The Loop : Bright Eyes - Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground

Bright Eyes - Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)

As is clear by the 14-word album title, this album is nothing short of "complicated". Appropriately so, considering it's main songwriter, Conor Oberst, is a notoriously complicated man, in all of his variations. But more on that later.

This was one of those glorious, "hey, what is that you're playing?" record store finds. Full credit goes to my brother who, while browsing at the late Karma Records, heard this album and bought it on the spot. I still remember when he brought it home and I got to keep it for the night, immediately giving it at least five good spins before going to bed.

This album truly reads like a story, pieced together with sound bites and dialogue that became trademark for Oberst. It runs a staggering 71 minutes (again, not surprising considering the length of the album title) However, what binds this book is actually how drastically the mood changes throughout. Knowing what I know about Conor, it almost feels like a manic episode : happy to sad to hopeful to in love to bitter. The lyrical themes follow a similar pattern of isolation but go from : " The sky, the trees, houses, buildings, even my own body. And each person I encountered, I couldn't wait to meet." to "I want a lover I don't have to love, I want a girl who's so drunk she doesn't talk."

The most manic of all the songs most defintely has to be "Waste of Paint", which tells about six different stories of people he may or may not have encountered, ending with him parked outside a church "where the floodlights point up at the steeples. Choir practice was filling up with people.I hear the sound escaping as an echo.Sloping off the ceiling at an angle.When the voices blend they sound like angels. I hope there’s some room still in the middle." It battles God and love and flows like a stream of consciousness with no real verse nor chorus. I used it in a "poetry presentation" my Junior year of high school (and yes, made my classmates sit through nearly 6 minutes of song) and it almost brought my teacher to tears. It's a track so pulled back and forth by words that it can exist with the simplest of musical themes.

In the overall scope, the album tends to make illusions and metaphors on life in stationary things : a book on a shelf, a bowl of oranges, paint, etc. The word count must be insane, but I guess that's what you go for when you're truly telling a story.

Aside from all the metaphors and nerdy stuff, it explodes with instrumentation with an endless list of contributers, either orchestrated in this mess of folk-infused sound or sometimes dropped out completely. Oberst has since tweeked around his lineups, becoming more of a "band", even when he dropped the "Bright Eyes" moniker. However its undeniable how much of this comes from his brain, and in this album specifically. For a guy with a huge amount of work to his name, before and after this record, this seemed to be the turning point of when Conor Oberst truly grew up.

A lot of these themes were more grown up than I could ever understand at 16, but maybe the length of the album title reflects the length of time it takes to appreciate a record like this.

I strongly encourage you to watch this in it's entirety: