conor oberst @ hardly strictly bluegrass 10.02.10

this weekend was the tenth anniversary of the hardly strictly bluegrass festival. it's a completely free festival in golden gate park. people bring blankets and picnic, and just drink all day. it's one of the best free festivals i've ever been to. the stage that conor obest was playing on, was pretty deep into the park though, and it took about two hours on public transportation from berkeley to get there, but it was completely worth it. i couldn't really see him from where we were standing so we just found a comfortable spot, and sat down. i guess the felice brothers were his backing band, and they were really good. most of the songs he played were from cassadaga, and i'm wide awake it's morning. four winds sounded really good, so was train under water. there were a handful of songs i didn't recognize. i'm not sure if they were monsters of folk songs. i'm not too familiar with that album, and i don't think he played any mystic valley band song . . . so maybe they were new bright eyes songs? he ended the set perfectly with method acting and then poison oak. i've only seen bright eyes once, and last time i wanted them to play method acting really really bad, but they didn't so it was awesome to hear live. poison oak was stuck in my head for the entire trip home. i really love that song.