Lissette Schuster

“Shoestarr’s Top 5 Favorite Albums of All-Time”

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My Top 5 Favorite Albums of All-Time in Autobiographical Order, High-Fidelity-Style.

Coachella without the Sunburn: Bright Eyes + Jenny & Johnny + Broken Social Scene: Part 1

I am no longer the rambunctious punk rocker of my youth because when I think about an outdoor weekend concert/festival, only two things come to mind: sunburns and how much a bottle of water is going to cost me. That being said, I did not attend Coachella this year, but luckily, living in LA I didn’t really have to. I opted instead to mooch off of Coachella, attending a sold out Bright Eyes concert with Jenny and Johnny at The Fox Theater in Pomona on their route to Coachella and seeing an intimate fan-club only Broken Social Scene show inside of the Masonic Lodge at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on their triumphant return from the Cochella festivities.

Jenny and Johnny were a blast as always, starting off their set with “Committed” as they did the last time I saw them at their first ever show at The Three Clubs in Los Angeles. This time around they played a beautiful deconstructed version of “The End of the Affair” off of Jonathan Rice’s solo album “Further North” that was exponentially more amazing than the album version. They also played a lot of fun songs off of their album “I’m Having Fun Now”, including “Scissor Runner”, “Just Like Zeus” and “Big Wave”, proving that only Jenny Lewis can write a pop song about the waning economy. They closed the night with ”The Next Messiah” off of Jenny Lewis’s second solo album “Acid Tongue” which includes three different songs stringed into one melody which Jenny Lewis describes as “an ode to Barbara Streisand and the devil”. I concur.

Bright Eyes put on an amazing show as well. The last time I saw Conor Oberst was with The Mystic Valley Band at the Echoplex and it was refreshing this time to see him not always strapped down into a guitar with a performance that seemed more of an multi-instrumental rapper than of a tortured singer-songwriter prodigy. It was really the emergence of Conor Oberst the performer. And for that evolution, I applaud. Mike Moggis and Nate Walcott were equally as impressive to watch, as was the new addition of Laura Burhenn from the band Georgie James (which featured the ex-dummer of Q and Not U, an amazing D.C. band I was fortunate enough to see live in Miami before their break-up in 2005).

The first time I heard Bright Eyes, I was sixteen years old, and as I’ve grown up, the band has grown up and their music has continued evolving over the years. That being said, I was extremely satisfied with their set-list. There were old songs played that filled my sixteen year old sad sappy emo heart with joy such as “Something Vague”, “Going for the Gold”, “Falling Out Of Love At This Volume” and “The Calendar Hung Itself” (The titles of these songs alone are a dead give-away to the sad sappy emo heart I’m referring to). However, the new Bright Eyes album “The People’s Key” is really spectacular and I was really excited to hear some of my favorite songs from the new album as well like the hard drum-roll trashing intro of “Jejune Stars”, the catchy danceable pop emo single “Shell Games” and the eerie piano haunt of the “Ladder Song”. If there was ever a Bright Eyes album to hear live, this may be the one.