As Bright Eyes revisits its landmark albums with a Woodstock cannabis collaboration, Conor Oberst reflects on sobriety, survival, and staying human.
For a certain kind of person, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning was not just an album. It was survival literature.
It lived in burned CD binders, scratched iPods, shitty car stereos, headphones worn during long walks after bad nights, worse relationships, panic attacks, protests, hangovers, and moments where the future felt like a collapsing building you were somehow expected to live inside. Bright Eyes did not soundtrack the 2000s indie experience so much as emotionally document it in real time.
When Bright Eyes released I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn simultaneously in 2005, Conor Oberst became the reluctant voice of a generation that felt politically betrayed, emotionally overexposed, artistically restless, and permanently suspicious of American optimism. One album leaned folk, ragged, intimate, and politically furious. The other drifted through electronics, delay, experimentation, and alienation like a transmission from a nervous breakdown happening inside a laptop.
Twenty-one years later, Oberst is revisiting both records for a series of anniversary shows culminating June 6 at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens. Bright Eyes has also partnered with Woodstock on a limited-edition cannabis collaboration themed around the albums: a sativa tied to Wide Awake and an indica inspired by Digital Ash.
On paper, that combination could sound cynical. Legacy indie band meets weed branding in late capitalism. But talking to Oberst now, the collaboration lands differently because his relationship to cannabis — and to himself — has fundamentally changed.
This is not the same Conor Oberst who once romanticized collapse in public.
And honestly, that may be the most meaningful part of the story.
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Author: Kyle Rosner / High Times
