen Beatles, to anonymous civil-rights marchers, to a time when rock’n’roll united a generation instead of scoring iPod commercials.

Oberst isn’t watching any of it. He’s sitting with his knees up, pilgrim hat brim angled down, hands working a BlackBerry. Formed in a lost culture of cassette-trading, D.I.Y., indie-rock intimacy, he must seek that connection in an age of pseudo-friendship.  “Positivity is really important to me right now,” he says. “You need people to smile and crack a joke and pick up the slack. I try to do it for my friends, and they try to do it for me. Because that’s all we’ve got, really, is each other.”