Digital Ash in a Digital Urn: A Companion

When Bright Eyes released *I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning* and *Digital Ash in a Digital Urn* 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 *Digital Ash*, 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 *Wide Awake* highlights like “Old Soul Song (For the New World Order)” and “Land Locked Blues” are reimagined as cavernous synth-pop, *Digital Ash* 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.”

Digital Ash in a Digital Urn (2005) - A Companion EP (2022) “The first three are innocent in a way, because we didn’t have an audience when we were making them,” Oberst says. “But from Lifted on, I was definitely aware of an audience. Lifted was well-received right away, and then everything happened with Wide Awake and Digital Ash.” Those two albums came out simultaneously. And their lead singles – “Take It Easy (Love Nothing),” from the austere, remote Digital Ash, and “Lua,” from the warm, folky Wide Awake - debuted in the top two slots on the Billboard Hot 100. “First Day of My Life,” also from Wide Awake, would later be voted the Number One love song of all time by NPR Music’s reader’s poll. Bright Eyes had officially broken through. It was a heady, exciting time, but also fraught and tense, both because of the band’s careening new fame, and because of the state of the world. When Bright Eyes made their Tonight Show debut in 2006, they chose to perform none of their shiny new hits, instead delivering a searing, harrowing rendition of their caustic anti-Bush anthem, “When The President Talks To God.” These days, Oberst is still amusing himself by messing with the extremes Bright Eyes baked into this era’s releases, extremes that reflected the polar, with-us-or-against-us, fractious feel of the times. The reworked Digital Ash tracks, originally so clean and elegant, are, on the companion EP, full of “harmonica and mandolins – folky vibes,” Oberst says. While the analogue sweetness of the Wide Awake songs have been put through a detached nihilism filter.

Digital Ash in a Digital Urn is an album that has always suffered from comparison.