Four Winds
Part 2 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. Last month I covered “Clairaudients (Kill or Be Killed).”
If you are an artist and would like to submit artwork to be featured in a post about a song you love on Cassadaga, please email thickmistofchange@gmail.com.
The Bird’s Eye View of “Four Winds”
“Four Winds” is a fiddle-driven folk rock song that roars through America and leaves no branch unshaken.
Selecting “Four Winds” as a single when their spotlight was brightest was an audacious choice for Bright Eyes, given the song’s scathing critiques barely hidden beneath its catchy tune. “Four Winds” sweeps us up into an ever-changing scenery, seamlessly transporting listeners into graffitied warehouses, ivory towers, a meditation retreat, and the badlands to tell the story of an emerging apocalypse. You get the sense that Conor Oberst wrote these words in watercolor, with his evocative and cerebral myth-making covering so much ground that you’ll need to listen more than a few times to piece it all together. Fortunately, it’s a joy to listen to, as the tapestry of a wailing fiddle, shimmering organ, and dancing mandolin drive the song forward, pierced only by Conor’s split-flecked, consonant-forward, melody-tinged raps in the verses and tight three part harmonies in its choruses. This is one of Bright Eyes most fully realized songs and is a testament to the band’s willingness to take their music and subject matter in unexpected directions.
Before I unpack this masterpiece, I need to warn you - I went on a very deep dive in this post. I thought about trimming it back, but ultimately decided that the point of this project is to leave everything on the table. “Four Winds” is a fan favorite and I hope that those who are in awe of it as a work of art will be interested in the complexity of what this song is exploring. This song begs for interpretation, and there are many ways to read it, so please add your thoughts in the comments!
The Lyrics
Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe
There's people always dying, trying to keep 'em alive
There's bodies decomposing in containers tonight
In an abandoned building whereThe squatters made a mural of a Mexican girl
With fifteen cans of spray paint and a chemical swirl
She's standing in the ashes at the end of the world
Four winds blowing through her hairBut when great Satan's gone
The whore of Babylon
She just can't sustain
The pressure where it's placedShe caves
The Bible's blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qu'ran is mute
If you burned them all together, you'd get close to the truth
Still, they're poring over Sanskrit under Ivy League moons
While shadows lengthen in the sunCast on a school of meditation built to soften the times
And hold us at the center while the spiral unwinds
It's knocking over fences, crossing property lines
Four winds, cry until it comesIt's the sum of man
Slouching towards Bethlehem
Our hearts just can't contain
All of that empty spaceIt breaks
It breaksWell, I went back by rented Cadillac and company jet
Like a newly orphaned refugee, retracing my steps
All the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead
They said, "You'd better look alive"And now it's off to old Dakota where a genocide sleeps
In the black hills, the badlands, the calloused east
I buried my ballast, I’ve made my peace
Heard four winds leveling the pinesBut when great Satan's gone
The whore of Babylon
She just can't remain
With all that outer spaceShe breaks
She breaks
She caves
She caves
The lyrics of “Four Winds” take on the quality of the song’s title. When I listen, I feel like a leaf being blown around, getting a glimpse of overflowing moments passing by. As in “Clairaudients,” the stanzas are seamlessly bridged together despite their fractured landscape, delivering a stream of consciousness floating on patterns of the wind. The verses are stacked like nesting dolls, the first reckoning with the degrading social structures that order our world; the second lamenting how organized religion has led us astray from enlightenment; and the third centering the inner journey as the last place to hunker down and wait out the coming storm.
Conor starts this song with one of the most clever and perfectly delivered lines on the album: “Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe/There’s people always dying trying to keep them alive.” Every way humans needlessly divide ourselves from each other sets the stage for our downfall, suggesting that upholding these divisions takes arduous effort and is not our natural state of being. A clarifying lens on this line comes from one of Conor’s luminaries, Simon Joyner, who in 2006’s “Medicine Blues” sang “maybe the lines that define us are just ditches in our heads.” After the scene setting impressionism of “Clairaudients,” no time is wasted interrogating civilization’s inherently compromised nature.
