Article:
One of the songs on the album, "Milk Thistle," contains the lines "If I go to heaven / I'll be bored as hell /like a little baby / at the bottom of a well." I asked him about that song.
“Well, I guess it’s, to me, you know, pretty much commonsense. You can only really understand good if you have bad, so the idea of heaven or anything that happens for eternity, even if it’s nice, I can’t imagine it being nice forever. Even the idea of forever is kind of ridiculous, which is unfortunate because it’s kind of a nice thing to say, you know. I think it softens the blow of mortality and having to say goodbye to everything you know and everyone you love and all that kind of thing. I think it’s a nice concept, and I wish it made sense to me, but I guess it doesn’t.”
This was in a interview with Conor about the slightly religious aspect of this song in Paste Magazine (http://www.pastemagazine.com/high_gravity/2008/07/conor-oberst-on-religion-and-politics.html):
Article: One of the songs on the album, "Milk Thistle," contains the lines "If I go to heaven / I'll be bored as hell /like a little baby / at the bottom of a well." I asked him about that song.
“Well, I guess it’s, to me, you know, pretty much commonsense. You can only really understand good if you have bad, so the idea of heaven or anything that happens for eternity, even if it’s nice, I can’t imagine it being nice forever. Even the idea of forever is kind of ridiculous, which is unfortunate because it’s kind of a nice thing to say, you know. I think it softens the blow of mortality and having to say goodbye to everything you know and everyone you love and all that kind of thing. I think it’s a nice concept, and I wish it made sense to me, but I guess it doesn’t.”