Bright Eyes: LIFTED or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2LP) [DEAD OCEANS]

Why you'll love it

Dead Oceans' reissue spreads the album over a 2LP set and adds a download card. Rolling Stone ranked it fourth among the best albums of 2002, it became Bright Eyes' first Billboard 200 entry, and it has sold over 340,000 copies in the US.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Download card included

About the album

Conor Oberst was barely 22 when he made the record that took Bright Eyes from Omaha's Saddle Creek scene to national television. He didn't do it small. LIFTED is a sprawling, ragged, wide-open album, built around his trembling voice and acoustic guitar but stuffed with horns, strings, banjos and a whole choir of friends.

Mike Mogis plays nearly everything with strings or a keyboard attached, from banjo and dobro to pedal steel and glockenspiel, and produces the lot. Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett of Rilo Kiley sing harmonies, Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink of Azure Ray chip in. "The Big Picture" opens with a hushed, late-night lament, "Method Acting" and "False Advertising" swing between whisper and roar, "Lover I Don't Have to Love" and "Bowl of Oranges" are the songs everyone knows, and "Let's Not Sh*t Ourselves (To Love and to Be Loved)" closes with a ten-minute torrent of words.

Blender later put it in its 100 greatest indie-rock albums, and a generation of bedroom songwriters learned to shout quietly from it. The full title is long enough to need its own spine, and on this 2LP set it very nearly has one.

Also at Kops: more Bright Eyes on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Dead Oceans (cat# DOC286LP), a reissue of the 2002 album.