The stakes are instantly made real with the image of “bodies decomposing in containers tonight in an abandoned building.” This brutal scene is punctuated with the devastating beauty in the image of “mural of a Mexican girl… standing in the ashes at the end of the world.” Conor’s gifts as a writer are in full bloom, as he describes this desolate spectacle, in which a squatter has painted this image overlooking decaying corpses with “fifteen cans of spray paint in a chemical swirl.” I’ve always imagined a dark grey concrete wall draped with vibrant colors, even though Conor gives us no reds, yellows, greens, or blues to conjure this image. The four winds appear here, marking the sign of nature and destruction.
I have to admit that I’ve always had a bit of trouble interpreting the first chorus. “But when great Satan’s gone/The whore of Babylon/She just can't sustain/The pressure where it's placed/She caves.” I can’t say that this was a major topic in my childhood bible study, folks. After enough internet sleuthing that my algorithms are starting to recommend some pretty wild stuff, I think I’ve landed on a read that ties into the rest of the themes in “Four Winds.” The Whore of Babylon is a symbol of the apocalypse and there is a line of biblical interpretation that also views her as a symbol of the corruption of civilization by material wealth and worldly power in defiance of God. Conor once reflected that “Great Satan” could be interpreted as humanity or a powerful nation like America, and drew out the rest of the analogy to our unsustainable trajectory, citing problems of our own making like climate change and chemical weapons as having “the potential to cause Armageddon.” By quoting the commanding regime’s own text against it, Conor lays down hypocrisy as kindling for the next verse.
“Four Winds” is perhaps Conor’s most biting and direct critique of organized religion. “The Bible’s blind, the Torah’s deaf, the Qu’ran is mute/If you burned them all together you’d get close to the truth” is like a diss track against half the world. There are a few different ways to read the reference to “poring over Sanskrit under Ivy League moons,” which most obviously depicts our elite institutions still wrestling with ancient notions of the divine. It could also show that only a reflection of the truth is being studied, as the moonlight is just a reflection of sunlight on the lunar surface. By ignoring the actual source of light to study only a narrow and dimmed sliver of its radiance in the moon, we fail to grapple with the truth. This also hints at a sense of detachment in the act of intellectually understanding ancient religious texts rather than spiritually experiencing the wonder of existence.
In 2008, asked about the references to Christianity in his lyrics, Conor said:
“I guess I’m just conflicted. I mean, I want to find something like that. Badly. But in all the forms where it’s been offered to me, they seem fraudulent… [W]hat I know about all the other major religions kind of all just fall a little flat in their… narrowmindedness. I feel like there’s something much more basic than what all these people are worried about. I find it really shocking that two groups that are, from an outsider’s perspective, almost identical—you know, Shiites and Sunnis, or Catholics and Protestants—can actually kill each other over these minor details. And dogma…to me it’s anti- whatever I would consider god-like. Which is, I think, a connectedness and an all-encompassing sort of love for things. I suppose that’s a lot of what Buddhism is, but I haven’t found anything that really hits the mark for me. But it’s fascinating—what people believe in.”
This is a good place to introduce some source material that Conor is heavily drawing from in “Four Winds.” Throughout this song, and particularly in this verse and its companion chorus, we get references to WB Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” itself a work staring down the apocalypse. Yeats was an early 20th century Irish poet who was a religious skeptic with a deep and earnest interest in mysticism, and was hardened by the horrors of World War I and civil unrest in Ireland. Asked about the references to this poem in “Four Winds,” Conor said, “the poem gives the impression that many of the ideas from Buddhism, Christianity and Islam lead to the inevitable Armageddon. That is very interesting. Religions have a great influence on how people think, how their reality is affected, but according to the poem they also lead to despair and doubt.”
The line “to hold us at the center while the spiral unwinds” also draws directly from Yeats’ poem: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…” In “Four Winds,” that outward spreading spiral takes the form of the wind “knocking over fences, crossing property lines,” again showing chaos overwhelming humanity. According to the Poetry Foundation, Yeats “believed that certain patterns existed, the most important being what he called gyres, interpenetrating cones representing mixtures of opposites of both a personal and historical nature.”
