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Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst: ‘There was a time I wished I’d never made music’

In the last few years, the singer-songwriter has weathered divorce, grief and false allegations of sexual assault. Now, he’s back writing, performing – and rediscovering his political rage

And next thing you know I’m out here with some of my oldest, best friends in the world and everyone’s having fun,” he says, with a nod to the room behind him, a grey backstage space at the MegaCorp Pavilion in Newport, Kentucky, where Bright Eyes are on tour with fellow Omaha natives, Cursive. Oberst today seems once again politically ignited, railing against Elon Musk, the anti-immigrant crackdown, the dismantling of academic centres and legal processes, the attack on trans rights and the funnelling of public money into private contracts, against an administration he describes as “the greatest grift of all time”. He thinks back sometimes to those teenage years in Omaha, when Rage Against the Machine were pretty much the only common musical ground he could find with the high-school jocks, and wonders whether any of them were aware that they were essentially listening to the communist manifesto.

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