A Letter to Conor Oberst

Dear Conor,

I want to tell you what your music means to me, but I don’t know how. So instead, let me tell you a story….

When I was sixteen, I lived in a New Jersey town divided neatly into picket fence squares and dotted at even intervals with quiet houses with shut doors. In the morning, like a patchwork quilt, the misty lawns seemed to hold in them a layer of shadow, and at times, all the sadness that lay beneath my town seemed to rise up, more real than my town itself.

I was alone and in awe of the strange, new capacity of my body to contain loneliness. At night, when the moon rose over the roof of my house, and over the white magnolia tree in my yard, I would stand by my window and look out. And I felt myself shiver, and at the same time, I felt a wonder at the great, dark expanse of the night that had somehow slipped inside my body, had become a part of me. I was discovering something—the grandeur waiting in the empty heart of the world, and its capacity to render me insignificant, and alone with it.

I didn’t know what made it so difficult to explain how I felt when I saw or heard something beautiful—sunset that burnt me like a match I’d struck against one of my own hands, a song that struck me with the clarity of a mirror displacing my own reflection and showing me only silver, as if I no longer existed, a boy with dark hair who made me shiver as if it were winter all year round.

When the feelings got to be too much for me, all weird and surreal and unexplainable and unspeakable, I’d stuff my ears into my headphones and put on one of your CD’s. Suddenly, the outside world would fall into quietness, the voices of teachers and family and enemies and friends would go silent, and even my own voice would go silent, and I would float in the gravity-less space of the song, no longer myself, like a speck of dust all burnished gold by the light.

I’d close my eyes and imagine a place called Omaha - farmland, rows of corn, a wide, blue sky, a girl my age named Arienette, wild geese crossing over her head, and her running under them, arms outspread, as if she were the embodiment of absolute freedom.

I heard in the songs and in the tremors of the voice who sung them the jealousy that I could not articulate, the rage against the order, the sameness, the blankness of my life. That voice stood against the smooth, gray streets of my town, and against the even rows of lockers in my school, and against the routines of tests and chores and lessons, and against conformity. It stood—that voice—for self-definition. And I would tell myself that it was okay to have these feelings, because you had them too. And it was okay to be lonely, and to rage against the very structure of the world, because, in Omaha, there were songs, and the songs did not hold you prisoner. In fact, the opposite was true: You created them yourself. So, in hearing your songs, I began to believe in what the imagination was capable of. I began to believe in the existence of an alternate city; music and song paved the streets of it, and it was a place I could visit at will.

At school, I met a boy with black hair and he was younger than I was an even more shy. It turned out that he loved Bright Eyes too, and that just about cemented our friendship, and when we drove around town after dark and sat in the soccer field to read each other poems we’d written, we’d know that we were freaks but that Bright eyes somehow made it alright anyway. We felt the moon shine benevolently down on us from the window of the living room where we played Fevers and Mirrors on the stereo, and we felt loneliness strike down through us from above with the painstaking clarity of a knife, but we didn’t say anything. We just listened.

One night, we went to see your show at Town Hall in New York City, and I wore my Bright Eyes tee-shirt, a girl in the rain holding her violin like a life raft so she didn’t float away. You played all the songs we knew, and then it was time for the encore, and you played “This Is the First Day of My Life,” which I had never heard before, and during that song, I finally got up the nerve to reach over to my side and hold the boy’s hand, and that was the first time we held hands. It felt like I was finally waking up after having been asleep for many years. It really felt the first day of my life. 

At home, I had a guitar, and I dreamed of writing a song that I could sing to myself and maybe to him. After school, in my room, I practiced “Something Vague” for hours on my black and white Stratocaster, trying to will my fingers strong enough to do the hammer ons and pull offs, slowly working my strength up to make the barre that formed the top of the F chord.

One day, I rearranged the chords and strummed a little differently, and sang about the planets and comets and stars in the sky, and about the orbits in life that take you far away from somebody, and soon it was a song about leaving. It was my first song, and I knew right then that it was all true—that I would go to college and leave the boy behind, and that somehow the song had known it first, before I did. The song had somehow unraveled part of the future. It had shown me the truth about who I would be.

I played that song at a friend’s party that summer, and it felt so good to enter the world I had imagined to be real, that I kept on playing that song, over and over, bound by the gravity of my own voice, as the rest of the party whirled into the dark.

The next year, I saw a show you played at an ornate red theater covered in dust and set high up on a hill in New Jersey, and as soon as I saw the spotlight strike the surface of the acoustic guitar, I felt that I wanted nothing more than to be a songwriter and stand where you stood, conjuring up tiny worlds that swam before the stage like mirages, then burst open to invite us all in.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, the other day, at the show, you said something about how difficult it is to hold onto all the ways you used to feel when you were young. As we get older, the precision of our sadness, the dark fear and awe at the universe, the brightness, clarity, and ferocity of first love, they fade out of our lives, becoming something like a vague mist that floats beyond our grip, and we are powerless to stop the partial dissolution of ourselves into that mist, until one day, we find that we have lost track of who we were. It happens when we don’t even realize it, and it is inevitable.

But when I hear your music, I am suddenly sixteen again, and that is a powerful thing you do — taking someone back in time so far, and so quickly. And I think that is what it means to be an artist — to try to hold onto that part of yourself that existed when you were sixteen — that crazy wild freedom of mind hoping to be saved so much that it save itself. And it means holding onto that part of yourself even when the rest of the world wants so badly for you to give it up, and even as it is disappearing.

And even if you can never go back yourself, maybe you can write a song that takes someone else back to how they were then. And I think that is alright, and in the end, maybe more important.

Maybe I will be a singer some day, and maybe I won’t, and maybe I will be a poet, and maybe I will be nothing at all, but in your songs, I will always be alone, wide-eyed, and dumbfounded, just on the verge of a magnificent discovery, like a sailor nearing an unknown shore, its outlines the very borders of her own imagination. And on certain days, the sailor is exactly the same girl as the one who has spent the past ten years standing by herself in the pouring rain, holding onto her violin like the hand of a lover, and no longer even hoping for the rain to stop.

Thank you for helping that girl to exist.

Sincerely,

Amy Klein