In a similar vein, Guardian culture writer Dorian Lynsky observes, “Crucial to ‘The Second Coming’ was the symbol of the gyre (a cone or spiral) and Yeats’s conviction that history moved in 2,000-year cycles. The age of Christ (‘twenty centuries of stony sleep’) was coming to an end and a new era –– antithetical to progress and reason –– would begin with the birth of the rough beast in Bethlehem.” The next chorus invokes this part of the poem as well, with the “sum of man slouching towards Bethlehem.” Conor portrays the progress of the human race as the very beast threatening chaos to the existing world order. “Our hearts just can’t contain all of that empty space.” The spiritual and existential crisis returns. “It breaks.”
Up to this point, the song (and the album) has been setting an elaborate stage for Conor to step into. He describes arriving at Cassadaga “to commune with the dead,” moving directly from the alienation of modernity into this spiritual journey. The “rented Cadillac and company jet” represent the material comforts that both delivered him here and created this spiritual chasm. Comparing this experience to being “a newly orphaned refugee retracing my steps” may speak to the transformation that Conor expects to experience in Cassadaga.
The wind carries us into a final vignette, invoking the genocidal efforts against Indigenous people of the Dakotas. According to the Pluralism Project, “The Lakota Sioux, along with other peoples native to the Northern Great Plains, consider the Paha Sapa, or Black Hills, to be the center of the world, the heart of everything that is, with its seven sacred sites aligned with the very pattern of the stars.” In 2014, Lakota elder Leonard Little Finger wrote, “The desecration of the Black Hills is indicative of the violation of the sacredness of who we are as a people. The insides of Grandmother Earth are being taken; the atmosphere, the area that’s there to protect us and all things is being destroyed.” In this final stanza, Conor confronts an ugly history, lays down an anchor, and waits for an apocalypse. “Heard Four Winds leveling the pines.”
The Soundscape and Creators
Even though I’ve just spilled a reservoir of Digital Ink on a Digital Page about the lyrics of “Four Winds,” I can’t describe the soundscape of this song without talking about the delivery of Conor Oberst’s vocals. The feel of the words are pieced together so perfectly that you would think they originated in this song, broke apart centuries ago, and we’ve been borrowing shards of it to communicate ever since. The shape of each syllable is placed just so and the syncopation almost acts as a percussive instrument. It is one of his best performances and showcases the unique features of his voice.
“Four Winds” sets the Americana tinge of the album, with an iconic double stop fiddle line from Anton Patzner that is delivered with the intensity of a hornets nest. Patzner’s blaring intro line represents the midpoint of this intensity, as the subtle drawn out licks in the verses build tension and the musical interlude between the second chorus tears the song to shreds with the help of Mike Mogis’s distorted guitar.
Nate Walcott’s organ is a good companion to Patzner’s fiddle, ripping through the main lick and providing soulful undertones throughout the song. As Patzner does in the first verse, Walcott fills in the second half of the second verse with a subtly melodic line that builds momentum into the second chorus. I encourage you to really listen to what Nate is playing in the second verse right after “shadows lengthen in the sun” and through the rest of the verse. It’s a fantastic melodic line that is covered in timelessness.
The empty first count and crashing backbeat laid down by Jason Boesel (the drummer in Rilo Kiley, the Mystic Valley Band, and a wide swath of Bright Eyes songs) is a centerpiece of the soundscape. You can feel this in the very first moment, with that delay in the beat and quick drop into the song. Dan McCarthy (of Omaha folk band McCarthy Trenching) dutifully holds down the bass with some nice walking lines, especially the moments leading back to the first chord and Boesel’s backbeat. Dan McCarthy just so happens to be the pianist who played on the new version of “A Song to Pass the Time” that Bright Eyes released just a few weeks ago in celebration of the 25th anniversary of Fevers and Mirrors.
