Digital Ash In A Digital Urn (A Companion)

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When Bright Eyes released <i>I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning</i> and <i>Digital Ash in a Digital Urn</i> on the same day in early 2005, the response was immediate. “One everybody loved, and one everybody hated,” Conor Oberst tells Apple Music. “This record’s great, this record’s dog shit.” Indeed, while the former’s take on simple ’70s folk rock delivered something like a mainstream breakthrough for Oberst at the time, its synth-pop sister LP was (at least at first) met with derision. But the reality, he says, is that structurally and spiritually, every song was conceived in much the same way, separated by just months. “Especially with <i>Digital Ash</i>, I was always like, ‘If people had just heard the demos or heard those songs with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, they’d be like, “Hey, it’s The Avett Brothers” or whatever the fuck.’ It’s not a different guy singing, and it’s certainly not drastically different subject matter—it’s just songs.” Now people get that chance. In revisiting them both for a series of companion EPs nearly two decades later, Oberst and his bandmates, Nate Walcott and Mike Mogis, decided to emphasize that point by Freaky Friday-ing them—inverting their sonics and palettes. Where <i>Wide Awake</i> highlights like “Old Soul Song (For the New World Order)” and “Land Locked Blues” are reimagined as cavernous synth-pop, <i>Digital Ash</i> standouts like “Arc of Time (Time Code)” and “Gold Mine Gutted” get wrapped in mandolin, pedal steel, and organ, as well as the aforementioned guitar and harmonica. “We tried to be thoughtful about the arrangements, but in general, I thought it would be cool to flip these two on their heads and just make them as polar opposite as possible,” Oberst says. “I think we just had an embarrassment of riches at that point, and you gotta do what feels right. We didn’t have a lot to lose and still don’t.”

via Apple Music