LIFTED or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground by Bright Eyes

LIFTED or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, the fourth studio album by Bright Eyes, came out in August 2002 as the 46th release on Saddle Creek, the Nebraska label co-founded by Mike Mogis, who also produced it. Bright Eyes was Conor Oberst's band from Omaha, with Mogis on everything else he could lay hands on and a shifting cast of collaborators from the local indie scene filling out the sound.

It's a sprawling, shaky-voiced record that spills over from indie rock into folk and alt-country, Oberst's quaver cracking under the weight of every confession, and "Lover I Don't Have To Love" is among its standouts. The band made its national TV debut on the Late Show with David Letterman to promote it, though the song they played there, "The Trees Get Wheeled Away", wasn't on the record. Dead Oceans reissued it on November 11, 2022, with a six-track companion EP.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.