My Morning Jacket at Langerado, 2007, photo by Tyler Machado
"Music is limitless, with music, you create something out of nothing, that no one has ever done before. By recording it, you capture it, but that song is never the same again - it always changes."- Jim James
(The Independent interview, February 2004)
Pre-recording
"That is something I try to do. That's what I love about all my favorite music, that it lets me be creative and apply it to my own life. I don't want to hear specifically about some guy's specific situation. Lots of (my) lyrics are stream-of-conscious so I don't even understand what they mean until a couple months later when I make it mean something to me. Lots of it just pops out when I'm in a good place. When I get in the zone it just kinda falls out."- Jim James, about avoiding specificity and leaving space for the listener to find a place in the songs
(JamBase interview, January 2004)
"Out of the blue we'll get like a magical CD in the mail and it will have something scribbled on it, like the word 'please' or something on it, so I know it's from Jim. And he'll just send us a bunch of ideas."- Carl Broemel
(CNN video interview, July 2011)
"It’s a daunting thing, because I’m pretty childlike in the way that I describe things to people. I’m not trained in music and I don’t read music. I just will send these emails to people with times, like, ‘From zero second to 30 seconds, I want this to happen, and from 30 seconds to 45 seconds, I want there to be silence.’"- Jim James
(Under The Radar interview, June 2008)
Recording
"I bring in the skeletal structures and the boys flesh him out. His name is Orange Roughy and we like to tenderize him until he takes on different shapes and sounds just right."- Jim James
(Pitchfork interview, August 2002)
"I bring in the song and the melody and show it to them and give them a basic idea of what I want to happen. Then everybody starts picking it up and running with it, turning it around, flipping it over, slapping stuff on. I watch what they do and it ends up turning out way better than I could have by myself."- Jim James
(JamBase interview, January 2004)
"We've been getting more upbeat in our live shows. After being locked up in the van all day we're ready to have a good time and rock as hard as we can. I think we definitely wanted this record to be a more upbeat, rockin' experience. When you're playing with a band people can add things that really distract from the song, really take away from the song if they're putting in things that don't need to be there. Luckily, with each time we've done it they've ended up contributing to make it far better than it might have been on its own."- Jim James
(JamBase interview, January 2004)
"The record makes itself. It all depends on how you feel. You never really know until you're into the album."- Jim James
(The Age interview, March 2004)
"I think most of the time they [the songs] stay pretty close structure-wise to what they were on the demo and sometimes they’re radically different. Especially on It Still Moves, that whole middle part on Run Thru with the weird distorted synth and the drum and bass thing was kind of a happy accident that happened while we were rehearsing. And that stuff still happens. "- Tom Blankenship
(College Tower interview, June 2005)
"It’s a process. Jim comes in with the skeletal work, and we put muscle and skin on it and make it a human. The songs are their own beings. We don’t make them. They’re out there, and they channel through us."- Patrick Hallahan
(Popmatters interview, October 2005)
"We never do anything consciously, as far as writing. We don't say that we're going to write a really poppy song, or one with alt-country twang. We pride ourselves on not thinking about things creatively and just letting them happen."- Tom Blankenship
(Rolling Stone interview, October 2005)
"This band started with Jim as a singer/songwriter and he added on people – so he kind of sits around and writes demos when we're off the road. He then hands them over to us and we knock them around, and add our two cents, or five cents, or however much our additions are."- Patrick Hallahan
(The Star interview, June 2008)
"The process doesn’t change too much. Jim makes demos at home and hands us like two dozen songs or something. And we all live with them for a while. Then we get together and everybody just plays whatever comes into their minds. We just kind of hammer them out from there."- Tom Blankenship
(The Aquarian Weekly interview, June 2008)
"I would listen to the songs in the morning here at the house and I guess it was last spring I had to do a lot of mowing. I had to mow the yard like every five days or something and then I had to rake between mowing because I had this ancient mower. So anyway, I spent a lot of time outside working and I would still have the songs in my head and I could hear little bass parts come up that way. So a lot of my stuff came when I was just working in the yard."- Tom Blankenship
(The Aquarian Weekly interview, June 2008)
"In the studio. I always have a vision of what I think I want, but the albums evolve as the guys put their input in, and the spirits have their way. It becomes whatever it wants to become."- Jim James
(NJ.com interview, August 2010)
Once we all get together we have a general idea of what we're gonna do. But it's always interesting, you never know, like there's definitely been a few songs that now in my mind is classic us songs, that the first time I heard them I was like 'what is that? Is that Jim? What is that?'.- Carl Broemel
(CNN video interview, July 2011)
