Bright Eyes Are Bringing a Piece of Omaha History to Dallas.
They could play the records everybody already knows, put “First Day of My Life” somewhere near the end and send several thousand people home happy.
– JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM
Instead, Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott are spending this year pulling different pieces of their history back into the room and seeing what they look like now.
In May and June, Bright Eyes marked 21 years of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn by playing both 2005 albums in full at Red Rocks, the Hollywood Bowl and Forest Hills Stadium. This fall, they’re heading back into considerably smaller rooms, including The Studio at The Bomb Factory in Dallas on October 16.
The timing makes sense. Bright Eyes are now nearly three decades into being a band, but their most recent album, Five Dice, All Threes, never felt especially interested in behaving like a victory lap. Released through Dead Oceans in 2024, it found Oberst, Mogis and Walcott making another restless Bright Eyes record: messy in places, funny in others, occasionally uncomfortable and still capable of making a song feel as though it might fall apart while you’re listening to it. Cat Power, Matt Berninger and Alex Orange Drink all appeared on the record.
That gives the Dallas show a useful tension. Bright Eyes have reached the point where the catalog itself is enormous, and where a song written by Oberst in his twenties can sit next to something made by the same people more than twenty years later. The interesting part is hearing whether they still belong to one another.
The support makes this particular tour even better.
Lullaby for the Working Class are reuniting for the run, bringing another piece of the Omaha scene that produced Bright Eyes back onto the road. The band includes Mogis and Walcott, meaning both will effectively open for themselves each night before returning to the stage with Bright Eyes. Ted Stevens, Shane Aspegren, Megan Siebe, Macey Taylor and Tiffany Kowalski complete the touring lineup.
It turns the night into something slightly bigger than a Bright Eyes show without needing to call it a retrospective. These are musicians whose histories have been crossing for decades, playing songs from different points in that history in the same room.
Which, for a band that has spent most of its existence writing about the problem of time passing, feels fairly appropriate.
