Bright Eyes on new album ‘Five Dice, All Threes’, and why “Elon Musk is one of the biggest pieces of shit to ever walk the earth”
nme.comBright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst has spoken to NME about “megalomaniac” Elon Musk, “bullshit” artificial intelligence, his hopes and fears about the forthcoming US presidential election, and how all of this and more has fed into the band’s new album ‘Five Dice, All Threes’.The band’s 11th album, and their second since their return from hiatus with 2020’s ‘Down In The Weed Where The World Once Was‘, features collaborations with Cat Power and The National’s Matt Berninger, and was co-written in part by Oberst and Alex Levine (aka Alex Orange Drink) of New York indie punks The So So Glos.“Alex was in LA in the winter of 2023 writing songs with Tim Armstrong from Rancid and Operation Ivy who has a studio here for different projects,” Oberst told NME. “He was staying with me at my house and I think he got sick of just watching me smoke cigarettes on my porch doing nothing.“He was like, ‘What are you doing today?
Nothing? OK, well let’s write a song.’ We started hanging out with guitars on the porch, very old school, and wrote a lot of songs.
Some of them might end up on one of his records, but a bunch of them felt very Bright Eyes centric. He was instrumental to getting this record made, just out of friendship and encouragement.
He’s just such a positive person.” Oberst said that the record, which has been preceded by the irreverent lead single ‘Bells And Whistles’ and the pacy, punk-inflected ‘Rainbow Overpass’, is “a bit more light, for want of a better word.”“When I make records, to some extent they’re a reaction to the record I made before,” Oberst said. “’Down In The Weeds\ was very heavy, for lack of a better word.
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