I love the three part harmonies in the choruses, which are rounded out by Maria Taylor of Azure Ray and Andy Lemaster of Now It’s Overhead, both frequent Bright Eyes contributors and themselves regular collaborators. A sonically interesting choice of how these lines are delivered is how they land on the vowel “E” even in words that don’t necessarily end in an “E” sound (“She caves,” “It breaks,” etc). These are the same gorgeous voices you hear in the choruses of “Easy/Lucky/Free” singing “Don’t you weep for us/Don’t you weep.”
In sum, the soundscape of “Four Winds” is unique to the Bright Eyes catalogue and it is brimming with brilliant ideas from start to finish.
Interlude: One-on-One with Anton Patzner
I had a chance to interview Anton Patzner about creating and recording his parts on Cassadaga. He was very generous and shared some wonderful insights about his time with Bright Eyes and his contributions to the songs. Patzner first joined the band during the “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn” tour in 2005 and went on to write the fiddle parts for “Four Winds,” “Soul Singer in a Session Band,” and “Middleman.” Below are some excerpts from our conversation. I will release more of our discussion when I review other songs from Cassadaga that feature him.
On how he came to play in Bright Eyes
I had a little act with my brother. He plays cello and I play violin. We would go play on the street and play as loud and fast as we could - almost like metal riffs. The band was called “Judgement Day.” We had a drummer too. We would play live shows and play with distortion… We had a big show coming up and to promote the show we would go play acoustic outside of concerts as they were getting out and pass out flyers to our show. So we went and did that at a Cursive show because Cursive had a cello player and we really liked Cursive. We played outside the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and the band came out and watched us. We were like “Wow this is so crazy!”
Their cello player Gretta [Cohn] gave us her contact information and when our album came out, I wrote to her and sent her the album. When she wrote back, the email said, “Our labelmates are looking for a violin player for a tour. It’s going to be 10 weeks long and the shows are going to be between 1,500 and 5,000 people per night. I can’t say who it is. Are you interested?” And I was like, “Is this real?” It turned out to be Bright Eyes on the Digital Ash tour and The Faint was on the tour too. I played with both of them.
I was just like, starstruck the entire time, basically. I was fresh out of college and super into that scene. So yeah… that is how I first got involved.
On writing the “Four Winds” fiddle parts
They had me do a little two-week Canada tour with them and leading into that tour, Conor was like “Okay I’ve got this new song and I want to have fiddle on it.” And he had me play on it. He’s generally pretty hands-off - he lets people do their thing which is a pretty great way to get awesome stuff out of people. So I basically came up with a riff and he told me, let’s just use the first half of it and loop it. And that’s what it is! I think it was a longer phrase at first and then he said, “Let’s just use the first half.” I was just so stoked when it came to the record, like you are opening a track with a violin and I get to play this epic solo? I couldn’t have been more excited.
On recording “Four Winds”
They were really hands off [in the studio]. They kind of just pressed record and I played… They were surprisingly hands off given how awesome their records are. At the time I was learning about how to make records and I was such a micromanager. It was an eye-opener for me to see that you can make a song like that without [giving much direction]. You just get good players and you know they’re going to do something good and just let them go. I may have done four takes and maybe they cut them together. We did go on tour beforehand, so we worked on it during the Canada tour.
Today, Patzner composes scores for films and plays in Foxtails Brigade and Laura & Anton. Foxtails Brigade’s new record “The Red Album” was released in April 2025.
What “Four Winds” Means to Me
One thing I love about “Four Winds” is that, even with its heavy subject matter, it still gives the sensation of jumping into a car for a long road trip with your arm out the window and the panorama of the American landscape unfurling all around you. This will forever be a road trip album for me and “Four Winds” is the moment you cross the city line out into the unknown. I have a few pre-smartphone memories of trying to figure out how to get to wherever I was going that were set to Cassadaga. Forever a good one to get lost and found to.
