Photos: Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band @ Soma

Seriously, Conor. That was kind of awkward.

You were drunk. Obviously so. And with reason – I think it was the last night of your tour.

The awkwardness? It’s because the rest of us were all sober. Because the show was at Soma. And not everyone has the foresight to drink in their car in the parking lot before the show. Or sometimes the buzz you get from drinking Jameson chased with Sparks wears off a little too soon.

Or sometimes the venue is embarrassingly empty. This confused me as well. Either people don’t realize that Conor Oberst = that dude from Bright Eyes, or people really didn’t want to come to Soma. A little of column A, a little of column B, is my guess. The young folks probably didn’t make the connection, and the older folks who did probably didn’t want to deal with the all-ages venue.

That’s the only reasoning I can think of to account for a crowd that was less than a third of what showed up for the last Bright Eyes tour through town.

The band sounded great, and as awkwardly drunk as you were, at least it was entertaining. Unfortunately, Soma is not the most acoustically sound venue, and I was getting a lot of lower level noise shoved in my left ear. Tried moving around a bit to find a better spot, but couldn’t get rid of the reverberation entirely.

I don’t mean to say that this wasn’t a good show. It just would have been better…elsewhere. The Belly Up, perhaps? I think your recent albums have skewed more towards an older crowd anyway. I like that. I just wish I didn’t have to go to one of the worst venues in town to see you play that material live. And I wish I hadn’t felt like you were the only drunk person in the entire building.