On a Sunday afternoon in the connected backyards of two houses in Omaha, Nebraska, 16 people will gather for what Conor Oberst has christened the Davenport Open: a pickleball tournament, organized with the kind of meticulous attention to detail that longtime fans expect of Bright Eyes. Computer-generated brackets. Line judges. Best-of-three matches; best-of-five for the championship.
“ I’m not all that good at it, but I like moving around,” says Mike Mogis, co-architect of Bright Eyes’ sonic estates. “You know, I’m 51. Conor is, I don’t know, fuck, 45? I don’t remember how old he is.”
Get Bright Eyes Tickets Here
We talk a few days before the competition and about one hour after Mogis consumed a gummy called “Laugh.” Some minor details swim away from him but he mostly catches up. “Yes, 45 I think… It’s good exercise and not too physical. Here, though, there’s a lot of injuries in pickleball, ’cause of all the old people playing it.”
Related Video
By a coincidence, the Davenport Open had scheduled first service just a few days shy of Fevers and Mirrors’ 25th anniversary. In separate conversations, the two band mates and neighbors offer contrasts in personality; Mogis repeats that “it’s hard for me to remember back then,” while Oberst maintains a “vivid memory of that recording process.” It’s a difference in temperament more than retention. Both men recall similar details, honed over years of press cycles (Fevers and Mirrors was re-mastered and re-released in 2012 and again in 2022).
Sleeping in cold basements. Planting mics in odd spots around the house, including the kitchen. Hoping bandmates would arrive safely through a blizzard. Cutting together tracks before Pro Tools (or maybe during — Mogis can’t recollect). As Mogis taught himself techniques that would influence the next generation of rockers, the 19-year-old Oberst concluded his final private experiments; every other growth spurt, whether graceful or awkward, would take place in full public view. Fevers and Mirrors isn’t just Bright Eyes pre-breakout; it is pre-expectations, too.
Oberst felt that pressure keenly, as he acknowledged on Bright Eyes’ Fevers and Mirrors follow-up, 2002’s Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground. On “False Advertising,” he sang, “I could tell you the truth like I used to/ And not be afraid of sounding fake/ Now all anyone is listening for are the mistakes.”
Much changed after Fevers and Mirrors raised the band’s profile, Oberst tells me. “The next record, Lifted… we kind of joke about that period where we just wrote a lot of songs about writing songs, you know? Which is, I guess, part of understanding what you’re doing. But it got boring after a little bit.”
He struggles with his “internal world becoming a commodity,” he says. “If you have a brain in your head, there’s gonna be a little bit of reconciling two things — ’cause they’re oftentimes at odds — of doing what makes money versus doing what you’re compelled to do; the art you wanna make. And that’s been a tightrope for me the whole time. Still kind of is, you know? I’ve just got used to it, to the point where I don’t think it affects me as much as when I was younger.”
And of course, exercise helps with the stress. The tournament will kick off at noon and last five and a half hours if every match goes the full fifteen minutes. Oberst has done the math. He thinks the favorites are his cousin Max and Roger Lewis, who sometimes drums with the band. With his pickleball net and brand new lawn chairs, Oberst enjoys the recreational half of the connected properties. Walk up a hill and through a little gate between the fence, and you’ll enter the business side, with Mogis’ studio and the guest house where the band stays.
Mogis’ ARC — that would be Another Recording Company — has become a base for new explorations and old archeology. Not too long ago, Oberst cut a fresh version of “A Song to Pass the Time,” the final track on Bright Eyes’ 2000 album Fevers and Mirrors.
