After the success of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning made Bright Eyes a mainstream concern, Conor Oberst found himself grappling with the trappings of minor celebrity and—thanks to a new major-label deal outside of the US—a recording budget unlike any he’d ever enjoyed. The result was Cassadaga—a sprawling, string-embossed spiritual quest that took its name from a small community in Central Florida known for its unusually high concentration of psychics, healers, and mediums. “I went there a couple different times, and a lot of the ideas came out of that, just thinking about the intersection of different religious beliefs,” Oberst says. “It’s a pretty human thing to want to believe in something, but I’ve never been really good at that. There was a searching aspect to the whole record.” Whittled down from over 30 songs recorded across sessions in six different cities, Cassadaga lands somewhere between the symphonic ambitions of Lifted and the intimate folk rock of Wide Awake. There are thick, choir-abetted blasts of psychedelic pop and country (“Hot Knives”) and warm, lived-in rock tunes (“Classic Cars”), existential shuffles (“I Must Belong Somewhere”) and spectral heartbreakers (“Lime Tree,” the first and only song that’s come fully formed to Oberst in a dream). “We went to Chicago just to record a bunch of percussionists in a room, and into Capitol in LA just to do strings in the most hi-fi way possible, with a 40-piece pickup orchestra,” he says. “I don’t think it was so much that we felt we had to go big, but we just were entertaining all the ideas we had, because we had the time and the money to.” Lyrically, Cassadaga marked the beginning of a new chapter for Oberst as well, one in which he started to move away from the confessional, first-person perspective of his early work in favor of denser language that looked upwards and outwards instead—a natural fit for the album’s often experimental arrangements. “I think some of it holds up,” he says. “But there’s parts of it where I’m like, ‘Did some things get left in the oven too long?’ There was a lot existing at once and maybe that was part of what we could have done better. We could have maybe stuck with one direction or the other, but I don’t know: At the time, I just wanted to take the songs that I felt came out the best, as opposed to having it fit together, super concise.”