Photos: Conor Oberst at the Greek Theatre
Kevin Bronson on
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Conor Oberst’s new “Salutations” received warm greetings itself on Saturday night when the singer-songwriter visited the Greek Theatre. He played nine songs off the his new solo album, his eighth, starting with “Afterthought” and finishing the show with “Napalm,” in between mixing in five songs from his Bright Eyes catalog, as well as other gems.
He was backed by the Felice Brothers — minus Ian Felice, “because his wife is expecting a stork to drop a child off at their house soon,” Oberst told the crowd. Filling in was Taylor Hollingsworth, who has also played in Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band.
L.A.’s Phoebe Bridgers, who has been opening on Oberst’s tour, did not open this show — this time it was dreamy Memphis singer-songwriter Julien Baker. But Bridgers did join Oberst for two songs. “We’re gonna sing this little song of mine that I started liking again once I started singing it with Phoebe,” Oberst said of his 2005 Bright Eyes composition, “Lua.” That was followed by the Oberst-Bridgers tandem doing the Felice Brothers’ “Jack at the Asylum.”
Oberst also also performed “Map of the World,” a song that appeared on the supergroup Monsters of Folk album in 2009, explaining that the song had its origins in a map his grandfather kept of places he had been and places he wanted to go. When one excited fan yelled out “Jim James!” (the My Morning Jacket frontman who was in Monsters of Folk), Oberst responded with a smirk, “Yes ma’am, yes ma’am Jim James, my dear old dad Jim James was in that band. My uncle Montgomery Ward was in that band. And my step-dad, Michael Mogis was in that band.”
Photos by Samantha Saturday
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