(The Age interview, March 2004)
On March 5th 2004 Australian newspaper The Age published an interview with Jim James written by Sophie Best, original interview can be found here.
Keywords: band name, Louisville, band chronology, songwriting, It Still Moves, reverb, touring, Jim James
My Morning Jacket is an enigmatic band name, befitting the magical grandeur of their sound - a spacey, reverb-heavy mix of psychedelic country, cosmic soul and classic southern American roots-rock.
There's no hidden meaning, says vocalist Jim James. The name just came to him with the same mysterious suddenness that dictates his entire creative process.
"I was just lying on my bed, writing songs in a notebook, and I put 'my morning jacket' at the top of the page," says James, in a deep, pensive southern accent. "It doesn't mean anything. A lot of things happen for me that way - things pop into my head when I'm riding down the highway or at inopportune moments, like when I'm falling off to sleep."
My Morning Jacket are based in Louisville, Kentucky, where James was born and raised. "I've had a real lucky life. I've got a good family and lots of good friends here." Louisville is a mid-sized city on the banks of the Ohio River, famous as the home of the Kentucky Derby, but James says that "it seems like a real small town - everybody's connected".
My Morning Jacket started out as just James and his guitar, with bandmates drawn from his close circle of friends and family. "The band is made out of friendships," he says. "We've tried to make it a good, fun environment where you feel welcome. It's grown and evolved. We've had a lot of people come and go."
The latest evolution was in January, when the original lead guitarist, James's cousin Johnny Quaid, quit the band, together with keyboard player Danny Cash.
"They just don't like touring," James explains, "and people should always be happy, not stuck in a situation they don't enjoy."
He takes a similar philosophical approach to making music. "The record makes itself. It all depends on how you feel. You never really know until you're into the album."
My Morning Jacket's rehearsal space is a barn in the nearby countryside ("It's beautiful out there, real grassy, lots of rolling hills and woods"), which provided the setting for the cover photography on their major label debut, last year's It Still Moves, starring a 2.7-metre-tall stuffed bear. ("I was looking up in the loft when we practised and imagined a bear in it," says James.)
The album was recorded in a grain silo, with a reverb chamber rigged up to layer James's vocals in cathedral-like echoes.
"I just need a comfortable place with lots of reverb and I just zone out and let it happen," he says. "To me, reverb is dreadfully important, just as important to me as a guitar or a voice. It's definitely got its own life force."
This love of reverb comes from Roy Orbison's and Elvis Presley's classic recordings in Nashville's famed RCA studio B. "I'm so in love with the process of recording," James says. "I put the picture in my head of what I wanted it to be - rich and lush and massive. I wanted to take those sounds and make 'em my own."
Growing up in Kentucky, James inevitably absorbed country influences. "The real gritty country that has a real backbone - Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Townes Van Zandt."
The band's relative geographical isolation made constant touring a necessity, especially in the early days. "We worked our asses off. We had to, coming from Kentucky, or no one would have heard us. There's a lot of people here but not many places to play, not much of a scene. You have to work and kick and scream and fight to get people to listen to you."
Until he managed to make a living from music, James worked at dozens of casual jobs - "so many f--ing jobs I can't remember half of 'em". His favourite employer was the Louisville Zoo. "I swept the grounds and took out trash and walked around and looked at the animals and ate ice-creams and rode around in golf carts," he recalls.
Music has been James's full-time focus for more than two years now. "I'm just trying to follow this thing and make sure I do the best I can," he says. "To bring all the things it wants me to into the world and still live a happy life."
James can't say exactly what it is that he's following - he describes it as an unseen, unexplained force. "It appears in dreams or when I'm in a scary place," he says. "I can just feel it going through me, that there's forces at work."
He is drawn to the supernatural world but doesn't hold any particular religious beliefs. "I believe in karma and being a good person but I'm not tied to any one religion. There's just some thread that runs through all this shit that I don't understand, that makes it all happen."
James is content to let his music evolve as it will. "My policy is to try not think about stuff, just let it be what it is. It doesn't really matter what I think about it, the listener is the one that matters.
"I just always want it to change. I always want to take it in different directions. And I always want it to be special."
