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Though only 34, Oberst has been a recording artist for more than two decades, starting with raw, acoustic guitar-based bedroom tracks he cut as a young teenager and initially released on cassette. After his early Omaha-based band Commander Venus broke up, Oberst recast himself as Bright Eyes, an umbrella name for Oberst, producer-keyboardist Mike Mogis and multi-instrumentalist/arranger Nathaniel Wolcott, and a shifting group of collaborators. By the time he released Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground on Saddle Creek, the label he helped found with friends in Omaha, Oberst was a word-of-mouth success, with an avid young audience that helped to sell out his tours. The critics soon followed. Rolling Stone called him “a true American original: the ghost of Walt Whitman setting up shop in the wraith-white, rail-thin frame of an acoustic-strumming Nebraska Cure fan.” The 2005 simultaneous release of two markedly different Bright Eyes albums—the more singer-songwriter-oriented I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and the darker, computerized Digital Ash in a Digital Urn—displayed the breadth of his talent. Time Magazine listed I’m Wide Awake among its top 10 albums of the year. Since then, Bright Eyes has continued to evolve, its lineup morphing with each successive tour. While supporting his 2007 Cassadaga album, Oberst took over New York City’s Town Hall for a week of sold-out shows, with his large, string-augmented ensemble outfitted spectacularly in white suits. He’s also recorded and toured with Mogis, Jim James, and M. Ward as Monsters of Folk as well as with his own Mystic Valley Band. For the first leg of his summer 2014 tour, he’s bringing along Wilson’s other pals, the Southern Californian quartet Dawes as his support act and backing band.

“I feel lucky that I have been able to do this for as longs as I have,” declares Oberst. “I’ve seen so many talented friends come and go, for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes they stop making music because they can’t pay the bills or they lose the passion for it. At this point it is my life. I don’t know another way to live. There is something fundamental in myself; I have to be this way. It completes what I am.”

Since his earliest self-produced CD-Rs, Philadelphia psych-pop master Kurt Vile has referred to himself as "Philly's Constant Hitmaker"—and while he gave himself that name with a sly wink, he was also nodding toward the songwriting prowess that would result in him becoming one of his home city's most celebrated rock artists. "I’m always thinking about catchy music, even though it’s fried, or sizzled, out," he says. "It's my own version of a classic thing—it's moving forward and backward at the same time." 
On his latest album, (watch my moves), Vile pulls his talents as a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer in unexpected directions—and the result is a vibrant, yet meditative album propelled by Vile's laid-back charm and curious spirit. Every lyric has been chiseled down into an aphorism, every bloom of distorted guitar or murmuring synth helping create that "fried" pop. "It's about songwriting. It's about lyrics. It's about being the master of all domains in the music," he says of his ninth album and first in partnership with a major label, Verve Records.
(watch my moves) comes from a period when Vile, whose touring and recording schedule during the 2010s was seemingly constant, stayed in one place. His mind was always swirling, though, puzzling out pointillistic lyrics, dreaming up spit-shined choruses, and checking in on other dimensions. "My favorite pastime these days is sitting drinking coffee in the morning post-breakfast by the window, reading and listening to Sun Ra, sun shining through the forest trees," says Vile. "In that moment, it's all the traveling I'll ever need. This record encapsulates all that—letting two years roll by and staying in my zone, traveling all the while in my brain, at the piano or in my guitar."

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