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" To me, a political song is also a personal song. Most political activism has been driven by empathy for other people and the desire for a world that's less divisive. Even if songs aren't overtly political, they can make a listener more empathetic. "

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" Sometimes I daydream about having a farm and a wife and some babies and watching the grass grow, but you have to meet the right person for that. "

Conor Oberst

You

Wife

Right Person

" When I started writing songs, I was doing it for myself and a small circle of friends. And gradually, over the years, an audience became involved. "

" I like to feel the burn of the audience's eyes when I'm whispering all my darkest secrets into the microphone. "

" When I would first come to New York on tour, I hated the place. "

" When I try to explain to people the big influences in my life, or at least when I first started, the most important ones were my friends who were also writing songs and were typically four or five years older than me. "

Conor Oberst

Writing

Try

" I like science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and Vonnegut, and I really like Margaret Atwood, 'The Handmaid's Tale.' And you know, so much of science fiction has to do with predicting what's to come, so I think that's really interesting. "

" You can do a lot to shape the feeling of a song by the way you record it. "

" I think that, with anything creative, you should have the freedom to experiment, and that experimentation means not feeling totally responsible for how other people perceive it. "

" I think there's a danger, for me at least, in retreating and going inward and depression. I have to stay diligent against that tendency. "

" A boycott is, inherently, a blunt instrument. It is an imperfect weapon, a carpet bomb, when all involved would prefer a surgical strike. "

" I like ideas, but I don't like being preached to. "

Conor Oberst

Ideas

Being

" It's dangerous to buy into praise and criticism for what you do when you're trying to present your music to people. I don't ignore it completely, but I don't dwell on it too much. "

" I was raised Catholic, and I have an aversion to anyone who takes religion to the extreme. "

" Although Omaha is my birthplace and the place I grew up, I don't see myself spending extended amounts of time there. I feel almost more comfortable and more at peace in New York. "

" There's a lot of optimism in changing scenery, in seeing what's down the road. "

" With science and reason throughout history, what people believed turned out to be false. So I like to keep an open mind to all perspectives and learn and become more fully realised as a person. I just feel we're never going to know what the full picture is. "

" I keep my eyes closed a lot when I'm singing because sometimes it's distracting to see people. "

" It's very strange when people get so focused on what a song means, what actual events inspired a song. That gets people really excited for some reason... But that's what's great about music - however people interpret it, whatever they see, is what I want to be there for them. "

" I used to work at a school as a teacher's assistant, and my mom is a principal at an elementary school. I don't know, I think that's a pretty good life, teaching kids. "

" You can't manufacture inspiration, so a lot of it is still a waiting game for me. There's still a lot of mystery to songwriting. I don't have a method that I can go back to - they either come or they don't. "

" The worst thing you can do as an artist is to repeat yourself. "

" I'm proud that with 'Bright Eyes' we've always experimented and tried to make a different record every time out. "

" I would prefer to be a little nervous, because when you stop being nervous is kind of when you stop caring. "

" I'll write about myself, or people I know, or archetypal characters, but the goal is to get at some truth, not to necessarily convey my own experience as an individual to the world. "

" There's a major underlying idea as you grow up that you need to just save your money and get that affordable housing at the edge of town where you're away from the city where all the crime happens or whatever. "

" The one recurring theme in my writing, and in my life in general, is confusion. The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you're going to find out you're wrong - that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions. "

" If you think about Protestant and Catholic or Shiite and Sunni, they are basically the same thing... one eats with their left hand, the other eats with their right hand. "

" I went right from wunderkind to washed up. Old. Been around too long. That's just the way I feel. That's my internal dialogue. "

" I kind of go in waves with reading. Sometimes I read all the time, and sometimes I can't get settled enough to focus. "

" Art is essentially communication. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. That's why people make art, so other people can relate to it. "