A totalitarian rabbit regime. Art Garfunkel’s plaintive voice. “Burning like fire.”

A year ago these would have been my only musical associations with the notion of Bright Eyes. The theme to the movie version of Watership Down by Richard Adams.

Then, via a convoluted Spotify radio station rabbit hole, I stumbled upon Bright Eyes the band.

To be precise I stumbled across the song First Day Of My Life, from the album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning.

First Day Of My Life is a love song about finding and falling in love with your soul-mate; the kind of love where your lover is also your best friend.

Remember the time you drove all night
Just to meet me in the morning
And I thought it was strange
You said everything changed
You felt as if you’d just woke up

And you said, “This is the first day of my life
I’m glad I didn’t die before I met you
But, now I don’t care, I could go anywhere with you
And I’d probably be happy”

I was falling in love with Claire at the time and it struck all kinds of soppy, sentimental chords. I bought the album for her.

The video for the song is similarly sentimental but it’s hard not to like even if you’re not in that doe-eyed frame of mind. The ideal is simple. A locked off camera records the reactions of people who love each other listening to the song together on separate sets of headphones.

The film is an apt visual metaphor for this post.

This is a love letter to the lyrics of Bright Eyes. And it is a celebration of how shared music brought my eldest daughter and I closer together just as she was flying the nest.

Molly discovered Bright Eyes (the band) at about the same time as me. She was not long at Glasgow University and her convoluted rabbit hole was somewhat different to mine. You don’t need Spotify radio to discover new music when you share a student residence with thirty five eighteen year-olds.

Spotify does come in handy, however, when you want to save, segment and savour said music at your leisure.

So, before she left for university, Molly and I made a kind of musical pre-nup agreement regarding custody of and access to my Spotify Premium account.

Its terms are thus. I retain custody but she gets access.

Spotify quite reasonably limits the number of devices that can access a premium account at any given time. It doesn’t allow two people to simultaneously listen to different playlists on different devices.

Molly’s time-shifted, twenty four hour party lifestyle means that such clashes are less common than I expected. And when they do occur Molly is a good girl and a dutiful daughter. She logs off and makes way with the minimum of fuss. I must have done something right.

It is an elegant, mutually beneficial arrangement. We both get lots of win. I provide the hive and she makes the honey, in the form of playlists sourced from dozens of music-mad friends and curated by Molly.

It is a simple symbiosis. It reminds me of these lyrics from Mr Wendal by Arrested Development.

Now that I know him, to give him money isn’t charity
He gives me some knowledge, I buy him some shoes

To give her my Spotify login credentials isn’t charity. She gives me some musical knowledge, I buy her ad-free, offline access to songs.

By some happy accident Molly and I have avoided that cliché whereby each generation fails to comprehend the music of the next. She gets no “turn that horrible noise down” from me. Quite the opposite. I can’t take any credit, but I can take plenty of pleasure from the fact that her catholic taste in music matches mine sufficiently for us to have plenty in common, whilst varying enough for me to be surprised and delighted by additions to her playlists.

When it comes to expertly curated playlists, our roles are reversed. Molly is custodian and I am granted access. The largest and most fertile of these collections are her Chill list (which brilliantly does exactly what it says on the tin), and her First Year At Glasgow list, home to nearly eight hundred tracks, the diversity of which frequently prompts a mental double-take on my part. From The Arctic Monkeys to Ella Fitzgerald. From The Black Keys to Bob Marley. From Vampire Weekend to David Essex. I repeat, David Essex, the bedroom pin-up of girls I knew at junior school forty years ago, who is apparently enjoying a modicum of renewed 21st Century credibility in certain quarters of Glasgow University. From The Smiths to The Kinks. From Bowie to Bright Eyes.

Molly and her friends are respectful students of musical history. They wear Beatles t-shirts. They listen to The Rolling Stones and The Doors and The Who. It makes me laugh in my day job when young, thrusting brand managers and hopelessly past-it marketing directors alike insist on appealing to teenagers by trying awfully hard, far too hard as it turns out, to appropriate the very latest musical thing into advertising sound tracks. Their miss is worse than a mile because they were aiming in the wrong direction to start with.

By contrast, the I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning album is a direct, bulls-eye hit for both Molly and I.

Molly took her acoustic guitar to Glasgow and left the electric at home. I’m not surprised that she was drawn to the unplugged, one-take vibe of this album. It is folky in places, bluesy in others and intelligent throughout. In fact it is intensely intelligent.

It is also intelligently intense.

The lyrics for Lua, for instance, are so authentic and raw that they almost scald your consciousness. You can hold your head under cold running water for five minutes after listening but the pain won’t go away. There will be emotional blisters. There will be a psychic scar.

I got a flask inside my pocket, we can share it on the train
And if you promise to stay conscious I will try and do the same
We may die from medication, but we sure killed all the pain
But what was normal in the evening by the morning seems insane

All too often lyrics that sound deep and meaningful when performed in the context of a song are revealed as shallow and vapid when the music is stripped away and the words are laid bare. Which is not to say that lyrics have to make perfect sense to have meaning. Art that leaves no room for interpretation is neither fit for purpose nor worthy of the name.

Conor Oberst has nothing to fear from such analysis. His lyrics are thoughtful, opinionated, provocative. Every song on the album is underpinned by a high concept idea, filtered through allusions and wrapped in a complementary vibe.

At The Bottom Of Everything is a prime example. It is a song about a song.

It is a song about a song which is sung by one stranger to another as their lives flash before them during a plane crash. And the candid, urgent lyrics are juxtaposed with a jaunty melody, the incongruity of which just adds to the unsettling mood.

The slightly surreal feeling is amplified in the video by deliberately lo-fi animation and a cameo appearance by Terence Stamp as one of the strangers.