The 37-year-old singer is sitting in his tiny, pod-like room on the third floor of his modern SoHo hotel in Manhattan and he's looking a bit worn. The smooth baby face that sparked a million indie rock crushes in the early 2000s is starting to show some cracks and is peppered with a few days' worth of stubble. His hair is no longer shaped into the asymmetrical swoop that accidentally made him an emo style icon at 20, but is now a rat's nest of black strands pinned back by a pair of sunglasses. It's 92 degrees outside but in this blank, white box that resembles the sleeping quarters of a futuristic spaceship, there's a stiff, air-conditioned chill so he grabs a fleece throw blanket from the bed and wraps it around the shoulders of his striped, button-down Levi's shirt. He has a hard time sleeping most nights and has the darkness around his light brown eyes to show for it. Life has dealt Oberst a few bad hands recently but, like a true product of a Midwestern upbringing, he seems incapable of discussing it without noting that things could always be worse.

Conor Oberst is rubbing the bridge of his nose so hard with his fingertips that the skin between his eyebrows is starting to flake off. "It's been a long, uh…" He winces as he counts time gone by, letting out an exhausted sigh through his hands. "...Well, a long few years, really."

"Sometimes I wish I was a bratty, shitty prima donna artist," admits the Omaha native. "But I feel like my disposition, the way that my parents raised me, it was like: work hard, be grateful for what you got, be polite to everyone." He looks down at his cup of afternoon iced coffee and sloshes it around. "I mean, if someone's an asshole to you, that's a different story."

In the last days of 2013, the social media averse Oberst was blindsided by an online firestorm. In the comments section of a personal essay posted on the now defunct women's site xoJane, a woman accused him of raping her in 2003 when she was 16 after a show that his band, Bright Eyes, played. "Conor definitely took advantage of my teenage crush on him. At first, I was flattered when he was playing with my hair and had his hand on my leg. It was like my dream come true at that point," read the comment. "But then he clearly wanted to go further and I made it very clear and told him I was a virgin and wasn't prepared to change that right then but he didn't stop."

As the allegations spread like wildfire, getting picked up by music publications and causing a heated debate on Tumblr, the court of public opinion seemed to have its mind immediately made up and even longtime fans began to turn on him. Oberst, who had always aligned himself as a feminist, was labeled a rapist, a misogynist, and whatever other ugliness anyone wanted to project on him. The internet sunk its unforgiving claws into Oberst and he was powerless in its iron grip.

"At the time, it was like: I've lived 34 years on this earth, and I'm not saying I'm a great guy, but I know I'm not…" he pauses and taps on the glass tabletop in front of him. "I'm not violent towards anyone. Nothing like that would be a part of my character. And for a second, to have the whole world think that was true about me just did a number on my psyche."