Happy 20th Anniversary to Bright Eyes’ fourth studio album LIFTED or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, originally released August 13, 2002.
Like most filthy hipster casuals, I came to Bright Eyes late and through I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning (2005). (OK, actually, I got there through Phoebe Bridgers, but once I’d Wikipedia’d Conor Oberst, I turned to Wide Awake.) By the time that record came out, the band was a legend of emo and anti-authoritarian 2000s folk rock. It’s an era that came and went, one that I wasn’t nearly edgy enough to occupy during my actual high school years, but now I find Oberst’s contorted vocals deeply comforting—speaking to a frustration that I felt back then, but hadn’t known there was a voice for.
But Wide Awake, despite its inarguable mastery, is very, well, clean. Everyone comes together perfectly. “Old Soul Song” works because the band is completely in-time on the final return to the riff. It’s a record that capitalizes on experience to air frustration.
LIFTED or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002) is not that album. The last full album of new material before Wide Awake, LIFTED is loose and shaggy. It feels like a live performance, with Oberst driving much of the train on the back of his acting. The opening track, “The Big Picture,” is essentially solo, owing all of its drama to his own vocal and instrumental exaggerations. The record closes much in the same way, except louder, with Oberst losing his mind for about nine minutes over a train beat—the antagonism of the record is rooted in in-the-moment catharsis.
Meaning, it doesn’t sound like it was contrived via molecular production. This is rock before it all got a little too professional, before we’d lay an Ableton-concocted loop under it and a couple of layers of synth to heighten the drama. LIFTED lives up to its name in the sense that it is a deeply analog record, relying on the strength of the band and its orchestra to, well, raise it up.
This is not a knock on modern indie rock or a well-produced album—I love that stuff. (See the appreciation for its current patron saint in the second sentence of this article). Instead, it’s an homage to a sound that’s fallen away, a bygone sincerity. Interestingly, a contemporary review of LIFTED describes “The Big Picture” as “[stretching] the limits of taste for seven full minutes. Oberst falters often here, giving the illusion of greater emotional heft.”
Maybe back then, in the era of paranoid anti-sellout culture, when anything with a hint of artifice warranted getting dragged through the mud of the blogosphere, this song and Oberst’s dramaturgy were in fact unwelcome and in poor taste. Twenty years later, I think we know that sincerity and reality are not the same thing, and I think that Bright Eyes knew that all along.
LIFTED is also weird—“Don’t Know When But a Day Is Gonna Come” is a six-minute minimalist saga through impressionistic, confessional songwriting that drifts from Afghanistan to daddy issues to generational angst, only to hit a surprise orchestral climax. This is fine enough, but what makes it awesome is how it is preceded by the latter half of “Bowl of Oranges,” an instrumental palate of basically nothing that sets the stage. It’s completely excessive and I love it—the band is telling you that this is an album to get lost in. We’re not going anywhere in particular. This is just what we’ve got now—there’s no need to perform excellence or tightness.
Which is funny, because Oberst doesn’t seem to see it that way. On “False Advertising,” he writes that he knows that his nightly performances of emotional music can’t possibly all be genuinely emotive—and that now people are just looking for moments where the performance slips. There’s a strange need here to be real, which everyone knows is a performance, but if the performance slips, is that less real? This is the infuriating circular logic of anti-sellout culture. The band stopping on the word “Mistakes” is a little hokey, but that’s also part of the story—they probably know that, too.
At the same time, LIFTED is full of the visceral songwriting that started Bright Eyes’ career in the first place. My personal favorite moment is on “Waste of Paint,” where Oberst affectionately describes a couple who love each other deeply, and admits his gratitude that at least someone out there is happy, while also calling love a “fairytale that drugged us.” It’s actually kind of a simple moment—show us a good thing, complain about not having it—but the “fairy tale” line brings it home for me. If that love does really exist out there, or you can convince yourself that it does, doesn’t that make you want to keep chasing it? Throughout LIFTED, Oberst claims to know better, but is always succumbing to some version of naivete.
I’m not sure whether the word for all of this is “endearing,” but there is definitely one moment that seems to fit the definition. The finale to “Make War” ends with an a cappella chorus; one can imagine the band singing with their arms around each other, into one microphone, not totally in tune but it doesn’t matter. Again, more of the scrappiness: it gives me this feeling that this is what this music is really supposed to be—something that brings people together, rather than being the unique performance and vision of a lone auteur.
Do I buy any of this? Did the band really feel this music, really think that it would raise spirits and give people something to hold on to in troubled times? I’m not sure the question is relevant anymore. LIFTED is an album that is seemingly both obsessed with this question and completely unashamed in its answer: we’re going to play the songs the best way we know how, and if you don’t like it, you can’t say we didn’t put everything we had into it. Besides, we don’t read the reviews.
LISTEN: