Clairaudients (Kill or Be Killed)
Part 1 of "A Thick Mist of Change"
Welcome to “A Thick Mist of Change,” a series of essays where I review every song on my favorite album, Cassadaga by Bright Eyes, exploring its lyrics and themes, soundscape, the musicians who contributed to the song, reflections from the artist, and the song’s place in the album.
A quick request before we start: I am hoping to include Cassadaga-inspired art in future posts, so if you would like to contribute something you have created, please email thickmistofchange@gmail.com.
“Clairaudients (Kill or Be Killed)” is the haunting first track of Cassadaga by Bright Eyes, introducing listeners to the outer edges of the album’s universe.
The Bird’s Eye View of “Clairaudients (Kill or Be Killed)”
Bright Eyes albums always start with a hill to climb, or what lead singer and songwriter Conor Oberst calls a “way to ward off casual listeners.” Cassadaga is no different, and the payoff is rewarding, with the messy avant garde symphony building a panic attack into Conor’s calm delivery of a devastating message: love didn’t work against a world of cutthroats. The matter-of-fact, almost sanguine delivery of this message pours with potency.
The song’s subtitle “Kill or Be Killed” seems to be a reverse echo of, or possibly a jaded though tongue-in-cheek response to, the overarching theme of another seminal Bright Eyes song, “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and To Be Loved).” The last line of 2002’s Lifted serves as a thesis statement for the album: “How grateful I was then to be part of the mystery/To love and to be loved/Let’s just hope that is enough.” But “Clairaudients” suggests maybe it was not. If Lifted was an album about being pulled up out of darkness by friends and the binding gravity of music, Cassadaga offers a more sober look at forces shaping the world beyond a tight circle of friends and the inner journey necessary to find true peace. Conor was steeped in early Bush-era rage during Lifted but he’s seven years in when we find him in Cassadaga. He has seen more of the world and felt the bitter disappointment of a second Bush term. It’s hard to blame him for the conclusions he draws, especially when you view them through the prism of where we are today.
The Lyrics
Corporate or colonial
The movement is unstoppable
Like the body of a centerfold, it spreads
To the counterculture copyright
Get your revolution at a lower price
Or make believe and throw the fight, play deadIt's exploding bags, aerosol cans
Southbound buses, Peter Pan
They left it up to us again
I thought you knew the drill
It's kill or be killedFuture Markets, Holy Wars
Been tried ten thousand times before
If you think that God is keeping score, hooray
For the freedom-fighting simulcast
The imminent and the aftermath
Draw another bloody bath to drainLike the polar icecap centrifuge
First snowman built at the end of June
He slicks his hair for the interview
His fifteen-minute fame
Would you agree times have changed?
Cassadaga kicks off with a clairaudient guiding us through all of the vortexes and spiritual meccas scattered across America, where you can go to find peace or transformation or something else you won’t stumble upon in day-to-day American life. A clairaudient is a medium who has “the power to hear sounds said to exist beyond the reach of ordinary experience or capacity, as the voices of the dead.” Think of a clairvoyant, but in the spectrum of sound. According to a Cassadaga-era interview, these recorded voices are “snippets of conversations Oberst recorded by dialing psychic-hotline numbers.” Conor revealed that at the time of the interview he was “still in the process of contacting the psychics to obtain legal clearance to use their voices on the track.” He quipped, “Well, they probably already know, right? They’re telepathic.”
The exploration of mysticism on this album is a continuation of Conor’s fascination with and weariness of human belief. He’s a sponge that soaks in worldviews and squeezes out songs that lay them bare, all at once marveling at the power of belief while being confounded and terrified by it. “Ultimately I think all beliefs are the same,” Conor said in a 2011 interview. “They all want to think we’re more than just this, that we can see and touch. I don’t look down upon them. I’m actually in awe. But there is always something for me that is a turnoff or breaks the suspension of disbelief.”
