walking upstream…
Conor Oberst
sourcesMagnet Magazine — "Bright Eyes · Rock Cellar Magazine — Conor Oberst Q&A (Bridge School Benefit, friendship with Gary Burden) · Far Out Magazine — on Oberst's cover of Neil Young's "Out on the Weekend" · Nylon — Bright Eyes on covering Elliott Smith's "St. Ides Heaven" (what backs the influence claim) · Rolling Stone — Bright Eyes Companion reissue series (cover-song tracklist and dates) · The FADER — Bright Eyes profile (biographical detail, "new Bob Dylan" tag) · The A.V. Club — Conor Oberst interview (early biography and career) · Wikipedia — Conor Oberst
Conor Oberst self-released his cassette debut, Water, at 13, already writing songs that would meet the man who'd produce nearly all of them: Mike Mogis first heard him play in a University of Nebraska-Lincoln dorm room in 1994. Oberst and his friends founded Saddle Creek Records to put their own music out, turning small-town Omaha into an unlikely indie hub. As Bright Eyes, he built a catalog of tumbling, confessional verses sung in a voice that shook on purpose, then spent two decades resisting the frame the press kept handing him — "the new Bob Dylan" — a tag he has pointedly never claimed for himself. What actually shaped that voice were closer to home: an Omaha songwriter almost nobody outside the scene had heard of, and two restless heroes he covered rather than imitated.
the sound in question
2005
First Day of My LifeConor Oberst
walk the tributaries ↓
Simon Joyner1990s · Americana / Lo-fi / Singer-songwriter
Before there was a Saddle Creek Records, there was Simon Joyner's kitchen-table label, Sing, Eunuchs! — the outlet that issued a teenage Oberst's earliest cassette recordings, years before he had any profile beyond Omaha. Joyner, an older local songwriter almost nobody outside the scene had heard of, became the yardstick: asked in 2000 to pick between Joyner and fellow Omahan Elliott Smith as his favorite songwriter, Oberst didn't hesitate. "I think I'd still pick Simon," he said. "To me, Simon is a little more... he touches me." A 2007 profile called Joyner more formative to Oberst than Neutral Milk Hotel ever was.
listen: upstream & heresource: BB*ISLAND — Simon Joyner artist page (Oberst quote calling Joyner his favorite lyricist) ↗
1994
Double JoeSimon Joyner
2022
Double Joe (Simon Joyner cover)Conor Oberst
listen forPlay Joyner's ragged 1994 original against Bright Eyes' 2022 version and the debt is in what didn't change: a plainspoken, conversational vocal that never oversells the story of two doomed friends, delivered almost like it's being told across a table rather than sung. Oberst thickens the arrangement — more instruments, cleaner production — but keeps that same unhurried, matter-of-fact phrasing, the exact quality the Omaha cassette-folk scene Joyner helped define was built around.
Neil Young1970s · Folk rock / Country rock / Rock
By 2014, Oberst had cycled through solo records, the punk band Desaparecidos, and soon Better Oblivion Community Center, and named an explicit model for that restlessness: "Neil Young's a good example of someone I look up to that has had a long career and has made a bunch of different records," he told Drowned in Sound, pointing to Young's 1980s detour into rockabilly with the Shocking Pinks 'to piss off' his label, Geffen. "He really doesn't give a fuck." The admiration is personal too — Oberst has played Young's Bridge School Benefit charity concerts and spent twelve years close with Young's longtime album-art director, Gary Burden.
listen: upstream & heresource: Drowned in Sound — Conor Oberst interview (Neil Young as a model for reinvention) ↗
1972
Out on the WeekendNeil Young
2003
Out on the Weekend (Neil Young cover)Conor Oberst
listen forBright Eyes buried a full studio cover of Young's "Out on the Weekend" on the vinyl-only pressing of the 2003 EP There Is No Beginning to the Story — an actual tribute, not just a claimed influence. Set the two side by side and hear how both let a spare acoustic figure carry a lonely first-person narrator without the vocal ever rising above a resigned half-whisper; Oberst even keeps Young's loping tempo, letting the arrangement stay sparse instead of building toward a chorus.
Elliott Smith1990s–2000s · Indie folk / Lo-fi / Singer-songwriter
When Bright Eyes revisited 1998's Letting Off the Happiness for its 2022 reissue series, the chosen cover wasn't incidental: "St. Ides Heaven," by fellow Omaha native Elliott Smith, is the song Oberst was listening to at fifteen while the album was being recorded. "Elliott's songs have been such a part of my life," he told Nylon, describing a debt that never quite aged out of him: "I don't know, maybe I just never grew up... I guess I'm still a teenager at heart." Asked in 2000 to rank Smith against Simon Joyner, Oberst placed Smith just behind — "good too," but not quite the same pull.
listen: upstream & heresource: CWAS — "Bright Eyes ↗
1995
St. Ides HeavenElliott Smith
2022
St. Ides Heaven (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)Conor Oberst
listen forSmith's original is just voice and a single unhurried guitar, almost too quiet to register the menace in the lyric. Bright Eyes' 2022 version, sung with Phoebe Bridgers, keeps that same hushed, close-mic'd intimacy — neither singer pushes for a big moment — even as the arrangement fills in gently around them, proof that what Oberst absorbed from Smith wasn't a sound so much as a way of singing quietly about something dark.