A Concert by the Famously Melancholy Bright Eyes Might Be Just What Dallas Needs

On the day Nate Walcott phoned us from Los Angeles, there was a nerve-wracking wind kicking up ashes from the recent wildfires. Walcott, a trumpeter and pianist who is one-third of the band Bright Eyes, was thinking about his daughter. She’s 8 years old, and at the time, she was safe in school. Still, her rock star dad – about to embark on several weeks of shows – couldn’t help but worry.

“They’ll be staying inside all day,” he says. “It’s going to be like this for a while.”

When he says “like this,” you get the feeling he’s referring to both his fatherly concerns and the dangers of wind and ash. Walcott is soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, but also full of candor and concern for the state of the world – not unlike his band’s brutally honest songs.

Bright Eyes will bring their distinctive mix of melancholia and cathartic lyrics to Dallas for a show at The Factory on Friday, Feb. 28. The concert will showcase their latest album – the well-reviewed Five Dices, All Threes – and while the band isn’t necessarily known for cheering people up, their live show may be just what people need at a time of destructive fires and deeply depressing politics.

In other words, while Bright Eyes have always flirted with hope, their latest record, and their new show, might just be, against all odds, their most hopeful work yet.

Walcott himself felt that hope as the band wrapped up their previous leg of shows in Los Angeles.

“I felt an energy of enjoyment just looking out and seeing people,” he says. “I don’t know, maybe I’m being overly optimistic. Maybe there’s some people that are truly bummed. But I looked out, I was really feeling like, ‘OK, people are having a good time. This is great.’ And that’s not always the case.”

He’s also not the only one feeling hopeful because of the group’s music. Alex Orange Drink, lead singer of the Brooklyn punk band The So So Glos, co-wrote more than half of the album’s songs, and not long before the collaboration with Bright Eyes, he underwent treatment for a rare type of cancer that affects the salivary glands. In a podcast interview, he shared how the title of the record holds a special meaning for him because of its reference to the game of “Threes,” where players roll dice in the hopes of achieving the lowest score (and threes count as zeroes).

“I can’t speak for what it means to [lead singer Conor Oberst], but for me, it’s like going through this against-all-odds dark thing, and you’re gonna roll a perfect roll and just be alright,” he says.

At the same time, fans of Bright Eyes know the album still contains plenty of righteous vitriol, including not-so-thinly-veiled jabs at politicians (“I was cruel, like a president / It was wrong, but I ordered,” begins one song) and Elon Musk, whom Oberst has previously said is “ruining culture one step at a time.”

There’s also plenty of weighty, existential discussion about religion, mortality and pain. “Tiny Suicides,” one of the album’s standout songs, tackles all of those themes in the span of a few lines: “Tried to tip my way into heaven’s gate / Must have lost a fortune along the way / I never saved up for a rainy day / I put it all upon the brass collection plate.”

Walcott, who co-wrote that song with Oberst and Alex Orange Drink, says the band has more or less got their collaborative process down to a science at this point. After all, they’ve been playing together for more than two decades. Still, the inclusion of collaborators like Alex Orange Drink, Cat Power and Matt Berninger of The National provided plenty of opportunity for new ideas and spontaneous bursts of creativity during the writing and recording.

“It’s spontaneous and planned all at once,” Walcott says. “Just timing and place and people being together at the same time.”

One example of this controlled spontaneity can be found on the song “All Threes,” which features Cat Power and a surprising, sprightly piano solo by Walcott.

“Conor had this idea of, ‘Maybe you should get really trippy and do a jazz thing,'” Walcott says. “I sat down and spent half a day writing just that one thing. So, the idea is spontaneous, the execution is not. It’s kind of both. And I went a little wild with it.”

This free-flowing creative process lends itself well to a live show, where the band is sure to attract legions of faithful who have followed their exploits since the days of classic album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and even before. And Walcott, while he’ll miss his daughter, is looking forward to being back in Dallas. He’s a fan of the city’s architecture – the clashing eras, the different vibes and moods all colliding at once.

“It’s a fun city to wander around and get lost in for a little bit,” he says.

As for the show itself, the goal is the same as it was in Los Angeles and every other city in which the band has recently played. For a band prone to tackling the most tragic and complex topics on the face of this earth, it’s a remarkably simple goal.

“I feel like Connor’s been doing a really wonderful job of not sinking into any despair or rage,” Walcott says. “Although that’s there, we all feel it, that’s not what our show is about right now. We’re not saying we’re going to change the world in 90 minutes, but what we can do is make for a really nice night of music.”

Hopefully, he adds, “We leave people feeling better than they felt when they walked through that door.”