I first bought this album in 2005, having just begun to get into Bright Eyes following the dual release of I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning and Digital Ash In A Digital Urn. Putting it on in the car on the way home from my local HMV, I wasn’t convinced; the lo-fi recording sounded sloppy to my uninitiated ear and the opening track didn’t exactly grab me and pull me into the record. My mum was even less impressed by it and halfway through the second track it was switched off. I listened to it perhaps once or twice more in the weeks after buying it but was not enamored with it and it was consequently left to gather dust in my CD rack.

Fast forward three years or so, and after aging enough to become a legal adult, I had learned to start listening like one, and so I dug Fevers and Mirrors out of my growing CD collection and played it. And I played it again. And again. And again. And I was left wondering why I hadn’t been listening to this album every day since I bought it.

As with the majority of Bright Eyes’ output, I love this album primarily for vocalist Conor Oberst’s engaging lyricism. The record is less political than the band’s more recent work, covering personal topics ranging from the bitterness felt after a bad break up in “Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh” (“You said you hate my suffering and you understood, and you’d take care of me/ you’d always be there well where are you now?”) to missing someone in the heart-wrenching “When the Curious Girl Realizes She Is Under Glass” (“Time take us forward, relief from this longing/They can land that plane on my heart, I don’t care”), all the while conveying a combined sense of anxiety and resentment perfectly delivered by Oberst’s wavering voice.

One of my personal highlights of the album is the third track, “The Calendar Hung Itself.” The song begins by questioning whether the new partner of an ex can care for them as much as he did (Does he walk around all day at school with his feet inside your shoes/ Looking down every few steps to pretend he walks with you?) and later features Oberst angrily wailing excerpts from popular war-time song “You Are My Sunshine,” brilliantly expressing his bitter-sweet feelings toward the subject of the song. This is accompanied by interesting percussion rhythms and offbeat guitar work, and filled out with some striking lead lines.

The end of the penultimate track “(An Attempt To Tip The Scales)” features an apparent interview with Oberst that at first appears slightly pretentious, and then downright ridiculous. In fact, the interview is a fake, scripted by Oberst and read by his former bandmate Todd Fink (of The Faint) and once heard in this knowledge allows the listener to appreciate this self-mocking attempt to lighten the mood of the album.

This record never fails to make me feel something, and although it took a few years to grow on me, I now find myself listening to it a whole lot more regularly than I ever thought I would. Hannah Watts