“We’re looking forward to being back in Cleveland,” says multi-instrumentalist and producer Mike Mogis, in a recent phone interview.
Mogis recalls playing the Agora for the first time as an opening act in the early 2000s, and fondly shares a memory of swinging by the Rock Hall years later when one of singer-songwriter Conor Oberst’s jackets was on display in the Midwest exhibit.
Oberst and Mogis met when Mogis walked into his friend’s dorm room during freshman year at University of Nebraska-Lincoln to find a teenage Oberst sleeping on the floor.
Mogis, with his Mr. Bungle T-shirt and cigarette habit as well as the 8-track reel-to-reel machine and Radio Shack mixer that he kept back at his parents’ house outside of small-town North Platte in rural Nebraska, had already met some friends and collaborators on campus and was curious as to what a little kid was doing there.
Once he heard Oberst’s demos, the reason for his presence in Mogis’s musical circle became clear.
“I was like, ‘These songs are actually legitimately good songs from a little kid, who hasn’t really experienced a ton,” says Mogis, going on to praise Oberst’s “distinct, natural writing ability, just from his own mind, creating stories of people and their life situations.”
Mogis had also begun experimenting sonically at a young age due to boredom and his and his older brother’s shared love of music. From age 7 or 8 on, it became his primary use of free time.
“There was nothing to do, where I grew up,” laments Mogis. “I’ve always had an affinity for finding sounds, tweaking sounds, and being creative with them. You know, talking backwards, and then playing and recording it backwards. Turns out, [director] David Lynch did the same thing for the Twin Peaks stuff. I didn’t know that it even existed, but I was doing that when I was a little kid.”
Mogis shares that he picked up his dad’s acoustic guitar around age 10 and is self-taught on every instrument he plays.
“Recording sounds and hearing them back gave me a feeling,” says the 50-year-old. “I found pleasure in manipulating sound or playing back things that I would record. It was just interesting to me. It was before the fucking internet.”
There were many years of trial and error as Mogis worked on fine-tuning his craft as a producer.
“I just kind of learned on the fly by just doing it, unfortunately,” jokes Mogis. “Even [on] the early Bright Eyes records.”
The band’s first two official releases came in 1998 on a label that Mogis himself had started after being ignored by many different indie labels to which he had submitted demos.
The first, A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997, was a compilation of demos that Oberst had recorded himself and Mogis had later mixed. The second was the band’s first proper album, Letting Off the Happiness. The first four songs from it went onto the mix-tape Mogis recorded to send out to indie labels, only one of which responded.
These days, Mogis, Oberst, and composer/trumpet and piano player Nate Walcott make up Bright Eyes along with a rotating cast of friends and backing musicians.
“[Oberst] had a very good imagination and a unique and very poetic writing style, when he was a little kid,” says Mogis. “I heard that, and I was like, ‘Holy shit! I gotta help this kid make records’ because I had all this recording equipment, and some knowledge on how to use it.”
By the time he started recording Bright Eyes albums, he had upgraded to a home studio in the basement of his college house but was still driving back and forth from Lincoln to Oberst’s parents’ house in Omaha, setting up to record in the laundry room.
The band continued writing, producing and releasing albums at an impressive rate until after it wrapped its lengthy tour in promotion of 2011’s full-length The People’s Key. At that point, Oberst requested a break from Bright Eyes.
The band’s hiatus ended with a Christmastime phone call from Oberst to Mogis in 2017 as Mogis was shopping with his kids at the mall.
“Conor called me, just sort of out of the blue, and he was like, ‘Hey. What do you think about getting the band back together and making another record this year?’ says Mogis. “And I was like, ‘Fuck yeah!’ I was super excited.”
Mogis shared that he had continued collaborating with Oberst on his solo music and other projects throughout the band’s entire hiatus. The two share a Los Angeles studio with two fully equipped recording rooms. Mogis even worked on a single and a remix for Oberst’s super group with Phoebe Bridgers, Better Oblivion Community Center, which came out in 2019.
