Conor Oberst
Phoebe Bridgers
$36.00 – General Admission Floor
$36.00 – Reserved Balcony
*plus applicable service fees
Tickets are also available service charge free at The Fox Theater’s Box Office (located on the 19th street side of the theater) on show dates and on Fridays from noon – 7:00pm.
Conor Oberst has partnered with Plus 1 so that $1 from every ticket sold will go to support Planned Parenthood and their work delivering vital reproductive health care, sex education, and information to millions of women, men, and young people in the US and worldwide (www.plannedparenthood.org)
Conor Oberst joined his first band at the age of 13 and has been releasing music since 1993. Over the next two plus decades, he’s released cassette-only recordings, split 7-inches, and a dozen albums of uncommon insight, detail, and political awareness with his band Bright Eyes, under his own name, as a member of Desaparecidos, as leader of the The Mystic Valley Band, and with the Monsters of Folk supergroup.
While it’s been two years since his last solo album, Oberst didn’t expect to record an album this year. He hadn’t even written any songs. But like John Lennon so famously said: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Which goes a long way toward explaining how his fourth solo album Ruminations (Nonesuch Records) was born. He had moved back to his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska last fall after being briefly hospitalized in Jacksonville, Florida and being forced to cancel a tour with his rock band Desaparecidos, due to what doctors said was definitely laryngitis, anxiety, exhaustion, and, following an abnormal result from an MRI, possibly something very wrong with his brain.
Oberst realized he needed to record the songs right away, in order to capture the kind of raw intensity and rough magic behind them. He enlisted the help of his longtime friend, engineer Ben Brodin. The two of them entered Omaha’s ARC Studios, which Conor cofounded several years ago with Bright Eyes cohort and producer Mike Mogis, and emerged 48 hours later with the completed solo album. Recorded sparsely with a quiet hushed grace, and using only Oberst’s acoustic guitar, piano, and harmonica as instrumentation, Ruminations has none of the sound collages or found sounds of records past.
Making and playing music has always been a healing balm for the sometimes troubled musician. And this time it especially seemed important. It was if he was writing himself back to himself. Back to sanity. Back to understanding what is really important and has meaning for him.