The themes running through “Clairaudients” remain prescient today: the pornographic allure of capitalism (“Like the body of a centerfold it spreads”), the co-optation of social movements (“the counterculture copyright/Get your revolution at a lower price”), the failure to address climate change (“the polar icecap centrifuge/First snowman built at the end of June”), the treatment of collective action problems as ones that can be solved at the individual level (“Exploding bags, aerosol cans/Southbound buses, Peter Pan/They left it up to us again/I thought you knew the drill”), the violence and corruption of organized religion (“Future Markets, Holy Wars/Been tried ten thousand times before/If you think that God is keeping score, hooray”), and the big closing line that seems to assess Bob Dylan’s “Times They Are A Changin’” from the perch of about 50 years in the future (“Would you agree times have changed?”).
That last line is bursting with irony. Times have indeed changed, so completely estranged from the world 60s folk singers imagined to be unfolding. Oberst offers a powerful metaphor in the snowman who “slicks his hair for the interview” to get his “fifteen minute fame.” His narrow self-interest brings on his own destruction. It’s a playful image: a melting snowman combing his ducktail back to describe the disaster to the world, a mocking of the journalistic “view from nowhere.” But the joke only lasts as long as it takes to realize the snowman is us, and we are sweating it out in the beating sun.
In an interview with a Dutch magazine, Conor made clear what he meant by “the movement” in the opening verse:
“I mean colonial power, economic imperialism, embodied by big business. I think they are unstoppable, no matter what politics tries to do to them. We have an economic problem that cannot be solved. The most gentle liberal people in the Western world keep talking about change, but what needs to change to bring balance to the world is being held back by a small group. They refuse to live in a way that would give everyone in the world a bearable life. That is the problem.”
During the Cassadaga era, the band dressed in all white and Oberst grew his hair out to his shoulders. He looks like he walked out of the cover of Abbey Road, sans Lennon’s beard. I’ve long wondered if this look tied into the themes of this song and in some ways, the politics of the entire album. While he embodies the era’s symbolism, he makes no secret of his cynicism about the uncontainable spread of corporate power and what the flailing revolutionary spirit of the 60s ultimately achieved. “In the 1960s, there was protest and music and this amazing force that shaped the policy of the country and society itself,” Oberst mused in an interview about the album. “It’s not that the music was so much better or that the people were more motivated; it was just a moment in history when everything was aligned for that to be possible.” In his fantastic book about the Beatles and the 60s, “Revolution in the Head,” Ian MacDonald calls the youth culture of the 60s a “spiritual crisis en masse” and provides a theory that ties together these themes:
“In the Sixties… socially liberating post-war affluence conspired with a cocktail of scientific innovations too potent to resist: TV, satellite communications, affordable private transport, amplified music, chemical contraception, LSD, and the nuclear bomb. For ordinary people - the true movers and shakers of the Sixties - these factors produced a restless sense of urgency headily combined with unprecedented opportunities for individual freedom. Abandoning a Christian world of postponed pleasure for a hungry secularism fed by technological conveniences, they effectively traded a hierarchical social unity in which each ‘knew his place’ for the personal rewards of a modern meritocracy… The true revolution of the Sixties - more powerful and decisive for Western society than any of its external by-products - was an inner one of feeling and assumption: a revolution in the head. Few were unaffected by this and, as a result of it, the world changed more thoroughly than it could ever have done under merely political direction.”
Conor deftly tells a similar story of how the counterculture was overrun by the simultaneous shift away from mass religion and towards the comforts and apathy of materialism, themes that also play strongly in the next song on the album, “Four Winds.” Cassadaga, both as an album and the spiritual retreat, seems to land on this same conclusion: the only place to find true peace is inside of ourselves. "In my mind, it's a pilgrimage record to find peace of mind," he said. "It's a search for contentment, which is what I'm always looking for, until I get it, then I want out, I want chaos."
