Cassadaga (Remastered) 2XLP

Album Details

If I’m Wide Awake... was 'the New York City album', then Cassadaga is 'the America album', in which Oberst diaries his travels around the country and articulates his sense of history in the landscape. In first single 'Four Winds' he is 'off to old Dakota where genocide sleeps/in the Black Hills, the Badlands, the calloused East/I buried my ballast, I made my peace.' Cassadaga itself crops up in the same song. The town, a community  for psychics in central Florida, is visited in order to 'commune with the dead'. This wandering spirit is crystalized in 'I Must Belong Somewhere' a song which was already a staple of live shows by the end of the 2005. 'Hot Knives' is particularly spirited, bringing to  mind the true energy of a Bright Eyes show. Likewise, 'Soul Singer In A Session Band' - a rousing paean to an oxymoronic profession - enlists all of the elements which make the  Bright Eyes live band such a euphoric experience. 'Make A Plan To Plan To Love Me' is Bright Eyes at their most playful; a straight-up love long, replete with girl group vocals and Burt Bacharach strings. Oberst, the fumbling guitarist whose impassioned prose  tumbles out under stark stage spotlights, is still recognizable in every track, but the songs are rich with elaborate production, cinema-sized orchestration and, at times, sprawling,  almost psychedelic, atmospherics.    

The line up of Bright Eyes players includes Andy Lemaster (Now It's Overhead), Ben Kweller, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Janet Weiss (ex-Sleater Kinney), Jason Boesel (Rilo Kiley), John McEntire (Tortoise) M.Ward, Maria Taylor and Rachael Yamagata.