It was made without customary producing partner Mike Mogis, the most consistent member of Bright Eyes through the years. It’s not on Saddle Creek, but on the more pedigreed Merge. And the signs are there: More than a dozen albums into his discography, his latest is his first album under his own name since his teenaged cassettes. But it would be natural for him to seek some way short of dying to beg a bit of reconsideration. Not to be too woe-is-Conor-to his credit, he seldom bitches about the backlash. That his Dylanisms brought Rolling Stone to declare Oberst the top “songwriter of 2008” months before this new album was even released is only one more item in the dossier of the prosecution. He’s been mocked for his emo-ish eyeliner and sweaters, canoodling with People magazine starlets (unhelped by his occasional callow blather about his own mack-daddy mojo), for his whiny/shouty vocal style, rounds of public substance abuse, folk-rock throwback semi-melodies and, most of all, his fraught-wrought lyrics and the way Bright Eyes groupies-many of them in the music press-suck it all down like watery draughts of Pabst. Ever since, Oberst has served as a skinny, bobbed and bobbing target for those aiming at superiority in the rock-taste status sweepstakes. His early coffeehouse gigs and his group Commander Venus stirred up an unheard-of amount of notoriety for a 10th-grade songwriter from Omaha, and then he and his friends followed by forming the band Bright Eyes (among several others) and prosperous clubhouse label Saddle Creek. Former prodigy ventures to Mexico to record transitional album without longtime producerįor half his life, 28-year-old Conor Oberst has been schlepping around a prodigy’s burden.