Bright Eyes have announced an extensive reissue/re-recording project on Dead Oceans. The revered band will reissue all nine of their studio albums as a Companion series that gives Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis and Nathaniel Walcott a chance to revisit some of their earlier material and re-work it entirely – with the occasional addition of some talented friends. Each Companion EP also includes a cover version of an artist they found particularly inspiring at the time of the original recording. First to receive the Companion treatment in May 2022 are Bright Eyes’ first three albums – A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997, Letting Off The Happiness, and Fevers and Mirror.

It’s the desire to celebrate that sonic bounty that first got Oberst and the band excited about the idea of comprehensive reissues. But this wouldn’t be a Bright Eyes project if a moment devoted to appreciating the past weren’t turned into an opportunity to connect with the future. That’s where the nine companion EPs come in. Or as Oberst puts it, “the supplemental reading” for the primary reissues: One six-track EP per reissued album, each featuring five reworked songs from that album. “My thing was they had to sound different from the originals, we had to mess with them in a substantial way.” Plus one cover that felt “of the era” in which that particular albums was made – a song that meant something to the band at the time. To help the EPs come alive in the fullest way, Bright Eyes called in lots of old friends, like Bridgers, M. Ward, and Welch and Rawlings, as well as new ones like Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee.

“I wrote all these songs before I turned 20,” Oberst notes on the first wave of reissues. “And a lot of them are better than the recordings – the recordings were sometimes really bad – so it was cool to sing them in a way that doesn’t hurt my ears when I listen back. This was the most explicitly retrospective and intimate part of the whole reissue project, as well as the most immediately gratifying. You get a re-do.”

And then there was the pleasure of digging back into Fevers and Mirrors, one of Bright Eyes’ most beloved and enduringly obsessed-about records. “There’s some percentage of kids every year that get to high school and an older sister or a friend or somebody hands them that record,” Oberst says. “I know that for a fact because I see the royalty statements. It’s not a ton of people but there are a few who keep buying it over and over again, and it’s over twenty years old! That’s really cool to me. That’s the nicest compliment ever.”