Last Sunday morning, March 17, 2019, many folks were crowding around the Seattle Center fountain in spandex, ready for their St. Patrick’s Day run. I was there too, but I was getting ready for one of the most memorable KEXP instudios I will ever experience - Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst, aka Better Oblivion Community Center, a new band that combines my current tastes with the old.

Phoebe Bridgers has been popping up everywhere lately, her album Stranger in the Alps (originally released in 2017) has the incredibly catchy single “Motion Sickness” which was a go-to for me in the past couple of years. Her voice is a true one-of-a-kind. There is a lulling mourn in her sound. The harmonies Bridgers creates (she typically will have two vocals of here own layered on top of each other) evoke a story even without the meaning behind the lyrics themselves. She isn’t a tragic soul, but there is certainly a depth and pain in her background. Even in moments that would standardly feel lackluster if they were executed by another artist, the monotony of her sound becomes riveting in its lingering.

Conor Oberst has been around for a very long time - creating music even earlier than when he burst onto the indie/emo scene in ‘95 as Bright Eyes. At his core, Oberst was always a simple sounding singer, but a complex songwriter. His vocals are unmistakable as well, sometimes he sounds like he just having a conversation with someone else, often with a vulnerability as if there’s a tear to fall following his message.

Bridgers and Oberst have another thing in common as well, they both have their own solo projects but collaborate often. Oberst was recently involved in a resurgence of the post-punk outfit, Desaparecidos, which was one of the first live shows I ever photographed for KEXP back in the fall of 2012. Bridgers is also a part of the supergroup boygenius, which is made up of singers Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus as well. All of this culminates in 2019, when Bridgers and Oberst announced their own collaborative effort, Better Oblivion Community Center.

Oberst had previously had Bridgers open for him on another tour, and really appreciated the sad music she was making. He said he believed her music would help people feel better - explaining that it, at least, made him feel better.

The two had been crafting songs here and there together, not sure about whose albums the songs would end up on in the future, when eventually they began to realize the songs sort of belonged together as their own standalone thing. Now we’ve got a mouthful-of-a-band-name an a full LP via Dead Oceans.

The result is much of what you might expect, melodic and somber harmonizations with detailed lyrics. A song titled “Dylan Thomas” speaks of dying on the bathroom floor as a result of a seizure, something that specifically terrorizes me to my core. Such specific story-telling can alienate some listeners, but for me, I feel closer to the artists behind the work if what they have to share isn’t generic.

With all of this being said, I was completely floored to shoot the Better Oblivion Community Center performance at KEXP last week. Both performers were incredibly humble, as expected, yet still I had nerves creeping up on me because both musicians were so big to me for different reasons. Phoebe Bridgers probably is my favorite female vocalist at the moment, and Conor Oberst brings me back to an age where I was discovering music for myself for the first time - truly discovering it, as the internet was ever powerful and relatively new at the time of my teens.

Both Bridgers/Oberst and co. were perfectionists. The session started a bit late as all of the technical details were sorted and made just right. Once all was ready to go, the band ran through “Dylan Thomas”, “Didn’t Know What I Was In For”, “Little Trouble” (a new song that the duo jut released) and “Easy / Lucky / Free”, a Bright Eyes cover, which the group recorded twice to get just perfect. Bridgers opted for a mic only for this song, and got closer to her counterpart by offering her mic to him while he tended to the guitar work.

After the session, I was able to grab a few portraits for the station and got to talk a bit about Seattle and our music scene state right now with the duo. Bridgers reminisced about past years spent at the Bumbershoot music festival at the Seattle Center. Oberst asked for me to mimic a dramatic fish-eye portrait of them (at the top of this entry) as he had been really loving the fish-eye look his friend had been using in their press shots that were recently taken. I gave it a try and he gave me a hair flip.

Phoebe and Conor were two of the sweetest musicians I’ve ever gotten to shoot. Their album (that I’ve currently listened to more times than my favorite band’s recently released album) is going to be a classic among the 2019 releases. I’m really hoping there is much more to come from this pairing, and it’s not a one-off thing - they both have so many projects, but there is something special about this combo and the eloquent, sad songs they have created together.

Check out the entire performance from KEXP below (you may spot me in the wide shots of the full studio doing my thing!):