It is hard to overstate the presence of WB Yeats throughout Cassadaga. It has only been through exploring the poet’s biography in light of the references to his work in “Four Winds” that this became clear to me. Automatic writing is a deep channel of spiritual truth for Yeats (see “If the Brakeman Turns My Way”); Yeats says that happiness requires “a re-birth as something not one’s self” (see “Hot Knives”); and Yeats had an obsession with the phases of the moon, linking “historical cycles to the 28-day lunar cycle, contending that physical existence grows steadily until it reaches a maximum at the full moon, which Yeats described as perfect beauty” (see “Classic Cars,” though this one is a bit more of a stretch). The Guardian article I linked above also points out a writing technique deployed by Yeats that he describes as a “productive vagueness” that “makes the poem ever-relevant.” That struck me as an apt description of Conor’s stylistic shift on Cassadaga and is perfectly exemplified by “Four Winds.”
When I first heard “Four Winds,” I was quite disaffected with religion. My family was Catholic but as I grew older, I harbored a deep disappointment not only with the hypocrisy of the church but the way religion was weaponized by the Bush administration and its allies to justify a dark agenda that did not resonate with my values. “Four Winds” so poetically articulated that anger at the precise moment I needed it.
Conor’s critique is sharp in all the right places, but the pockets it opens up haven’t been filled and sealed up in the years since “Four Winds” was released. I don’t know that I would have said this if I was writing this 4 or 8 years after Cassadaga. A humanistic impulse seemed to take hold during this time, but its grasp on power was tenuous. And today, our search for common values that can cut through the divisions Conor brings to light in “Four Winds” feel more distant than ever.
Reflecting on it now, I am caught between the righteous battle against dogma and the dying sense of community that religion once provided. I have met so many people who authentically live out their faith in a humanistic way and have found their community there too, and my cynicism has been eroded by their kindness and acts of service. All that is to say, while I still love Conor’s most biting expressions on “Four Winds,” I have to stand a little further back to appreciate them. At the same time, I find myself landing on a similar conclusion as Conor: these are truths you have to find in yourself. If an organized religion can help you find it, that’s wonderful. But Conor’s weariness is well earned and I think many of us will continue to search for interconnectedness and peace with our place in the universe elsewhere. Unfortunately, that does not necessarily create a foothold for a new world order to replace “your caste, your class, your country, sect, your name, or your tribe.”
Perhaps the most intractable features of this problem lie in the leverage our differences still provide in our collective lives. The power of “us vs them” politics remains unparalleled and the center around which humanistic values might gravitate does not appear to be obvious in our current moment. What makes this so unsettling is that WB Yeats had a theory that Conor doesn’t provide, and I’m sad to share that our mysticism-obsessed Irish poet was a god damn fascist. His “center” was a powerful leader that prioritized order in society above all else. Clearly, Conor’s politics are far afield from Yeats’, making it all the more interesting that these themes can be expressed to such diverging ends.
With all this hindsight and history set against “Four Winds” as a work of art, it’s hard to know our course of action. Fortunately, I think I have just enough self awareness to know that a single song and my scattered thoughts on it could never provide all the answers to the hardest questions of existence. The roadmap it provides raises more questions than answers. But I think that the sum of Conor’s work actually does point in a direction and that’s why “Four Winds” is a meaningful guidepost in the journey. It is in the process of wrestling with these questions that we create some light on the path.
More than maybe any other song on Cassadaga, “Four Winds” leaves a wide breadth for interpretation. I am so curious to hear what others take away from the song. What stood out the most to you? What meaning did you find that I missed? What musical moments made the greatest impact? Please add your thoughts in the comments! I would love to hear what this song means to readers. Next month, I’ll explore “If the Brakeman Turns My Way,” another sprawling folk song about finding balance in a world where fate is outside your control.
If you are enjoying this series, I would appreciate it if you would share it with friends in your life who love good music and storytelling, especially Bright Eyes fans who want to dive deeper on this album.
After reading this I could only squint at the ceiling and wonder how many songs I sing to myself without any comprehension as to the meaning of the words. How long have I loved this song without asking it what it is sharing with me? Fascinating. Thank you for exploring and sharing what you unearthed about this gem.