From Noise Floor: Rar­i­ties 1998–2005 (2006)

I first heard this song on Let­ter­man. There was a lot of buzz. Bright Eyes on Let­ter­man! So we tuned in, and the band got up, and they played this song. And no one had ever heard it before. It was delight­ful, in many ways, to be party to that. It was a new song, and he was show­cas­ing it live on national tele­vi­sion. I went online and found a video of the per­for­mance, and then I found an mp3 of the audio from the per­for­mance. That was it, though. No one knew where the song came from, or where it would go. And all this begged the ques­tion: “When is he going to release it?” A Bright Eyes mys­tery, solved in 2005.

Notable lyric: so believe you’re who you are / and just stay in char­ac­ter / but at the end of the play the audi­ence walks away / and you’ll be shiv­er­ing cold on a well-lit stage.

lis­ten here