By October 2016 Bright Eyes had not released a record in more than five years. Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott had played what was then their last show in Honolulu in November 2011, and the band was on an unofficial hiatus. What Saddle Creek put out on 21 October was a box: The Studio Albums 2000–2011, six albums in a foil-stamped linen case, limited to 5,000 sets on coloured vinyl and 1,000 on CD. The label’s own store listed the vinyl edition at $148.99. There is no song in it that the band had not already released.
The six records run from Fevers and Mirrors (2000) through Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002), I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, released on the same day in January 2005, and Cassadaga (2007), to The People’s Key (2011). That makes 70 tracks and about five and a half hours. Bob Ludwig remastered the first five at Gateway Mastering. The People’s Key, which he had mastered in the first place, went in as it was. Left out are the two albums from 1998, A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995–1997 and Letting Off the Happiness, the 2002 Christmas record and the rarities set Noise Floor.
The liner notes tell how small most of this was. Fevers and Mirrors was recorded mostly in the last month of 1999 at Dead Space in Lincoln, Nebraska, by Andy LeMaster and Mogis. Lifted was made at the same studio, renamed Presto!, over December 2001 and January 2002. I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning took one freezing week there in February 2004, with Emmylou Harris and Jim James adding their vocals that spring in Nashville and Louisville. By Cassadaga the notes named the band as three people, Oberst, Mogis and Walcott, with Mogis recording and mixing every song.
What the box adds is packaging. Each album comes in its own colour, maroon for Fevers and Mirrors, black and yellow swirl for Lifted, light blue for Digital Ash with an etched fourth side, in tip-on jackets pressed at RTI. There are twelve 8x10 prints by Butch Hogan, who had photographed Oberst’s projects for years, an essay by Nathaniel Krenkel, his manager and a co-founder of the Team Love label, and a download card. Two weeks after the box, the remasters started reaching shops on their own, on black vinyl, CD, cassette and MP3: Fevers and Mirrors and Lifted on 4 November, the other three on 11 November.
The few reviews were kind. AllMusic and Spectrum Culture both gave it 4 out of 5. AllMusic mostly listed the contents and called these the group’s most essential albums. Spectrum Culture’s Nick Gregorio heard the biggest gains on the two oldest records, allowed that die-hards might think the remaster had scrubbed away what they loved in them, and called the set limited and expensive but a fan’s dream. Saddle Creek had boxed Bright Eyes before. Its 2003 vinyl set put the early records on seven LPs, remastered, with five extra tracks and the first vinyl pressing of A Collection.
The music is not the problem. I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning averaged 85 on Metacritic when it came out. The problem is that the box doesn’t add anything. There are no demos, outtakes or live recordings, the oldest work is missing, the newest album wasn’t remastered, and the remasters were sold separately within three weeks. What you get only in the box is coloured vinyl, twelve photographs and an essay, for about 150 dollars. Bright Eyes showed what a reissue can add when they brought nine of their Saddle Creek records back through Dead Oceans in 2022 and 2023, each paired with a six-song companion EP of re-recorded songs and covers. The one for Fevers and Mirrors has Phoebe Bridgers singing on four of its old songs, and it adds more to that album than this ten-LP box adds to all six.
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