Taking his leave Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst finds life elsewhere BY CAMILLE DODERO

If you’ve ever been to Omaha, you understand why Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst has spent the last 10 years being so damn depressed. The Nebraska city where the warbling wunderkind was born is a spacious expanse of strip malls and parking lots, both so vast you’d swear they could house the entire population of China. The Red Staters tend to be so conservatively provincial, they wouldn’t know a double entendre if it licked them in the face. No one blinks at the name of local convenience-store chain Kum & Go; and when, more than a year ago, Omaha’s Chamber of Commerce tried to promote itself by adopting the simple symbol "O!", it was shocked when a local sex shop appropriated the symbol for a billboard. Also, Oberst is vegan, and his home town is all about dead animals: the land of the juicy steak once tried to market itself with the slogan "Omaha: Rare, Well-Done," and even the few hipster bars around have stuffed game heads mounted on the walls. But mostly, the problem with Omaha is that it behaves like a small town. "There is only one good use for a small town," Lou Reed once reasoned. "You hate it and you’ll know you have to leave."

Oberst, who comes to Harvard’s Sanders Theatre this Monday, is damn good at leaving. In early 2003, he fled Omaha for New York City, a relocation that New York magazine described as tantamount to "Faulkner leaving Oxford for Atlanta." He still has ties: he keeps a house, remains with his home-town über-indie-label Saddle Creek, and uses his own Lower East Side–based record label, the syrupy-sounding Team Love, as a platform to elevate Omaha-based acts like Tilly and the Wall, a tap-dancing fivesome who’ll open for him at Sanders, and hip-hop beatsman Mars Black.

But Oberst doesn’t just leave places, he leaves people — or so he claims on his two new releases, the acoustic I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and the electric Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, both on Saddle Creek and both hitting shelves this Tuesday. "I’m not a gamble/You can count on me to split," he whispers on "Lua," the first single from Wide Awake that floated like a helium balloon to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart this past November, side by side with Oberst’s Digital Ash single, "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)," another meditation on leaving and being left. It was the first time since August 1997 that one artist held the #1 and #2 positions — and that’s even more surprising when you consider that this wimpy indie kid had to push off Usher and Alicia Keys to be king of the Billboard mountain.

Since Wide Awake was the first of the two to be laid to tape, Oberst is heading out to support that one now. Then he’s planning to tour again on behalf of Digital Ash, with fellow Omahans the Faint as his backing band. On the folkie, stripped-down Wide Awake leg, he’s towing collaborators Mike Mogis, Merge Records’ M. Ward, and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James. There are no announced plans to have Wide Awake’s marquee-name guest star, Emmylou Harris (Loretta Lynn to Oberst’s Jack White on three songs), accompany him on any dates. There’s also no word on whether Digital Ash’s guest stars, high-cheekboned guitarist Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who appears on five songs, and the Postal Service’s Jimmy Tamborello, who leaves his fingerprints all over "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)," will be touring as Bright Eyes.

Oberst — who turns 25 on February 15 ("One day too late for love," as he told Rolling Stone in 2002) — recorded both Wide Awake and Digital Ash after his relocation. The distance from home appears to have temporarily alleviated his depression: the pixie-thin "boy wonder" with a knotted-cord necklace sounds more at ease with himself than ever before. He’s still tormented, of course; his songs continue to be revealing therapy sessions ("I’m thinking of quitting drinking again," he confesses in Digital Ash’s "Hit the Switch"), but his intimate admissions come across more like unyielding introspection than get-me-out-of-here distress signals. There are even two hopeful ballads: "First Day of My Life," Wide Awake’s folky testament to love’s ability to renew ("This time I think it’s different/I really think you like me"), and a mechanized steel-drum number called "The Piñata Song" buried at the end of Digital Ash.

Although stylistically dissimilar, these albums bear the same thematic conflicts that overwhelm any Catholic-school boy with a racing mind, heavy-hearted despair, and a taste for alcohol: God, religion, love, life, death, time, politics, war, drinking. Wide Awake opens with a sip and a swallow, as Oberst slugs back whiskey before narrating a tale of two strangers on a nose-diving airliner whose deathbound dialogue turns into a cathartic, mandolin-accompanied barn dance, "At the Bottom of Everything." Then as the plane plunges into the Pacific, Oberst cries happily, "Then they splashed into the deep blue sea! And it was a wonderful splash." If death is redemption, he postulates, there’s no reason to cry. "We Are Nowhere and It’s Now" is a gorgeous, floating arrangement of mandolin, trumpet, and piano; the voices of Harris and Oberst fit together so well, you can imagine them spooning. Oberst can spin a phrase like a roulette wheel, never quite knowing where he’ll end up, and he does so on the gentle, wistful, guitar-strumming "Poison Oak." His voice trembles over Mogis’s pedal steel: "Let the poets cry themselves to sleep/And all their tearful words will turn back into steam/Me, I’m a single cell on a serpent’s tongue." On "Another Travelin’ Song," he fancies himself a writer: "Now I’m hunched over a typewriter/I guess you call that painting in a cave."

