From beneath the clothy weight of my (post) teenage angst, I could always feel the immediacy of Conor Oberst’s music. It was something cool and vital, like the feeling of a hip flask against my thigh. The weathered misery in his voice seemed endlessly repeated in the streets outside my headphones, something that my ears could instantly cling to, that my brain could make echo in the external world.

But these days, Conor Oberst’s endeavours take time, and increasingly so. Each new album takes me a little longer, and plunges a little deeper. Upside Down Mountain is such an album. It’s a reminder of how we grow with music—that I’m no longer listening to music that simply ratifies my despair, and that Conor Oberst is no longer making it.

Instead, what I’ve been increasingly listening to is Oberst dragging his pen over invisible moments of human experience; unseen tapestries of love, loss, yearning and quiet joy.

Whether it’s the final words between strangers on a doomed plane flight in 2004’s I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, some squatters spraying a mural of a Mexican girl in 2007’s Cassadaga or migrant workers smoking in an orange grove in his 2008 Self-Titled record, Oberst is striving more and more to cultivate unique moments, casting lyrical stones into his songs and watching the ripples bloom.

Over the last decade, the music Oberst has made with Bright Eyes, the Mystic Valley Band and as himself, has departed from the security of its gloom, wandering less certain paths. Increasingly Oberst’s music allows that joy and contentment are possible, even attainable, and aims to turn over every stone to find it. And more so than almost any other album, Upside Down Mountain sees this search turned inward, upon himself.

“Show us what’s inside your head…” intones a brittle, automated voice through a phone line in Oberst’s most recent video for the single ‘Zigzagging Toward the Light’—a request he answers with the opening lines of the song: “I’m blessed with a heart that doesn’t stop. My mind’s a weathervane, it spins around just like a top.” And his mind is truly like a weathervane, slipping between different stories, situations and moods. But always (as the song very much suggests) heading towards the light.

 

The sound of Upside Down Mountain retains the sonic consistency of his more recent work, Bright Eyes and Mystic Valley Band included. There’s no wild departures, just different colours to match whatever direction the song’s lyrical content is listing in. Colours like the weeping tremelo in  ‘Artifact #1’, the haunting pedal steel in ‘Midnight at lake Unknown’ or the gales of distortion hanging over ‘Governor’s Ball’. I freely admit to wanting to use the word ‘beautiful’ more than once to describe the warmth of the album’s insides. It’s a beauty born of contemplation, doubt, and correspondingly, hope.

Time has indeed passed, and Conor Oberst has moved gently with it, the grief of his youth transfigured, unfolding into a richer spectrum of frailty that makes him, in 2014, more universal and vital than ever before. Listen, then repeat.

BEST TRACKS: ‘Zigzagging Towards the Light’, ‘Midnight at Lake Unknown’, ‘Hundreds of Ways’