OK, this is gonna move REAL fast so snooze you lose. Let this be a lesson to you: Open Phawker, hit REFRESH. Every minute of every day. Week after week. Year after year. Or buy your own damn Bright Eyes tickets, Bucco! Just kidding. Mostly. We have two pairs of tickets to see Bright Eyes at the Kimmel Center on Sunday! To qualify all you have to do is sign up for our mailing list (to the right of this post, at the bottom of the masthead). Trust us, you want to do this. Signing up to our mailing list gets you special content alerts and early warnings about special promotions and concert ticket giveaways. And rest assured your email address will never be sold or shared with anyone, we promise upon pain of death. Us not you. Then send an email to FEED@PHAWKER.COM with the words TURN AROUND BRIGHT EYES in the subject line, along with your full name and a mobile number for confirmation. And you’re in! Thirteenth and 25th person to sign up for our mailing list wins. Good luck and godspeed!
PREVIOUSLY: The biggest cliche about Bright Eyes — aka 24-year-old 34-year-old indie-pop pinup boy Conor Oberst — is that he’s emerged as the latest “new Dylan,” a Mr. Tambourine Man for the O.C. Nation. Like all cliches, this one’s been worn meaningless by overuse. And yet, like any good cliche it’s essentially true. Heck, Oberst already got props from the last “new Dylan” who amounted to anything: Bruce Springsteen. Like Dylan in his prime, Oberst writes long, elliptical narratives–weaving word-clotted threads of angst and regret, anger and shame, ecstasy and joy, through a camel’s eye of symbolism, creating word circuses that fascinate even when they flirt with meaninglessness. As with Dylan’s songs, when you boil them all down, they’re essentially about one thing: the wonder of consciousness. Baby I’m amazed, therefore I am. Both Bob Dylan and Oberst come from the Midwest–Dylan from Hibbing, Minn., and Oberst from Omaha, Neb. (his dad actually works in that iconic Mutual of Omaha skyscraper). Both migrated to New York City to pursue their chemical fortunes, riding into town on a ribbon of personal myth and self-invention. Both are–or in Dylan’s case, were–J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield incarnate: impossibly young, madly poetic and profoundly alienated. Both mastered the art of courting attention while seeming to want to be left alone. Both have voices that are, to put it charitably, acquired tastes, and yet they’ve both managed to convert a laughably limited range and a very casual relationship with pitch into a remarkably expressive instrument. Lastly, and most importantly, both have managed to express definitively what it feels like to be young and alive and trying to mapquest meaning with only an acoustic guitar for a compass. As a result, they’ve become existential weathermen for large, loyal followings eager to know which way the metaphysical winds are blowing. – JONATHAN VALANIA
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