Oberst’s first utterance on Digital Ash is the word "death." Years ago, he experimented with digital sounds on the disjointed Letting Off the Happiness (LBJ). Back then, the gargling-robot burbles and Atari death knells were distractions from his ragged warble. But six years later, he manages to get the machines working for him, conscripting Tamborello and the Faint’s Clark Baechle to handle programming. Digital Ash’s opening track, "Time Code," is an aural dreamscape, an organ dirge that regurgitates the subconscious’s intake, expelling church bells, children’s conversations, and distant screams, only to be interrupted by an alarm clock. On the Tamborello-fingerprinted "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)," theremin specters and clinking coins score Oberst’s tale of abandonment by an older woman. "Gold Mine Gutted" is the sonic equivalent of that foggy-headed, pre-pain hangover state where everything’s in slow motion and every gesture portends a weighty import as he reflects on being a big fish in a small puddle: "Living the Good Life I left for dead/the sorrowful Midwest/I did my best/To keep my head."

For now at least, Oberst keeps coming back to Omaha. Back when he was the lead screamer in a noisy indie-rock side project called Desaparecidos, he unleashed an acrimonious rant against his birthplace’s urban sprawl and girthy midsections on Read Music/Speak Spanish’s "Greater Omaha": "I have been driving now for 100 blocks/Saw 50 Kum & Go’s/60 parking lots/One more mouthful and I’m sure/They will be happy then." In Wide Awake’s "Landlocked Blues," he works through his motivations for moving 1400 miles: "So I’m making a deal with the devils of fame/Saying let me walk away please." Like fellow Omaha defectors cartoonist Chris Ware and filmmaker Alexander Payne, Oberst keeps being drawn to portray, even mock, the quotidian aspects of a cultureless, humdrum town: dead-end office jobs, blind consumerism, people who live for vacation days. But he’s worked through the purgatorial identity crisis of being from somewhere, "It seems, we’ve been in between a past and present town/We are nowhere, and it’s now." In the end, the two new albums scribble a sonic journal of a contemplative twentysomething who’s fled home to establish a new life elsewhere but is realizing that his roots, no matter how rotten or ugly, ground him.

Beneath it all, Oberst always seems doomed to sabotage himself, whether it’s those self-fulfilling prophecies of leaving lovers or his need to inject cacophony into the middle of a beautifully sculpted song. Digital Ash’s "Ship in a Bottle" is a meditation on aging that begins with an electronic oceanic-seashell echo, then segues into Oberst’s best lyrical declaration of longing since "The Calendar Hung Itself" on Fevers and Mirrors: "I want to be the surgeon that cuts you open/That fixes all of life’s mistakes/I want to be the house that you were raised in/The only place that you feel safe/I want to be the shower in the morning that wakes you up and makes you clean/I know I’m just the weather against your window, as you sleep through a winter’s dream." Then about a third of the way in, as he admits to fearing that knowledge turns people old, he brings the kaleidoscopic organ and toe-tapping beat to a grinding halt with an infant’s runny-nosed wails, mocking horns, and muffled cries. Challenging the listener is one thing; turning the perfect puppy-love mix-tape song into a crappy sampling experiment is another.

But Oberst loves dissonance. For Wide Awake’s finale, he lifts the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, deferentially calling his adaptation "Road to Joy" and setting the melody against a droning organ. Despite the mention of humming cemeteries, meaningless war, and rising body counts, he turns the hymn into an emboldened, kicking-sand-in-their-faces anthem for a anyone disillusioned by the current state of the nation. At the last minute, he flips the song back onto himself, admitting in his brink-of-madness tremble that there’s something about a breakdown, a sad song, a collapse that he can’t resist. "I could have be a famous singer/If I had someone else’s voice/But failure’s always sounded better/Let’s fuck it up boys, make some noise!"

Bright Eyes play this Monday, January 24, at Sanders Theatre, 45 Quincy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts's Harvard Square, with CocoRosie and Tilly and the Wall. The show is officially sold out.