How’s that for an asking-for-it post title? Fuck it, let’s just fag out here for a second. The moment I fell in love with Bright Eyes (and, yeah, some of the infatuation has since worn off) was in 2000, in Olympia, in an apartment I shared with two hardcore/metal kids that occasionally indulged in a soft spot of Slint, Will Oldham, or young Mr. Conor Oberst. Fevers and Mirrors had just come out, and I remember being pretty impressed with the whole album upon hearing it, but what really got me was “An Attempt to Tip the Scales.” Not so much the song itself, although it’s great, but the “interview” that follows, in which the Faint’s Todd Baechle impersonates Oberst for a fake radio interview. It’s hilarious.

Baechle lovingly skewers his subject’s supposed gloomy, fey, wiltingly emo disposition, and the radio DJ interviewer is basically the blueprint for how to conduct an asinine interview—asking point blank about the ablum’s symbolism, interrupting his guest, etc. The whole thing is totally absurd—questions and answers make no sense, Baechle asks for the background noise to be turned off just the minute you’ve forgotten it’s there. It was reassuring proof that dude could laugh at himself, and that acknowledgment—that art is after all an act—made it a lot easier to wade in the album’s melancholy. It was also perhaps the first such self-conscious, po-mo gesture I’d ever heard included on a record (or maybe that was Superchunk’s inclusion of a very real hilarious radio show on their Laughter Guns EP).

Oh, all of this, btw, is apropos of nothing more than this song coming up on my random shuffle lunchtime walk today. So there.