The Soundscape and Creators
“Clairaudients” introduces us to core elements of Cassadaga’s soundscape, though no single song on the album can capture the breadth of its sonic adventurism. The orchestra that sweeps throughout the album, beautifully arranged by Nate Walcott, makes a chaotic entrance that echoes a “spiritual crisis en masse,” eventually falling into the structure scaffolded by the lyrics with flourishes pecked through the toxic wasteland painted by Oberst, and finally building into a triumphant, cinematic outro veering into Fantasia Land. That victorious finale is disrupted by a concluding, unsettled chord (a minor fourth for all my fellow music theory nerds) that makes clear this struggle is not, and may never be, over.
M. Ward plays a reverb-soaked electric guitar through what sounds like a transistor radio, audible only in the calm moments before the song reconstructs itself following its frenzied opening. Mike Mogis’ iconic pedal steel blends with Nate Walcott’s organ beside Conor’s vocals in the first string of verses, subtly building a sense of floating upwards - a balloon that is perpetually deflated by the final chord of the the progression (feel it in the lines “it spreads,” “play dead,” “I thought you knew the drill,” “hooray,” “to drain,” and “fifteen minute fame”). The following string of verses builds further, with the orchestra holding tight to a beat by drummer Janet Weiss (former Elliot Smith and Sleater-Kinny drummer and current Quasi who makes several impactful performances on Cassadaga).
Conor’s controlled vocals walk up and down the staircase of the chord progression, producing one of the most interesting melodic sequences of the Bright Eyes catalogue. Here we are also greeted by two members of a four-piece angelic choir that makes the album shimmer from front to back. Rachael Yamagata and Z Berg hold down the smokey end of the Cassadaga Choir and appear here, providing rich layers of backing vocals that swoop in and out of the soundscape (singing “Victory! Defeat! Victory!” and “Oh Allah! Oh Jesus please!”). The two other members of the Cassadaga Choir, Stacy and Sherri DuPree of the band Eisley, will appear later in the album. Hassan Lemtouni also makes a brief appearance in the outro, blending into the apocalyptic ambiance on this track before his incredible feature in “Coat Check Dream Song.”
What It Means to Me
Bright Eyes sets the table for this ambitious album in its opening track. Reverberating the song’s lyrics, the music of “Clairaudients” lights a match near a tinderbox of apocalypses on the horizon. There’s an eeriness here that may obscure the themes of rebirth and the richness of life buried throughout the rest of the album, but “Clairaudients” gives the world of Cassadaga its context. It says: Here is what we are stepping into together. Let’s see what comes. That feels especially potent today, as we live through deeper and deeper backsliding into authoritarianism. Conor’s foresight here is as impressive as it is depressing.
“Clairaudients” also represents a fresh lyrical style from Oberst that breaks from much of what came before Cassadaga. Conor is famous for delivering a direct, painfully honest line that leaves no ambiguity about what he means. On Cassadaga, he starts deploying a sweeping, detached surrealism that places vivid but disparate concepts together and forces the listener to reckon with their meaning. On their own, they are evocative portraits of their subject, but take a step back and you can see a vast constellation of interconnected stories. It’s a moving form of writing, especially in the hands of someone as talented with words as Oberst. The same richness that brings older Bright Eyes songs alive is still here - and it’s worth the time it takes to dissect.
What are your thoughts about “Clairaudients”? How did this song affect you? What other meaning did you find that I missed? Add your thoughts in the comments! Next month, I’ll explore “Four Winds,” a roaring Americana rock song that sweeps you up across the country in a voyage through the end times.
I really chime with what you said about the shifting lyrical style - "On their own, they are evocative portraits of their subject, but take a step back and you can see a vast constellation of interconnected stories."
This is something I often think about with Oberst lyrics from Cassadaga onwards. I think of this style in terms of collage or mosaic. And it leaves the listener to join a lot of dots.
It’s so great to see someone be passionate about this album. It’s my favorite of theirs. You have some really great insights here about the theatrics of the song and what they might mean. It goes to show how much can be said not just in the lyrics but in the cadence and melody of the song. I’m excited for next time, Four Winds is one of my favorite songs—and you’re an excellent writer! Thanks :)