Track Review: "Lime Tree", Bright Eyes' Cassadaga

Originally posted Saturday, August 11, 2007

This isn’t the best track on the album – it’s one of several moments on Cassadaga when the heart-swell strings and shivery back-up vocals are played so straight as to be sacharrine – but lyrically, it’s the album’s keystone, telling the baseline story that tracks like “Clairaudients” or “Four Winds” bury under tales of epic journeys and the dizzying everything-at-once of expectation and omen.The plot of “Lime Tree” is simple. There’s a girl, of course, and the narrator seems to love her – but not, of course, quite enough. The usual story: enough to miss her, not quite enough to stay. There was a baby but they both knew the time, maybe among other things, was wrong. She took care of the details while he was away, or maybe he just didn’t bother to show up at the clinic at the appointed time. So anyway, he gets the news in an answering machine message and thinks a lot about timing and a lot about home, about a life half memory and half imagination.All of which is very Bright Eyes, the after-the-fact regret, the loving-at-a-distance, encapsulated in lines like “so pleased by a daydream that now living’s no good” that might just as easily been written by the adenoidal Oberst of Letting Off the Happiness as the world-travelled, rehab-weary Oberst of Cassadaga.But there’s a verse in “Lime Tree”, the key verse, that so frustratingly mingles hope and defeat that it sounds more like real life than anything that’s come before:“Under the eaves of that old lime tree I stood examining the fruit. Some were ripe and some were rotten I felt nauseous with the truth. There will never be a time more opportune.”That’s the difference, that’s the recognition that makes Cassadaga, despite moments of plodding predictability in the arrangements, a more mature album than any of Bright Eyes’ previous efforts. There is never a moment when life blooms wholly, when, as Kevin Costner’s character burbles in Field of Dreams: “all the cosmic tumblers click into place and the universe opens to show you what’s possible”. There are connections, blips, flashes of meaning, but no order in which each thing is illuminated in its place (I’m jumping songs here, paraphrasing a line from “If the Brakeman Turns My Way” that seems to sum up Cassadaga stance on all the new age spirituality it surveys: “it’s an infinite coincidence, but it doesn’t make a plan”.)The inverse, unfairly, is true. There really is a moment when all the times are out of joint and all the fruits rot on the vine. The peculiar hope and intensity of much of Oberst’s earlier stuff – from “If Winter Ends “ with its half-formed hope for an impossible zero summer to “Arc of Time” with its grasping after the whole cycle, blossom and decay, at once – comes of extrapolating from this moment of absolute unhappiness to a moment of happiness equally absolute.Cassadaga doesn’t take such a cleanly polarized route. For all the unworldly characters who populate its tracks, from spiritualists to psychic hotline operators to W.B. Yeats to the graffiti artists of Alphabet City, this is the least mystical of all Bright Eyes albums, the anti-Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. There’s a couple moments of grasping after the “big picture” – a wind that blows “older than Rome and all of this sorrow” (“Cleanse Song”), the scales that measure out a rough equivalence between life and death – but mostly this is an album of details, of individual lives, lived and unlived (and if this means a few moments of embarrassing presumption – when Oberst projects himself into the dried-out soul of a small-time soul singer who substitutes gratuitous expression for actual feelings, or the sublimated grief of a middle-aged psychic who responds to her failed marriage by living vicariously through the lives of her clients – it’s still an impressive expansion of vision on the part of an artist whose imagination has so far focused pretty exclusively on different incarnations of himself). Cassadaga is, as the opening track suggests, a search album, but the search is not for some great truth or peace of being, but for the mixed and relative blessings of a life slightly more liveable – the grey areas of consolation and compromise (“Middleman”), home envisioned as the “mouth and the reunion of the known and the unknown” (“Lime Tree”).The narrator of “Lime Tree” is in the process of realizing, maybe too late, that he’s found what he’s looking for – not the perfect harvest, but a love that might have been enough after all, not a place where all points intersect and all things bloom at once, but a bit of level ground on which to stand.(Don’t get me wrong; I wish Cassadaga was a better album, the vocals a little less self-imitative, the strings a bit less programmatic. But I also think that anyone who trashes this album for “selling out” has got to have no soul, or an overly romantic sense of the spiritual value of certain kinds of useless struggle. I mean, if Conor fucking Oberst has found a way to live in the world as it is, who’s to say there isn’t hope for the rest of us?)