Bright Eyes

W/ Good Looks
All Ages

About This Event

All tickets on the floor & mezzanine are general admission, standing room only. Limited seating will be available on both the floor & mezzanine on a first come, first served basis.
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PLEASE RIDESHARE - Parking is limited around the venue. We strongly recommend using rideshare apps like Uber or Lyft for transportation to and from the venue. There is a designated rideshare pick up / drop off location near the entrance for your convenience.

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This show currently has no COVID safety requirements for attendees. This is subject to change. If this changes we will be sure to update this page as well as notify all ticket buyers via email.

Artist Info

Bright Eyes

Sometimes it feels like you hear a Bright Eyes song with your whole body. From Conor Oberst’s early recordings in an Omaha basement in 1995 all the way up to 2020, Bright Eyes’ music tries to unravel the impossible tangles of dissent: personal and political, external and internal. It’s a study of the beauty in unsteadiness in all its forms – in a voice, beliefs, love, identity, and what fills up the spaces in-between. And in so many ways, it’s just about searching for a way through. The year 2020 is full of significant anniversaries for Bright Eyes. Fevers and Mirrors was released 20 years ago this May, while Digital Ash in a Digital Urn and I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning both turned 15 in January. The latter, a singer-songwriter tour-de-force released amidst the Bush presidency and Iraq war, wades through incisive anti-war rhetoric and micro, intimate calamities. On the title track and throughout the record, Oberst sings about body counts in the newspaper, televised wars, the bottomless pit of American greed, struggling to understand the world alongside one’s own turmoil. In its own way, I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning carved out its place in the canon of great anti-war albums by being both present and prophetic, its urgency enduring 15 years later.

In 2011 the release of The People’s Key, Bright Eyes’ ninth and most recent album, ushered in an unofficial hiatus for the beloved project. In the time since, the work of the band’s core members – Oberst, multi-instrumentalist Mike Mogis, and multi-instrumentalist Nathaniel Walcott – has remained omnipresent, through both the members’ original work and collaboration. In recent years, Mogis produced records for beloved folk acts First Aid Kit and Joseph, among others, as well as mixed the fine-spun ennui of Phoebe Bridgers’ breakthrough 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps. Mogis and bandmate Walcott also teamed up to write the original scores for The Fault in Our Stars, Stuck in Love, and Lovely Still, and Walcott worked as a solo composer scoring number of independent feature-length films. Walcott spent extensive time on collaboration; in addition to his arrangement work for Mavis Staples, First Aid Kit, and M. Ward, he contributed studio work to artists ranging from U2 to jazz guitarist Jeff Parker, and also traveled the world as a touring member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Oberst, who’s nearly 30 years into a prolific musical career, spent the last decade in similarly productive fashion. Across three years he released a string of solo albums: Salutations (2017), Ruminations (2016), and Upside Down Mountain (2014), as well as guested on records by First Aid Kit, Phoebe Bridgers, and Alt-J. His punk band, Desaparecidos, emerged from a 13-year hiatus in 2015 with the thunderous sophomore LP, Payola, a white-knuckled disarray of hollered political fury. And at the top of 2019, Oberst and Bridgers debuted their new band, Better Oblivion Community Center, digitally dropping the critically-lauded eponymous debut LP alongside a surprise performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

The heart at Bright Eyes’ songwriting still looms culturally, in films and TV shows and through re-imaginings by other artists. Mac Miller covered both “Lua” and “First Day of My Life”; Lorde’s version of the penultimate The People’s Key track, the funereal-waltz “Ladder Song,” was a focal point of The Hunger Games’ soundtrack; The Killers covered “Four Winds” for their Spaceman EP; and Lil Peep’s “Worlds Away” samples “Something Vague” while Young Thug’s “Me Or Us” samples “First Day of My Life.” Bright Eyes’ expansive catalog has traversed genre, sound, and countless players; unpolished demos or fuzzy folk, electrified rock or country twang. The sharp songwriting and musicianship is all anchored in Bright Eyes’ singular ability to flip deep intimacy into something universal. For so many, for so long, listening to Bright Eyes has been like hearing yourself in someone else’s song – a moment of understanding or illumination, knowing you’re on the same team looking for a way to move through of all this shit. And while 2020 is a year of milestones for the band, it’s also the year Bright Eyes returns, newly signed to indie label Dead Oceans. Amidst the current overwhelming uncertainty and upheaval of global and personal worlds, Oberst, Mogis, and Walcott reunited under the moniker as both an escape from, and a confrontation of, trying times. Getting the band back together felt right, and necessary, and the friendship at the core of the band has been a longtime pillar of Bright Eyes’ output. For Bright Eyes, this long-awaited re-emergence feels like coming home.

