lifted or the story is in the soil, keep your ear to the ground

Bright Eyes expanded their lineup and their horizons with the lyrical folk angst of this ambitious and sprawling indie opus.  Conor Oberst had gradually developed the band from a solo songwriting project with a revolving cast of musical guest stars.  After a long tour with his other band, the Desaparecidos, Oberst reunited with his longtime collaborator and producer Mike Mogis to work out some new songs at Presto! Studios in Lincoln, Nebraska over two months to create 'Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground'.  Mogis also engineered the tracks with Andy LeMaster.  Oberst says: "There was no premeditation.  I just started writing songs and they weren't like the old ones. It's nothing I thought about ahead of time, it just ended up not being so dark. I still think there are some sad moments on the record...I try to use whatever tools possible to convey whatever you want to call the truth of the song.  I'm willing to draw from my own life, or craft something to achieve something that's real at the end of the song. That's just what writing is. Anyone who gets hung up on if a song applies to my life or is something I created has missed the point...It's the most enormous production I've worked on as far as arrangement and scope. I demoed the record twice. I recorded the songs once in Athens and then did a demo here and each time fleshed out the songs a little more and kind of came up with the parts I thought would be good. Both Andy and Mike took my ideas and ran with them."

The sessions included a huge cast of musical characters:  Oberst on guitar, piano, rhodes, organ, and vocals; Mogis on banjos, bells, hammered dulcimer, vibraphone, glockenspiel, mandolin, electric guitar, dobro, and pedal steel guitar; Andy LeMaster on electric guitar, keyboards, vocal harmonies; Matt Focht, Clint Schnase, and Mike Sweeney on drums; Todd Baechle, Jenny Lewis, and Blake Sennett on vocal harmonies; plus contributions from Clark Baechle on drums and clarinet; Clay Leverett on drums and vocal harmonies; Jiha Lee on flute and vocal harmonies; Chris Brooks on piano; Gretta Cohn on cello; Sean Cole on harmonica; Julee Dunekacke on French horn; Margaret Fish on bassoon; Orenda Fink on trumpet and vocal harmonies; Jason Flatowicz on trombone; Tiffany Kowalski on violin; Casey Scott and Matt Maginn on bass; Katie Muth on oboe; Ted Stevens on electric guitar; and Maria Taylor on piano, organ, and vocal harmonies. Three distinct choirs were involved:  Clark Baechle, Todd Baechle, Orenda Fink, Jiha Lee, Andy LeMaster, A,J. Mogis, and Maria Taylor in the first Choir; Rob Bass, Andy LeMaster, Mike Mogis, and Jeff Tafolla on the Country Choir, and "everyone that was drinking at Duffy's and O'Rourke's that night" on the Drunk Choir.  

Released on the independent label Saddle Creek Records that Oberst co-founded, 'Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground' only charted at one hundred and sixty-one in the US and one hundred and thirty-eight in the UK; but it received critical acclaim as one of the best albums of 2002, and eventually sold over two hundred and fifty thousand copies.  With all of the hoopla, Oberst took the show on the road:  "a 14-piece band, but there will be 20 of us total.  Something like 13 will be in a bus and the rest will ride in my van. This tour by far is an anomaly...We made this record enormous, and just once we wanted to present it as it should be."  











http://saddle-creek.com/brighteyes/



http://www.conoroberst.com/











'Spend An Evening With Saddle Creek' documentary:










"Method Acting" 


There's no beginning to the story
A bookshelf sinks into the sand
And a language learned and forgot in turn
Is studied once again
It's a shocking bit of footage
Viewed from a shitty TV screen
You can squint at it
Just snow and static
To make out the meaning
And keep on stretching the antenna
Hoping that it will come clear
We need some reception
A higher message
Just tell us what to fear
Because I don't know what tomorrow brings
It's alive with such possibilities
All I know is I feel better when I sing
Burdens are lifted from me
That's my voice rising




