Happy 20th Anniversary to Bright Eyes’ sixth studio album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, originally released January 25, 2005.
According to the Pew Research Center, 72% of Americans in March 2003 thought that the invasion of Iraq was the right idea. By February 2005, the month after the release of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, that number was down to 47%. The tide was turning against one of the defining premises of U.S. politics.
I was twelve. So, I’m not going to pretend that I had a particularly informed perspective on the war or that I was listening to the coolest new records (my anti-war music was what my peers in middle school were listening to, i.e., Green Day’s 2004 effort American Idiot). But I am endlessly fascinated by this period in U.S. history because it revealed the cracks in the political establishment that would then define politics starting in 2016. Remember that President Trump was opposed to the Iraq War, and channeled the anger of voters who thought that the invasion was wrong. A lot of today’s weirdness can be traced to this one political event.
This makes I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, Bright Eyes’ 2005 emo-folk masterwork, a useful album for us today. It is very clearly an anti-war record, but songwriter Conor Oberst takes the wrongness of the war as a premise; he saw where the wind was blowing and didn’t bother convincing us. Instead, he asks a different and ultimately more interesting question: if the war is a crime, what does that mean for the country committing that crime? For the spirit of the people living there? Or, as Oberst put it on “Road To Joy,” “I read the body count out of the paper. Now it’s written all over my face.”
Malaise hums through the first few verses of “Land Locked Blues.” The song begins describing a breakup and verses bounce between flashbacks and post-separation blues. Oberst reminisces and processes in equal order, and the most vivid of his flashbacks brings the war into the picture: “We made love on the living room floor / With the noise in the background of a televised war.” There is a deep shame in this lyric (and in the subsequent verse), as Oberst wistfully remembers his moment of joy among other people’s suffering. Before the song’s inciting sadness, there was still a fundamental injustice at the heart of his life. The past feels less pure, the yearning feels even more pointless. At the heart of it lies a disgust at the pettiness of his own desire.
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The self-disdain of Wide Awake isn’t limited to the war. Other tracks overlay the same sense of losing one’s grip on reality to more everyday concerns. “Lua,” an understated string of verses featuring just Oberst’s guitar and voice, is a fixation on temptation. Oberst chronicles a series of events—getting high at random parties, intentionally throwing up your dinner, getting drunk on the train—whose deleterious effects become clear after-the-fact, in the morning. His voice is delicate here, far from the roar we heard on the preceding track “Old Soul Song (For the New World Order),” and its smallness shows that he’s singing from that position of regret—but we know that it’s not going to last once night falls again. It’s an endless loop. We know what the right course of action is, but can’t do it.
Despite all of this—the war, the self-loathing—the thing that brings me back to I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning is the joy. It is the rare album that authentically combines anger and joy into one foggy, intoxicating catharsis. The aforementioned “Old Soul Song,” as well as “Poison Oak” and “Road To Joy” find Oberst and company waking up every instrument in the studio to transcend this endless loop of guilt and depression. It’s all of the communal joy of folk and all of the communal anger of emo at once.
It doesn’t solve the problems. It doesn’t end the war, reunite the divorced parents, end the eating disorder, restore the relationship, stop the police violence, or land the crashing airplane. But for just a moment, it feels righteous. It’s the knowledge that there are others willing to raise their voices against a broken world.
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