Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	85/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Blender
Entertainment Weekly	B
Los Angeles Times
NME	8/10
Pitchfork Media	8.7/10
Q
Rolling Stone
Spin	A−
The Village Voice	A−

I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning is one of two Bright Eyes albums (along with Digital Ash in a Digital Urn) released on January 25, 2005, by Saddle Creek Records.

The music video for "First Day of My Life" was directed by John Cameron Mitchell.

This was the first Bright Eyes album to feature Nate Walcott, who is now a permanent member of the band.

"Road to Joy" contains an interpolation of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". The title of the album is taken from a lyric in this song.

They achieved success in the charts when the singles "Lua" and "First Day of My Life" took the top two positions in the Billboard Hot Singles Sales chart in 2004. In 2005, the band set off on a two-part world tour to promote the album along with Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, with the first half of the tour centring on the folk-influenced first album, and the latter half featuring the more electronic second album. Both records made it into the Top 20 of the Billboard album charts, with I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning peaking at number 10 on the Billboard 200 chart and at number 2 on the Billboard independent albums chart. The tour was captured on the album Motion Sickness, released later in the year. The song "Lua" has also featured in the 2015 Square Enix video game Life is Strange.

Like the two Bright Eyes albums before it, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning opens with a spoken recording, this time by Conor Oberst himself. The monologue is a short story about two strangers on an airplane that is about to fall into the ocean. Nearing the crash, one of the passengers begins to sing, "At the Bottom of Everything," the opening song of the album. The simple, four-chord folk song is one of Oberst's trademark sarcastic social commentaries on American ideals: "We must memorize nine numbers and deny we have a soul. And in this endless race for property and privilege to be won, we must run..."

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