Hear how indie rock band Bright Eyes is reinventing classic hits at Providence show
Indie rock act Bright Eyes has evolved quite a bit since singer-songwriter Conor Oberst started it as a DIY project in Omaha, Nebraska, back in the mid-1990s. After going on hiatus in 2011, the band got back together in 2020, with Oberst joined by multi-instrumentalists Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott, and drumming phenom Jon Theodore as a touring member.
As the band's musicians and instrumentations have changed over the years, so has the direction of its music from the way it was originally written. This has been the catalyst for a series of rerecordings of Bright Eyes’ previous material over most of this year. As part of their tour in support of this effort, the band will perform at The Strand Ballroom & Theatre in Providence on Nov. 11, with New Orleans Americana band Hurray for the Riff Raff opening the show.
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On the same day as their Providence gig, Bright Eyes will rerelease their fourth, fifth and six albums: 2002’s “Lifted or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground,” and 2005’s “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” and “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn.” Each rerelease has a companion EP featuring a handful of songs from each album done in a reimagined way.
“Truth be told, we worked on this over a span of many months, so it was all in the same timeframe, but because we’ve been touring all year, we’ve been kind of chipping away at it on and off,” Walcott says. “It’s been a huge project, but we had fun with this one, because of the approach we took of going in opposite directions from the originals. We went a little more electronic and rock with ‘I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning’ and more folky with ‘Digital Ash in a Digital Urn,’ so it was fun to flip those a little bit.”
Walcott said the idea of revisiting their previous material was hatched in 2020, as the band brainstormed projects to stay busy during the pandemic.
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“During that year, people came up with lots of crazy ideas, and I think it was somebody at [our label] Dead Oceans. It sounded like a small thing at the time to rerecord some of these old songs, and we decided to do it for each record. Then it quickly turned into recording and mixing 54 songs.”
The companion EPs are part of a series that has Bright Eyes rereleasing eight albums and a compilation in groups of three. The band just finished up the last installment a few weeks ago, but they decided against including their most recent album, "Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was," since it just came out in 2020.
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“The new record was a little bit too fresh to revisit, so we’re going to let that one sit for a while before we do anything like we just did for it,” Walcott says.
Walcott hopes that fans will appreciate the rerecordings' new spin on their older material.
“Nobody wants to hear a song necessarily rerecorded and treated in the same exact way," he says. "We were trying to come up with new and inventive ways to reimagine this material. ... People should expect something different.”
If you go ...
What: Bright Eyes, with Hurray for the Riff Raff
When: Nov. 11, 8 p.m.
Where: The Strand Ballroom & Theatre, 79 Washington St., Providence
Tickets: $35 advance, $40 at the door
Info: thestrandri.com, (401) 618-8900
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Indie rock band Bright Eyes to showcase rereleased music in Providence
