Conor Oberst’s 2016 album Ruminations opens with a song called “Tachycardia”—the word refers to a too-fast heartbeat, and the song itself starts with five ringing C major chords played on the piano. As the rest of Ruminations drunkenly spills forth, carried only by a piano or guitar, Oberst’s ragged, cigarette-streaked voice, and a harmonica that does the yelling when the singer needs a break, it’s hard not to keep thinking back to those five C chords. In the context of what follows—a lot of pain, a lot of shouting, and a lot of the inside of Oberst’s mind—those clean, unadorned chords seem strange, like a warm-up that was left in. But I think they have a more deliberate purpose: it’s like Oberst is saying that, no matter how person he’s about to get, we’ll understand. It’s anguish in the key of C: it belongs to everyone.
And if we didn’t then, we do now. Five years after Ruminations, Oberst is back with Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was, the first Bright Eyes record since 2011's The People’s Key. A CinemaScope epic, as expansive and majestic as the best of his band’s work, Down in the Weeds is symphonic, a necessary shot of grandeur at a moment that seems not quite to deserve it.
But if Down in the Weeds is a symphony, Ruminations is a sonata, kind of like the ones that Schubert wrote in the months before he died—the so-called “late sonatas,” soaked with dread and pathos and unhinged genius. Thank God Ruminations is no late anything for Oberst, who has now released three records since then under three different umbrellas—one, Salutations, that’s a fleshed-out full-band version of Ruminations; one with Phoebe Bridgers as Better Oblivion Community Center; and the new Bright Eyes. But of the three, Ruminations has experienced a fascinating afterlife. Oberst’s new record might be the bold-faced statement of intent that will carry on his legacy and connect with the widest possible audience, that syncs Bright Eyes up with 2020, but it’s Ruminations that feels, as much as any music I’ve listened to, like a direct line into the spirit of Right Now.
Oberst wrote and recorded the album in the wake of two overlapping crises: a serious health scare and a rape accusation that has since been recanted. A collection of songs about one man’s health problems and depression does not predict or anticipate or have anything much to do with our current moment, but Oberst’s chthonic journey does provide some welcome insight into what happens when the lights get a little darker. On Ruminations, Oberst reckons with having the fabric of his life ripped apart by a disease of the flesh he couldn’t control or understand. Perhaps that sounds familiar?
“It’s a mass grave, a dollar-fifty resting place / on the north face, it’s a rope I’ve gotta climb / I’m a stone’s throw from everyone I love and know / and I can’t show up looking like I do.” These are the lyrics that follow the clarion call of those C chords, and they set the table for what’s about to follow: loneliness, inadequacy, and boozy brio, a man in a house in Omaha clutching a bottle of cheap red wine and looking out of windows, the ones in his room and the ones in his mind. On the record’s first three songs, Oberst flits from wanting to get drunk before noon to wishing he could channel John Muir and disappear into the comforts of nature; he simultaneously sinks into the muck of his condition and fantasizes about escaping to “some far-off place where I don’t belong.”
And on the next song, “Counting Sheep,” Oberst addresses an unusual subject for a singer once feted as a Dylan-esque voice-of-his-generation, rising up like a pillar of flame from the plains of Nebraska, burning with passion and Gothic metaphors. The mirrors and portals and brakemen of Bright Eyes have become vital signs, hospital horrors: “Life is a gas, what can you do / catheter piss, fed through a tube / cyst in the brain, blood on the bamboo,” he sings in one verse; in the next, it’s “Early to bed, early to rise / acting my age, waiting to die / insulin shots, alkaline produce.” He tells us his blood pressure, 121 over 75, then sings, as if in afterthought, “Scream if you want, no one can hear you.” What music we do have about suffering through illness does not typically come in such a frank, almost diaristic package, and at a time when many of us have bought oximeters to keep a close eye on our blood-oxygen levels, they have a renewed and startling relevance.
The lyrics all have the brutal elegance and jagged honesty of some mid-century male American self-portraitist—John Berryman at his most lucid, maybe, or Henry Miller at his least aroused. And they all point in one direction: Oberst paints a startling picture of how surreal life becomes when backlit by illness. Ruminations creates an atmosphere of closeness and squalor, when the boundaries of life seem to be the limits of your head and house; increasingly, pieces of architecture, in particular Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Imperial Hotel, come to represent the permanence and solidity that Oberst, in his sickness, lacks. What escape Oberst can find comes in the form of a bottle, but that relief is more a mirage than anything else; by the time of the closer, “Till St. Dymphna Kicks Us Out,” Oberst sounds like he’s singing at his own funeral, except in place of an open casket, he’s been pickled in a bottle of Maker’s Mark.
These descriptions might not suggest beautiful music, nor do the stories of Ruminations’ creation: two New York magazine profiles, one then and one now, sketch the process in extremely dark tones, and in the latest, producer and bandmate Mike Mogis says that Ruminations could’ve been mixed in a day but took two weeks, since Oberst was “so fucked up all the time.” Don’t be fooled, though: these songs are heartrendingly beautiful, filled with the beauty of day-drunkenness and Proustian flights into memory and waking up in the afternoon and realizing that, however imperfect the day is, it’s a day.
And it provides a remarkable companion piece to Down in the Weeds, which is the night-sky version of Ruminations’ pinhole. Look no further than the song “Forced Convalescence,” whose first verse basically summarizes the whole Ruminations arc, then moves on to a dizzying trip through space and time and finally lands in the body of a father—not, it should be noted, the childless Oberst—who is catastrophizing his 40th birthday and coping with Seroquel.
But there’s no summarizing on Ruminations: it’s all details. A drink rattles in a shaking hand; eyes are red and raw; urine vanishes into a catheter tube. For those of us all too immersed in the quotidian flatness of day after day spent indoors and inside of screens, listening to this kind of introspection, particularly when it’s been rendered into art, isn’t just relevant—it’s a relief. Oberst has been there, he’s been worse, and he turned his suffering into something he could share. And when the rest of us end up in a similar spot, we can meet here, at an album like this, and buy another round.