Bright Eyes w/ Hurray for the Riff Raff @ The Pageant

Saturday night Bright Eyes brought their Five Dice, All Threes tour to The Pageant in St. Louis.

Bright Eyes originally founded by singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Conor Oberst. Both multi-instrumentalist and producer Mike Mogis, and arranger, composer and trumpet and piano player Nate Walcott joined the band officially in 2006 before the 2007 release of Cassadaga.

I came about Bright Eyes back in the heyday of file sharing programs like Napster and Limewire. I download everything I could find by Conor at the time from his early solo self released stuff to his bands Park Ave and Commander Venus. It also introduced me to the other bands that were part of Saddle Creak Records at the time and seeing the band always takes me back to those days of new music discovery for me.

Before both Hurray for the Riff Raff and Bright Eyes set a pre-recorded message from Conner came over the PA about a chance to win a signed setlist from tonight’s show and meeting the band with a donation to the Poison Oak Project, a charitable initiative dedicated to advancing equity for LGBTQ+ people, with a particular focus on supporting the trans community.

The band kicked off the night ‘Bells and Whistles’ and ‘El Capitan’, a pair of songs off their 2024 release Five Dice, All Threes. The thing I like about a Bright Eyes show is you don’t know what songs you are going to get each night. Sure a few songs are in the same spot every night but looking at a site like setlist.fm you wont be able to know if the band will play a song or not. So when ‘Method Acting’ was played I was extremally happy. It is a song that I put on numerous mix CDs as the opening song in my 20s. Around midway into the set Conor started to loosen up a bit and worked the front of the stage and was dancing a bit during ‘Mariana Trench’. Conor brought out Hurray for the Riff Raff Alynda Segarra for a punk version of ‘Clairaudients (Kill or Be Killed)‘ and did a duet on ‘Lua’ saying he was going to miss this part of the show as it was the bands last night out on tour with them. Before ‘Old Soul Song (for the New World Order)’ Conor said this song is like 20 years old and wrote it around the time I moved to New York when Bush was in office. My friends and I marched in protests about the war in Iraq and I say this every night that we are in an immeasurable amount of a worse place now than we were then. They just erased the department of education. He then urged people to get off their ass and change things. Several people in the audience shouted fuck Trump. The set was closed out with another of my favorite songs ‘At the Bottom of Everything‘. The band did not stay gone for long and performed a three song encore of ‘Road to Joy‘, told the crowd to dance for a cover of ‘Dreaming’ by Blondie with Alynda Segarra, and before the last song of the night, ‘One for You, One for Me‘, Conor introduced his band Mike Mogis, Nate Walcott, and the currant touring musicians MiWi La Lupa – bass, backing vocals, flugelhorn, acoustic guitar, percussion, Alex Levine – bass, backing vocals, and Conor Elmes – drums.