Lua — The Morning Always Comes

An essay on the second Bright Eyes cover — February 6, 2014, the Larry Fisherman SoundCloud, three months before Faces. In 2012 he borrowed Conor Oberst's words for a feeling he didn't have yet. This time he borrowed them for a feeling he had too much of, and he didn't change a single line.

There are two covers in this whole catalog, and they're both Bright Eyes songs, and they are exact opposites. I didn't plan to write about them as a pair, but sitting with "Lua" I realized you can't do it any other way. "First Day of My Life" — August 2012, five months after Macadelic — is a morning song. A song about waking up and your life starting over, rain and all. "Lua" — February 2014, three months before Faces — is a song about how the morning is the enemy. How everything you build in the evening rots by the morning. He covered the two poles of Conor Oberst's worldview, eighteen months apart, and the distance between them is the distance between 2012 Mac and 2014 Mac. That's the whole essay, honestly. But let me earn it.

The scene first. December 2013: Live from Space, the tour document. Behind it: the Watching Movies cycle closing out, the move to LA, the house in the Valley with the studio in it — the Sanctuary — where the Faces sessions are already running. This is the heaviest period of his life by his own later accounting. The drug use that was subtext on Macadelic and texture on Watching Movies is, by early 2014, just the weather. And on February 6, with no announcement, the Larry Fisherman SoundCloud posts a cover of Bright Eyes' "Lua." Same move as 2012 — no beat, no bars, no rollout. Just the rapper, alone with somebody else's folk song.

Except he told us what this one was. Asked about it by Rolling Stone, he called it his middle school depression song — Oberst wrote it in 2004, which puts Mac at twelve, in Pittsburgh, before any of this existed — and then he made a distinction I've been carrying around since I first read it. He said there are two kinds of covers: the ones you play because you know and like the song, and the ones where you believe every word you're saying like they're your own.

"First Day of My Life" was the first kind that grew into the second — he borrowed words for a feeling his own vocabulary couldn't hold yet, and he still cut a verse, still edited, still made choices about what he could cosign. "Lua" is the second kind from the first breath. He changes nothing. Not a word, not a verse, not an arrangement idea beyond a little finger-picked outro. Every line of Oberst's hungover ledger — including we might die from medication, but we sure killed all the pain — gets sung straight, in 2014, by a twenty-two-year-old in the middle of the exact life the song describes. He didn't cover "Lua." He moved into it.

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The form is the argument

I want to talk about what Oberst built, because Mac's whole decision here is to trust it completely, and you can't hear the trust without seeing the machine.

Four verses, two choruses. Every verse ends on the same hinge — in the evening, by the morning — and the hinge mutates every time it comes around. Watch it:

Supplies are endless in the evening; by the morning they'll be gone. The mask gets polished in the evening, by the morning looks like shit. What's easy in the evening, by the morning is such a drag. What was normal in the evening, by the morning seems insane. And the last one, the one the song walks out on: what is simple in the moonlight, by the morning never is.

The song never modulates. The melody barely moves. The structure repeats so cleanly you think nothing's changing — and everything is changing, overnight, in the gap between stanzas, six times in a row. That's not a chorus trick, that's a thesis. The damage doesn't happen in the song. It happens between the parts of the song, while the form holds steady and pretends. If you've ever lived on a cycle — any cycle, the party kind or the other kind — you know that engineering. The evening is where the decisions feel good. The morning is where they get audited. Oberst built a song where the audit is structural. And Mac, who was living inside that exact loop in the Sanctuary in early 2014, recognized the architecture from middle school. The song had been waiting for him to grow into it. That's a terrible thing to say about a song this beautiful, and it's true.

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The lines doing the hidden work

The mask I polish in the evening, by the morning looks like shit. Regulars here know the mask. The clown face from Faces, the performance persona we've been tracking since "Ignorant" — the pose you put on because the room needs you to be someone. But Oberst's mask isn't a stage costume. It's smaller and sadder than that. It's the face you fix up before you go out, the one that only has to survive the evening. Nobody polishes a mask for the morning. The morning is when the mask gets inspected. In 2012 Mac covered a song about a doorway; in 2014 he covered a song about the upkeep of a face, and both times he knew exactly what he was singing about.

If you promise to stay conscious I will try and do the same. This is the line that wrecked me on the re-read. Look at the asymmetry. She has to promise. He will try. He's negotiating a survival pact and writing himself a loophole in the same breath — and the song knows it, and he knows it, and he asks her to stay anyway. "Try" is the most honest word in the whole lyric. It's the word of someone who has already failed this test enough times to stop lying about it. There is not a more Faces-era sentence in the entire catalog, and Conor Oberst wrote it in Omaha in 2004.

We might die from medication, but we sure killed all the pain. I'm not going to be clever about this line. Four and a half years after this cover went up, the medication won. He sang the trade — death risked, pain killed, we sure killed all the pain, past tense, mission accomplished — and he sang it plainly, no flinch, because in February 2014 the trade still felt worth it, or at least felt made. This is the line the whole Faces tape keeps orbiting in code and metaphor and funny voices, and here it is with no code at all. He needed Oberst's plainness because his own style in 2014 was all trapdoors and personae — Delusional Thomas, Larry Fisherman, the funny voice you do so nobody asks the real voice how it's doing. "Lua" is what it sounded like when he put all the voices down.