"False Advertising"


In a house by myself
I hear the ice start to melt
And I watched the rooftops weep for the sunlight
And I know what must change
Fuck my face, fuck my name
They are brief and false advertisements
For a soul, I don't have
Something true I have lacked
And spent my whole life trying to make up for
But I found, in a song
And in the people I love 
They will lift me up out of darkness





"Lover I Don't Have to Love" 


Now it's two o'clock
The club is closed and we are up the block
Your hands are on me
Pressing hard against your jeans
Your tongue in my mouth
Trying to keep the words from coming out
You didn't care to know
Who else may have been you before





"Bowl of Oranges" 


We'll keep working on the problem 
We know we'll never solve
Of love's uneven remainders
Our lives are fractions of a whole
But if the world could remain within a frame
Like a painting on a wall
Then I think we'd see the beauty then
And stand staring in awe
At our still lives posed
Like a bowl of oranges
Like a story told
By the fault lines and the soil





"Nothing Gets Crossed Out"


Well the future's got me worried 
Such awful thoughts
My head's a carousel of pictures
The spinning never stops
I just want someone to walk in front
And I'll follow the leader
Like when I fell under the weight 
Of a schoolboy crush
Started carrying her books 
And doing lots of drugs
I almost forgot who I was
But I came to my senses
Now I'm trying to be assertive
I'm making plans
Going to rise to the occasion, yeah
Meet all their demands
But all I do is just lay in bed
And hide under the covers
Yeah, I know I should be brave
But I'm just too afraid of all this change
And it's too hard to focus 
Through all this doubt
I keep making these to-do lists 
But nothing gets crossed out
Working on the record seems pointless now
When the world ends, who's gonna hear it?






"Make War" 


Once too often I've retreated 
Into the depths of my despair
I built a barricade to block you on the road
But standing there with all of my possessions 
Piled higher than a houseI felt closer to you
Than you ever would have known
So let's let all these tiny acts of charity
Become ground on which to build
A monument to commemorate our time
And though you say you've found another
Who will surely speed you on your way
Don't let the forest grow over
That path you came there by
But you will, so, so hurry up
And run to the one that you love
And blind him with your kindness
And he'll make war, oh, war,
On who you were before
And claim all that has spoiled in your heart





"Laura Laurent" 


Laura, you were the saddest song
In the shape of a woman
Yeah, I thought you were beautiful
But I wept with your movements
But I hope that you're laughing now 
From that place on the carpet
Where we shared a sleeping bag 
In your sister's apartment
Oh, how she would worry so
You know, I was just a stranger
But she asked me to care for you, yes she did
And I went and betrayed her





"Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and to Be Loved)"


Well I awoke in relief, 
My sheets and tubes were all tangled
Weak from whiskey and pills in a Chicago hospital
And my father was there, in a chair by the window
Staring so far away
I tried talking, just whispered, 
"So sorry, so selfish"
He stopped me and said, 
"Child, I love you regardless
There's nothing you could do 
That would ever change this
I'm not angry, it happens
But you just can't do it again"
So now I try to keep up, 
I've been exchanging my currency
While a million objects pass through my periphery
Now I'm rubbing my eyes, 
'Cause they're starting to bother me
I've been staring too long at the screen
But where was it when I first heard 
That sweet sound of humility?
It came to my ears in the goddamn loveliest melody
How grateful I was then to be part of the mystery
To love and to be loved
Let's just hope that is enough





'Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground'
full album:




0:00 The Big Picture
7:12 Method Acting
10:54 False Advertising
16:46 You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will.
20:11 Lover I Don't Have To Love
24:11 Bowl of Oranges
28:59 Don't Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come
35:31 Nothing Gets Crossed Out
40:05 Make War
46:21 Waste of Paint
52:51 From A Balance Beam
56:31 Laura Laurent
1:01:27 Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And Be Loved)