I don't want to play
it's a shell game
Conor Oberst

"Shell Games" was one of my favorite tunes off of The People's Key. It was a title that meant very little to me until I lost almost everything in my wallet to a shell...

Last night around midnight, I was onstage playing tunes with a band called Fiction Family in a town called Hollywood. By 3:00am I was pulling into my hometown with an empty bag of corn nuts and a caffeinated beverage that once resembled coffee. By the time the sun was up...

"Hate was just a failure of imagination." -- Graham Greene

Re-appropriate is a word that I stole from my friend David Dark. He'd stolen it from a guy named Jeff Tweedy. It's a good word to steal. In fact, of all the words I've stolen in my lifetime I feel...

I'm in seat 40G on a flight from Heathrow to LAX. After a couple weeks of playing rock and roll in Europe this long period of forced silence is a welcome change. International flights have become a meditation of sorts for me. Solitude. Breathing. Thinking. Forced air. Prayer. My tray...

Guilty Pleasures: the phrase alone implies a form of aesthetic righteousness. Your personal preferences (unique and subjective by definition), are kept in line by a higher standard of objective good (as defined by the community). The experts have agreed upon art that is right and superior. And in spite of...

Watermelons want to rule the world -- at least the two that we planted in our backyard. They took a long time to get started. For a while, they looked almost dead and we wondered whether they were going to make it, but gradually, the two watermelon vines began to...

When I'm on tour, I try not to think about home too much. I write songs, write things for the Huffington Post, and watch a lot of Sports Center. Lately, ESPN has been running segments on whether instant replay should be used in MLB games. Blown calls like the one...

My wife and I planted a garden this year. This tiny patch of dirt has become a space where small miracles occur daily. The slow and steady growth of the garden contradicts almost everything about our fast-paced world. The constant rush of the freeway traffic nearby seems to grumble in...

Q: What is the difference between a turkey and a man imitating a turkey?

A: Only a couple of minutes: a turkey never breaks character.

I am in the Tokyo Narita airport on a nine hour layover. I should be counting sheep. But alas, I am pondering the turkey. And...

My friend Andy and I are eating Grasshoppers on the tour bus talking about our favorite 15th century heroine, one of the darkest horses in all of history: Joan of Arc. It's much less exotic than it sounds. Apparently Grasshoppers are now trademarked by Nabisco; they taste and look and...

I am in seat 23 E on a flight from San Diego to Dallas. It's a middle seat. I'm trying to remain composed and tranquil; I am failing. As far as I can tell the baby behind me feels about the same way I do. I thumb through the airline...

I write songs for a living, which is to say that writing songs helps me to live. The song becomes a place where melody and tempo can cover some truly volatile topics. God, women, politics, sex, hatred, disillusionment- a song or a story can be a deeper vessel and more...