This is a review of a chirpy little single I once got sent in the post. It’s from the debut solo album by Conor Oberst, the Nebraskan multi-instrumentalist who’s the brains behind Bright Eyes and various other musical projects.

Conor Oberst- ‘I Don’t Wanna Die (In The Hospital)’ 

This new single, with its boogie-woogie piano, twangy gee-tar and rolling drums, was the stand-out track from Conor Oborst’s last album and is a good-time country-rock hoedown about the last desperate anxieties torturing the mind of a dying man. Woo! Alright!

Ably displaying his florid yet crooked creative bent, Oborst is on superb lyrical form, imparting his pleas to be pulled from his sick bed with an unerring paranoid catharsis.

It is ludicrously catchy, too. A song it’ll be difficult to forget after just one hearing, especially as the song’s title is also the opening 3 lines. Its irresistible campfire ‘clap-along’ feel would only fail to rouse the dead.

Speaking of which, help him get his boots on… take him back outside. Because, well…  ‘They won’t let you smoke and you can’t get drunk…I’m looking like a girl in my sleeping gown. Can you get this tube out of my arm…?’

Set the man free, for God’s sake.

This is a great single that deserves to be a huge hit and, consequently, get used over the closing credits of some revealing new BBC documentary on the sickly state of the NHS.

It’s sure to be a hit on Nashville hospital radio anyway.

(review originally published here)