Good Looks
Tyler Jordan of Good Looks grew up in a South Texas coastal town dominated by the petrochemical industry, his childhood steeped in the tension between nature and industry, exploitation abundantly present and the wealth gap in eyeshot if you just crossed the street. His father’s church, described by Tyler as “cult-like in its intensity,” was homebase and where he learned to sing. He snuck in harmonies where there was room, and where there wasn’t, and internalized melodies and structures. He bought into the content until he looked elsewhere and discovered a new obsession of studying lyrics for detail and intention.

Paul Westerberg and Spoon were early influences before Tyler gravitated towards artists like Patti Smith, Parquet Courts, and Minutemen. They were all rock bands who had something to say in their lyrics, and more than that, were high expectations he could set for his own project.

Tyler moved to Austin at 19 and spent his first few months busking on the loud and crowded drunken sidewalks downtown. “I used to stand on 6th and Brazos and try to bounce my voice against the brick building across the street loudly enough to have it come back and fill the street below.” It was an exercise that helped him build confidence in his voice.

A short time later Tyler met and befriended his primary collaborator Jake Ames whose own relationship with music began in a Kerrville country radio station where his dad was a D.J. Barely able to reach the faders, he reached for any kind of stringed instrument he could put his hands on. They met in the late-night song-swap circles of the Kerrville Folk Festival campground (where they would also meet Buck Meek and Adrianne Lenker pre-Big Thief). Between volunteer shifts and string jams, Tyler and Jake shared their mutual love of the Texas hill country canon (Blaze Foley, Townes Van Zandt, and Willie Nelson) and discovered their parallel small Texas town musical trajectories. They shared a love of cheap diner food, thrift store baseball caps, and a healthy dose of harmless shit-talking. They began playing in bands together, backing up other songwriters and taking turns in the spotlight.

Tyler was a fan of the albums coming out of Dandy Sounds, a recording studio about half an hour outside of Austin run by producer/engineer Dan Duszynski (of Loma and Cross Record). They met at Chill Phases, an idyllic showcase held at the tail end of SXSW each year on the Dripping Springs property the studio is on and talked about Julia Lucille’s Chthonic and Molly Burch’s Please Be Mine, records Dan had recorded whose layers and focused textures caught Tyler’s ear. Dan agreed to record and produce the songs that would become Bummer Year and added the touches that shaped it into a cohesive whole.

“My body could be put to better use” opens “21,” a song about the structures of capitalism. The chorus falls away to a euphoric guitar run that examines one of those rare moments of actual freedom. The song looks to a future where the greed of corporations is the cause of their own downfall. It’s this message that runs through the album, as if Billy Bragg had been born in a small Texas town instead.

Tyler is equally unafraid to sing about relationships and break-ups. Anthemic album opener “Almost Automatic” is a simple break-up song that amplifies those early days of a new relationship: “Pull the car over, watch the sun go down / Baby I’m just happy I could be here with you / Try not to race ahead, although my heart wants to” before wondering later “Why am I waiting on you?” The song’s inter-played guitars and build create something much bigger than the sum of its parts. They’re not afraid to record guitar solos and this is very much a rock record fronted by a songwriter honing his craft.

Of “Vision Boards” Tyler says “I kept hearing people talk about manifesting things and making vision boards. It really irked me at how privileged that viewpoint is, and how it’s really just another version of ‘you’re poor because you wanna be.’ The song gets at the very real structural limitations that make it hard to succeed in the music business, while at the same time acknowledging my own personal limitations holding me back, and trying to release them.” Lines like: “To the voice inside my head / Shut the fuck up / ‘Cause I tried my best and I am not listening” are married with bright and propulsive guitar lines.

Bummer Year is a record about learning to take care of yourself and tending to relationships that nourish you while wrestling the weak ones away. The songs reflect on what it is to gut your way through your twenties, learning when to apologize and when you’ve got to live with what you sai