Cassadaga

About

After the success of <i>I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning</i> made Bright Eyes a mainstream concern, Conor Oberst found himself grappling with the trappings of minor celebrity and—thanks to a new major-label deal outside of the US—a recording budget unlike any he’d ever enjoyed. The result was <i>Cassadaga</i>—a sprawling, string-embossed spiritual quest that took its name from a small community in Central Florida known for its unusually high concentration of psychic, healer, and medium. “I went there a couple different time, and a lot of the ideas came out of that, just thinking about the intersection of different religious belief,” Oberst say. “It’s a pretty human thing to want to believe in something, but I’ve never been really good at that. There was a searching aspect to the whole record.” Whittled down from over 30 songs recorded across sessions in six different citie, <i>Cassadaga</i> lands somewhere between the symphonic ambitions of <i>Lifted</i> and the intimate folk rock of <i>Wide Awake</i>. There are thick, choir-abetted blasts of psychedelic pop and country (“Hot Knives”) and warm, lived-in rock tunes (“Classic Cars”), existential shuffles (“I Must Belong Somewhere”) and spectral heartbreakers (“Lime Tree,” the first and only song that’s come fully formed to Oberst in a dream). “We went to Chicago just to record a bunch of percussionists in a room, and into Capitol in LA just to do strings in the most hi-fi way possible, with a 40-piece pickup orchestra,” he say. “I don’t think it was so much that we felt we had to go big, but we just were entertaining all the ideas we had, because we had the time and the money to.” .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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