“Even when we’re not in Bright Eyes together, our musical lives are very intertwined,” says Mogis.
Bright Eyes made its grand return, adding another album to its catalogue, with 2020’s Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was.
Five Dice, All Threes is the band’s second album, post-hiatus. Members of Bright Eyes are particularly excited for this leg of the tour because it will include one of their main collaborators on the record, Alex Levine, also known as Alex Orange Drink, who hails from the punk band So So Glos.
“We started rehearsals for the first leg of tour on Jan. 7 in Los Angeles, and the next day, the city burned down,” says Mogis.
He went on to explain that Levine was supposed to play bass on the first leg of the tour but had to abruptly leave L.A. due to the air quality; he had just finished his chemotherapy treatment. The band also had to find another last-minute replacement after its drummer’s house burned down in the fires.
“This is the first time that we’ll actually all be together to play these songs, and I’m looking forward to having Alex back,” says Mogis. “He just adds an energy. And we’re gonna play a couple of the new songs off the new record that we didn’t last tour, because we’ll have Alex with us. He sings a lot on the record, and we just felt weird playing those songs without him. That’ll be fun, and it’ll make this next leg of tour unique from any of the other ones.”
Levine co-wrote much of Five Dice, All Threes with Oberst, including the song “Rainbow Overpass,” which he is a featured artist on.
“I know ‘Rainbow Overpass’ was a song that — I think was maybe supposed to be a So So Glos song — but I remember being like, ‘I just love playing this song! It’s fun.’ It reminds me of being young again or something,” says Mogis.
The band leaned into minimalism, production-wise, in the making of Five Dice, All Threes.
“This particular group of songs kind of have a leaner, meaner, tone to them. They just didn’t feel like songs that needed a lot of orchestration or ornamentation. So, we wanted to sound more like a band,” says Mogis. “You know, we make records where there’s orchestras and all kinds of synths, and embellishments, and ornamentation, ‘cause I like doing that stuff, it’s fun. But we wanted to take an approach that was kind of similar to I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, which was mostly live.”
Mogis shares that the band will be playing songs off the fan-favorite 2005 record, along with a few tracks off Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, which was released the same year on this tour.
“We’ve been leaning a little bit heavier into the catalogue of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and a little bit into Digital Ash, because it’s the 20th anniversary of those albums coming out,” says Mogis. “We kind of get the impression that people like hearing those songs.”
The band has added subtle modern twists to the arrangements of the Wide Awake songs on the setlist in order to keep it interesting for themselves, while still maintaining the integrity of the stripped-down record.
“It’s one that I’m very proud of,” says Mogis. “At the time when we made [I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning], I felt like I wasn’t doing my job, or wasn’t doing a good enough job, as a producer, or as an engineer, but I didn’t want to do anything, because those songs are so good.”
He went on to explain that he just did not think the songs needed much production or many bells and whistles because it was some of Oberst’s best, most raw songwriting yet.
“There’s some skill in restraint. And I learned that then. And to some degree, we applied that kind of mentality to this new record, of not being fussy or overcomplicating production or songs, you know, with too much ornamentation,” says Mogis. “And there’s obviously some because we couldn’t help ourselves.”
Mogis thinks that the style of the new Bright Eyes album lends itself perfectly to a live show and can’t wait to be back on the road, playing the new material again, this time with Levine in toe. He also notes that he is particularly grateful for the fact that Bright Eyes’ music still connects with younger generations.
“That’s one of the things I find very interesting, and I feel very grateful for, with Bright Eyes fans, because they keep popping up. Young kids are still engaged with our music, just like they were twenty years ago,” says Mogis. “There’s still the same 20-year-olds up front now, even though, when we put out I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, they weren’t even born, some of them.”
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This article appears in Mar 13-26, 2025.