Review: Bright Eyes @ House of Blues 4/18

Photo credits: Shawn Brackbill

Review by Sophia Bartlett

Two very different crowds converged on Lansdowne Street: those attending Bright Eyes at the House of Blues and those heading to the Red Sox game on Friday, April 18. Thankfully, if anyone ended up in the wrong spot, the backdrop on stage reminded the crowd, “You are now at a Bright Eyes Concert.”

The band’s 2025 North American tour supports their new album, “Five Dice, All Three,” released last September, and marks the 20th anniversary of the iconic album, “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning.” Most of the songs played during the show were from these two albums; however, across the 23 songs the band played, a wide variety of songs from various albums were featured.

Conor Oberst sounded great during the show. Not only were his vocals crisp and technically great, but he also had a lot of energy on stage during the show. He appeared to be having a good time on stage himself, dancing and jumping around from one end to the other. People in the crowd next to me were commenting on how “with-it” and healthy he seemed to be during the set.

At the end of September 2024, Bright Eyes posted on Instagram that they were canceling all upcoming 2024 shows due to a health issue with Oberst and his vocals.

The band played for almost two hours, keeping the audience’s energy high throughout the show. This was my first Bright Eyes show, and I had heard previously that the shows are sometimes inconsistent, with really good shows and really not-so-great shows. With this in mind, I went to the show with no idea what to expect from Oberst and the show as a whole. I was pleasantly surprised by how engaging the band was, as well as how engaged the crowd was in return.

If you were looking for a show to escape the current political state of the Country and the World, this was not the right show for you to go to. Before singing “Trains Still Run on Time” from “Five Dice, All Three,” Oberst pointed out that the title of the song is a reference to a Mussolini fascist propagandistic statement. “We all know thats not fucking true,” said Oberst.

When introducing “Old Soul Song (for the New World Order),” Oberst began with an almost five-minute rant about the current political state of the United States.

He started with an anecdotal story of how he moved to New York City in 2003, and he found himself protesting in the streets against the US entering the Iraq War. “We felt very powerful, I had never really protested before, I’m from Omaha [Nebraska], you know, nobody does that, or at least back then,” he said.

“It taught me a lot, which is not that you shouldn’t protest, but you have to protest louder and stronger,” he said about how the US continued to go to war after protests against the war had taken place. He appeared upset and angry as he discussed how the song, which is almost twenty years old, still holds significance in today’s world.

He described “Old Soul Song (for the New World Order)” as an “antiquated” protest song, commenting on how the lyrics refer to an alarm clock radio, that he’s “not even sure if those exist anymore.”

Oberst went on to show his support for Harvard Univeristy standing its ground against the Trump administration, “I fucking love you…that is so amazing that they are standing up to those fools, because for God-fucking-sake its Harvard,” he said.

He also expressed the terror he feels watching the video of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk being detained by ICE officers last month. “I swear I see that video when I close my eyes,” he said. He received a lot of support from the crowd during this part of the show, showing how much the crowd agreed with his statements.

“We need to do everything we possibly can to resist whatever is happening right now…I am going to play you a very pointed protest song…its called ‘Old Soul Song (for the New World Order)’, or Elon’s new fucking wet dream facist world order because thats where we’re going to fucking go unless we do everything we can now,” he finished off the rant with before singing. The crowd erupted in cheers.

He talked about how he associates the city of Boston with a sense of personal political hope. He told a story of how the band was in Boston the night President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, and the hope he felt both in himself and the hope resonating off the city. “Man, I really felt like an American that night, real proud,” he said. “You guys should be proud of the things you stand for, and we need that now more than ever.”

The Bright Eyes show also coincidentally took place on the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s midnight ride, and a reenactment was taking place in another part of Boston on Friday night. Oberst took the chance to dedicate “At the Bottom of Everything,” played during the encore, to both “Paul Revere and whatever is left of our beautiful America.”

“Take care of each other, do something nice for someone you love, that’s great. Do something nice for a stranger, that’s even better. And if you do something nice for someone you don’t even really like that much, then you’re onto something. Take care, Boston. Mwah.”