No, Omaha's lonesome troubadour Conor Oberst won't be including any Los Lobos cover tunes on his forthcoming, self-titled album (due out next week on Merge), jamming with Flaco Jimenez, or sporting a sombrero. The Bright Eyes mainman's fondness for Mexico, as he recently explained, stems from the fact that he found it an amiable and inspiring place to record the aforementioned opus. Not only did it offer a more hospitable mid-winter atmosphere than Oberst's native Midwest, but while he was evading snowstorms, he also found no shortage of ways to fire up his creative juices there. "Any time we lost interest or motivation was waning," he told The Sun, "we would just stop and hang-out, do a bit of singing around the bonfire, drink beers and go into the town." So does all this mean that Oberst's new album will be a cheery, sun-dappled funfest? Is he about to do an aesthetic about-face and become the hip Jack Johnson? We're not sure we can picture the surfer crowd bobbing along to tunes like "I Don't Want to Die (In the Hospital)," but hey, you never know...