Top 40 '90s albums, #36: Bright Eyes — Letting off the Happiness (1998)

Ah, Bright Eyes. Sad sap music, especially if the year was 1998. But I was, like most teenagers, full of emotions of which I had no idea how I ought deal with, and I wish I’d been listening to Bright Eyes in 1998. I mean, a little bit. I was certainly not doing that — not for a couple of years. I don’t remember the year, but one of my friends went to a Bright Eyes concert. For the life of me, I cannot remember how old we were at the time — but I know we were in homeroom together, where we discovered we were actually born on the same day in the same hospital. He was telling me about the concert he’d gone to see with some friends, this band Bright Eyes. He told me about how the bandwas drunk on stage, about how he loved “The City Has Sex” (it’s a great song), about how transformative an experience it was.

You know how back when I wrote about the Silver Jews album American Water, I talked about how country just wasn’t my thing? I think I was actually wrong about that, sort of. Letting off the Happiness is jam-packed with elements that would fit right into the country landscape. Mike Mogis playing the pedal steel throughout, the lovelorn lyrics, the over-the-top stories: It’s all country music, isn’t it? “Contrast and Compare” is a country ballad if I’ve ever heard one.

I never knew quite how to describe Bright Eyes. I still don’t. But when I think about Letting off the Happiness, I’m always reminded of that friend. We weren’t that much younger than Conor Oberst, really, when this album came out. Just six years — just one year more than the age difference between Ginny and I, now. I’m reminded of the hours and hours I’d spend as a teenager on the Saddle Creek Web Board, where I learned about so, so much music. It’s amazing that place exists as a fragmented memory online these days, It was such a prominent part of indie music discourse back then — always anti-Pitchfork, if memory serves.

None of that’s about Bright Eyes. Letting Off the Happiness isn’t a perfect album, but it’s actually held up surprisingly well. “Contrast and Compare” holds up perhaps the best, with Neely Jenkins, who would later form the well-respected Tilly and the Wall. (I suppose I knew her from Park Ave., as well.) “June on the West Coast,” too. A great song. And really, it’s the first four songs that make this album work — the songs that keep it from just being overwrought music by an 18-year-old. (And if it was overwrought, who could blame Oberst? He was 18.)

What a great album. It’s far, far from perfect. If you’re concerned about a clean, neat production, this isn’t it. Mike Mogis may be a top mixing engineer these days, but this is early, and it’s recorded in the Oberst family basement. It’s rough. It’s crackly. It’s noisy. But it’s raw, and raw works with Bright Eyes.