A Christmas Album - WhiteDescription: It's a meaningful way to connect with the past that doesn't feel totally nostalgic and self-indulgent says Conor Colonel of the forthcoming Bright Eyes reissue project. We are taking these songs and making them interesting to us all over again. I like that. I like a challenge. I like to be forced to do something that's slightly hard just to see if we can. Just to see if we can could be the unofficial motto of Bright Eyes the band Oberst founded as a teenager and plays in with two of his oldest friends multi-instrumentalists Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. We've never made the same record twice the singer says. I'm proud of that. From warm folk-rock to austere electro plaintive earnest ballads to glacially cool guitar noise Bright Eyes has tried on pretty much every sound that's ever inspired them just to see if they could. Along the way they've collaborated with many of their influences heroes and peers from Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris to Jenny Lewis Nick Zinner and Britt Daniel. And they've seen their songs covered by many more including Lorde The Killers and Mac Miller. For a band that's often been perceived as an outlier - the ingenious but quixotic group fronted by that wunderkind singer-songwriter with the floppy hair and bedroom eyes - the depth breadth and impact of the Bright Eyes canon is remarkable. And that's what really strikes you when you sit down to fully take in the nine Bright Eyes albums that will be reissued in chronological order in groups of three beginning this spring. Over the last two-plus decades as Bright Eyes has released one after another time capsule LP's -urgent dispatches from transcendent fleeting eras of our collective lives - they've also been simultaneously assembling a robust mature narratively cohesive discography. I've written a looooot of songs Colonel says laughing. And by no means they are all good but the fact that we can cull through these records and find ones that I'm not ashamed to sing years later makes me feel pretty happy. It's the desire to celebrate that sonic bounty that first got Oberst and the band excited about the idea of comprehensive reissues. But this wouldn't be a Bright Eyes project if a moment devoted to appreciating the past weren't turned into an opportunity to connect with the future. That's where the nine companion EPs come in. Or as Oberst puts it the supplemental reading for the primary reissues: one six-track EP per reissued album each featuring five reworked songs from that album. My thing was they had to sound different from the originals we had to mess with them in a substantial way. Plus one cover that felt of the era in which particular albums was made - a song that meant something to the band at the time. To help the EPs come alive in the fullest way Bright Eyes called in lots of old friends like Bridgers M. Ward and Welch and Rawlings as well as new ones like Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee. It was the band's way of reframing rediscovering and renewing the past. It was also a hilarious amount of work. I thought it was a cool concept Colonel says. Then I realized it's nine records six songs a piece so that's like 54 different songs you have to record! He laughs. But if there's a mantra more central to the Bright Eyes ethos as trying something new just to see if you can get away with it it's signing up for way more than you can handle just to see if you can make it work. We always bite off more than we can chew Colonel summarizes. It keeps things interesting.