It's not something I would recommend, but it is one way to live. The second chorus — which casual listeners hear as a repeat, and it isn't, it's almost entirely new text, the song rewriting its own thesis under the same melody — ends here. Recommend. Consumer language. A Yelp review of self-destruction: two stars, wouldn't recommend, but it is one way to live. That deadened, appraising tone is the sound of someone too deep in the thing to perform alarm about it anymore. On "First Day of My Life" the borrowed words were tender. Here the borrowed words are tired. The reasons all have run away but the feeling never did — that's the second chorus too, and it's the whole addiction story in one line: whatever started this is gone, and it doesn't matter, because the feeling stayed.

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The production, or the lack of it

Credited to Larry Fisherman — and that name matters. He filed both Bright Eyes covers under the producer alias, not under Mac Miller the rapper. Same as 2012. The alias is where the non-rap Mac lives, the one who plays instruments, the one who doesn't have to be the kid from the "Knock Knock" video. Going to the Fisherman account to post a folk cover is its own kind of confession: this isn't for the brand.

And the recording is almost nothing. Acoustic guitar, voice, a wash of room around it, a finger-picked outro that drifts off instead of resolving. No drums. On "First Day of My Life" the bareness was the point — the most armored-down recording in the catalog. On "Lua" the bareness is something else. It's not disarmament; it's exposure with nowhere to go. In 2012 the empty room felt like a choice, a visit. In 2014 it sounds like where he lived. The guitar doesn't comfort him. It just keeps time while the evening/morning hinge does its work, the way the bright production on the Circles songs would later perform wellness while the lyrics shrank — except here nobody's performing. The music believes the words. That's rarer, and worse.

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The mirror

Put the two covers side by side and the catalog's whole early arc is sitting there in somebody else's handwriting.

2012: This is the first day of my life / I'm glad I didn't die before I met you. A love song that's secretly a survival report — the relief of still being here. Morning as rescue. He cut the flirtation verse because he couldn't cosign being liked; he ended it on working for a paycheck instead of waiting to win the lottery, a verdict on his own viral rise.

2014: We might die from medication, but we sure killed all the pain. A hungover ledger that's openly a survival risk — the cost of still being here. Morning as audit. He cut nothing, because there was nothing in it he couldn't cosign. Every word like his own.

The first cover is a kid standing in a doorway hoping the rain means something good. The second is the same kid, two years deeper, standing in the same doorway at 6 a.m. watching the supplies run out. He didn't write either song. He didn't have to. That's what the borrowed words were always for — the feelings too early or too heavy for his own vocabulary. 2012 was too early. 2014 was too heavy.

And the brutal thing, the thing I keep circling: the vocabulary was coming. "Youforia" was behind him by then — he'd started singing his own. Faces was three months out, and that tape does say all of this in his own words, but it says it in code, in funny voices, in collapsed brags and clown masks. The plain-spoken version — Circles, the morning album, the one where the evening/morning hinge finally gets sung in his own hand — was five years away and he wouldn't finish it. "Lua" sits right in the middle of that distance. The confession he could only make by standing inside someone else's sentence.

Two kinds of covers. He knew the difference. That's the part that stays with me — he knew. He picked the second kind on purpose, in the worst winter of his life, and sang every word like it was his own, because by then, it was.

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Motif Tracker (Explication #191)

Motif	Appearance	Notes
Borrowed words	The entire song — Oberst's composition sung verbatim, zero edits	Evolution of the motif. "First Day of My Life" (2012) borrowed words for a feeling too early for his vocabulary, and he still cut a verse. Here the feeling is too heavy, and he changes nothing. Borrowing as rehearsal → borrowing as confession. The distinction is his own: covers you like vs. covers you believe.
Evening/morning ledger	Six mutations of "in the evening... by the morning"	New motif. Time as auditor. Every pleasure is entered as evening credit and morning debit: supplies, mask, love, ease, normalcy, simplicity. The structural cousin of the time-negotiation motif ("Complicated") — but there he bargains with time; here time just keeps the books.
Mask (upkeep)	"The mask I polish in the evening, by the morning looks like shit"	New variant of the clown-mask / performance thread. Not the stage persona — the nightly maintenance of a face. Masks here have a service life measured in hours.
Self-medication as trade	"We might die from medication, but we sure killed all the pain"	The Faces-era thesis stated plainly, in borrowed words, three months before the tape. Risk accepted, pain killed — past tense, as if the deal were closed.
Survival hedges	"If you promise to stay conscious I will try and do the same"	Promise/try asymmetry — a pact about staying alive with a built-in loophole. Compare "I didn't die before I met you" (2012): the bar was that low then, too, but it was a relief. Here it's a negotiation.

Open QuestionHe covered Oberst twice — once for a feeling he didn't have yet, once for a feeling he had too much of. Was there a third cover he never got to? The plain-spoken morning album he was building toward on Circles suggests the borrowing was always temporary — a bridge to his own words. But "Lua" makes me wonder if some feelings never stop needing to be borrowed. If he'd lived, does the third Oberst cover show up at forty, sung for a reason we can't guess from here?