Jim James at KCRW 2002
In September 2003 The Inquirer published an interview with Jim James, written by Tom Moon, original interview can no longer be found online.
Keywords: Looks/image, Jim James, The Way That He Sings
Of all the methods rock performers use to avoid the "here we are, now entertain us" gaze of an expectant audience, Jim James' ranks among the most inventive.
The singer, songwriter and guitarist of My Morning Jacket - the Shelbyville, Ky., quintet whose revelatory and often astonishing third effort, It Still Moves (ATO/RCA), arrives in stores Tuesday - simply hides behind a curtain of long, wavy brown hair. It cascades symmetrically from his scalp to cover his face and everything down to his waist, and is divided, but not officially parted, by a nose.
When James is behind this low-tech shield, singing his songs of restlessness and crushing doubt with a choirboy's sincerity, it's almost impossible to see his eyes. No matter how the music heaves and roars, James emerges only when he's finished singing. Then, he'll step away from the microphone to engage in some ritual heavy-metal tress-swinging, his head rolling around in lazy circles, his whole body abandoned to the surging rhythm.
From one angle, this impenetrable veil looks like another of the high-concept affectations that dominate latter-day rock, something akin to those faux-mod outfits the White Stripes wear.
But it's also a way for James, 24, to set limits on what he will share. It creates a dynamic that's diametrically opposed to the prevailing archetype of the strutting, extroverted front man. By being intentionally remote, James forces those watching him and guitarist Johnny Quaid, bassist Two-Tone Tommy, keyboardist Danny Cash, and drummer Patrick Hallahan to listen a bit differently. To seek cues not from facial expressions or spoon-fed gestures, as on MTV, but from the way he sings, and the emotional hues he leaves lurking behind the narratives.
Not only does this partial inaccessibility change the listeners' focus, it also gives the band something that's been missing in this age of showing all while saying little: The slightest air of mystery.
Which, it turns out, is a deliberate part of the MMJ master plan.
Like Led Zeppelin and other heroes of pre-video rock, this band is determined to lure listeners, not bludgeon them, into appreciating its substantive sonic contributions - its shadows as well as light, its songs of yearning desolation that stretch out like lonely highways, its balance of brute force against poised finesse.
"I wish it was possible to get people the music without them seeing what you look like at all," James said recently by phone on a rare day off at home before beginning a headlining tour that will bring My Morning Jacket to the Theatre of Living Arts on Oct. 24. "To me, music is about closing your eyes and letting the sound destroy your brain. It's not about gimmicks."
He has sworn off watching music videos because he can't stand the sight of musicians acting - "Is there anything more pathetic than someone trying to look sad?" he wonders - and says that the biggest problem he has with much contemporary rock is the unwillingness of its practitioners to expose anything that shows their humanity.
"You can't believe people when they sing," James laments, explaining that from his perspective, most current rock vocalists appear "afraid to let anyone see their true heart." Compare that cynicism with the approach taken by the greats of yesteryear, he suggests.
"When you hear Neil Young, or Roy Orbison, or Etta James, you can hear how they've been trampled on and ruined. You can't help but feel what they've been through. That's different from today. Most people making music today are actors. And you can always tell when somebody's acting."
James is not an actor, not by a long shot. He grew up Roman Catholic, and remains spiritual despite finding "big holes" in the religion. His songs are laced with roadside mysticism, and phrases you'd find in a hymnbook ("on heaven's golden shore we'll rest our heads"). They're inner-directed but not self-obsessed, and at times they show a novelist's gift for sketching the human condition through fragmentary, seemingly disconnected scenes.
Raised on what he calls "the good records," James obviously soaked up not just the sounds but some of the extramusical values embedded in recordings by Young (Harvest is among his favorites), The Band (Music From Big Pink), Zeppelin (Physical Graffiti), and others, and let them seep into his own enigmatic, spirit-seeking traveling songs.
Where many retro-minded current rockers flaunt their scholarship, viewing imitation as a badge of honor, James takes a more organic approach to the history. He explains that he has lived inside those classic records, heard them over and over, until they've become part of his DNA.
As a result, his influences are rarely grabbed whole. Instead, they're threaded into the thick weave of his songs, sometimes manifest as traces of the blues, or the rafter-rattling ambitions of prog-rock, or the confessional honesty of country.
The result is music of sharply contradictory currents: A swirling, atmospheric evocation with strong bone structure and resolute beliefs, a sound that's steeped in classic-rock history, yet somehow timeless.
At times on It Still Moves, James sings as if he's trying to rectify rock's current crisis of belief - its lack of commitment - with one anguished falsetto cry. And the musicians of My Morning Jacket back him up. They treat rock with what often sounds like deep reverence, as a way to explore the great puzzles, if not a potential road to salvation.
Though his voice is bathed in echoes and odd reverb, James has a pure, needling tone that has, accurately, been compared to Young's. He can sound like he's petitioning the angels or plotting something diabolical, and he's unafraid to talk about the music's effects on him.
A song called "The Way That He Sings," from the 2001 At Dawn, is his account of being devastated and uplifted by a particularly haunting singer. And "Golden," from the self-produced It Still Moves, tells about the rush of anticipation that travels through the room just before a concert starts, then marvels at performers, and the bars that host them, for the ability to "make the time just disappear."
That earnestness and awe spreads through all of It Still Moves, from the Stones-ish stomp of "Dancefloors" to the gorgeously harmonized, impossibly slow "I Will Sing You Songs" to "Easy Morning Rebel," one of several metaphysical songs that suggest James has more in common with Sartre or Nietzsche than with Lynyrd Skynyrd or any of the subsequent cardboard-cutout "rebels" of Southern rock lore.
Even when the words are clear, it's not always easy to understand James' intent. Sometimes his lyrics are endless streams of odd images ("for the past I'm diggin' a grave so big, it will swallow up the sea"). Sometimes they're the rantings of drifters who have been on the road too long. James says that the meanings can change a zillion ways, and that for him the urgency of communication is more important than the words.
"All my favorite singers, I could care less what they're singing about. It's that life force you feel from them, and I feel it the same in everything I love. You can get all the content hearing their voice, the quality of it, the age and the pain in it."
The same can be said of James' vocal work.
Unguarded where most rock singers are cautious, James has that rare knack for communicating nuance beyond whatever vulnerability or tenderness or intimacy is stated in the words. Like Janis Joplin or Jeff Buckley, he's one of those conduits for pure, unfiltered expression who sing up at seagull altitude, where it's possible to soar without thinking too much about it.
The music he makes is, like all great rock, about the feeling, about trusting the feeling or running from it, about ultimately not being able to escape the feeling. And you don't have to look into his eyes to know he means it.
