On the 2nd of April 2006 Pitchfork published an interview with the band (except Jim James) written by Dennis Cook, original interview can be found here.
Keywords: Elizabethtown, Reverb more to follow
At their best, My Morning Jacket, both on LP and in the flesh, make blue-collar music with a celestial bent. The Louisville quintet likes to mix up elements just to see the juxtapositions dance. For example, the tilted fairytale "Into the Woods" from their fourth album, Z, which pairs effervescent carnival music with lyrics like "A kitten on fire, a baby in a blender, both sound sweet as a night of surrender." One minute they're fuel-injected rock, the next they're as delicate and refined as Belle and Sebastian. Rather than settling into a predictable groove, MMJ have only grown more ambitious and strange with each outing since their 1999 debut.
Apparently folks like strange. Z was chosen as Harp's 2005 Album of the Year and made Rolling Stone's Top 10, PopMatters' Top 50, Spin's Top 40, and Pitchfork's own Top 50. Where it would have been easier to follow the full bore chug of 2003's It Still Moves with a straight rocker, MMJ teamed up with legendary producer John Leckie to create a complex long player that recalls the Pretty Things' S.F. Sorrow and Mercury Rev's See You on the Other Side, all lovely, fuzzy, oddly moving slabs. Newest additions Bo Koster and Carl Broemel, who joined after the surprising departures of longtime members Danny Cash and Johnny Quaid in late 2004, bring new color to MMJ's pallet.
Pitchfork spoke to everyone except main man Jim James, who was recovering from severe pneumonia, while the band was on brief respite from their marathon tour schedule.
Pitchfork: Z has been out for about 18 months now. What's the strangest take on it you've heard so far?
Two-Tone Tommy: Whenever I was talking about the title people would think it was our going to be our last record. I thought that was funny. Or someone said we were going to start going backwards. After Z we'd do Y and just keep going that way.
I don't pay too much attention to the album reviews. I like to read about the shows and takes on the band's history but I tend to stay away from what gets written about the albums. I don't really think about it too much when I'm in the middle of doing it, writing it or recording it, so it's strange to see it deconstructed through somebody else's eyes when I haven't even done that myself.
Carl Broemel: I think the coolest take was when I played it for my dad. I told him, "Here's a saxophone part but it's a little bit out of tune." He was a classical musician and he said, "Sometimes that's better." Oh cool! He's on board! He kinda gets it more than I thought he would.
Patrick Hallahan: Somebody emailed me and said Z was the bible of the universe. That's pretty fucking weird [laughs].
Pitchfork: How does it feel to be an apostle?
Hallahan: I had no idea I was an apostle, so it might take some getting used to before I can answer that.
Pitchfork: How are the new songs developing as you tour them? I thought there were a lot of new corridors opening up in the newer tunes when I saw you in November.
Tommy: Only a handful of songs had been played live before the [fall tour]-- "What a Wonderful Man" and "Off the Record". A lot of them are just as short as they are on the record, like "Gideon" and "What a Wonderful Man", whereas in the past we'd have stretched out a lot longer. We'd have made the three- and four-minute songs six or seven minutes long. Part of it is the difference between this line-up and the last one. We always just played everything out as much as we could with John [Quaid] and Danny [Cash]. With Carl and Bo it seems a little more focused.
Bo Koster: They're taking on a life of their own. That's one of the cool things about this band. We're all open to things if they feel right. There's no rigidity to the way we approach things but we're also not completely out of control.
Hallahan: It's just like anything you keep doing. They just kind of grow by themselves. We always approach the live performances differently than we do the albums because we want them to exist in two different worlds. Live is a little more loose. I've noticed an incredible leap in everybody else in the band musicianship wise. Everyone's grown as a musician so I think we're able to take these new leaps and bounds on these songs.
Broemel: The stuff we didn't think would work live ended up being almost the most fun, like the end of "Off the Record". Before we rehearse we go back through all the old records and pick a few songs that haven't seen the light of day in a while. Like playing stuff off Tennessee Fire is fun because a lot of times those songs need to be reworked anyway, just 'cause they're not big rock songs. [With] this incarnation of the band, it becomes a totally different thing. That's fun to do, to rejuvenate a song that hasn't been out there in a while.
Koster: When I first joined the band there was obviously stuff [already] recorded, so it didn't feel like I totally had ownership over it. Now, when I play those songs it's a part of me, too.
Pitchfork: That kind of thing does affect the melody and feel. You bring your own life, your own experience, into the music in subtle ways. You made your movie debut this year in Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown. MMJ seemed to be having a ball during the funeral firestorm concert sequence but that could all be in the editing. I'm willing to allow for that.
Hallahan: It was a blast! It was exhausting, though maybe I say that because I was standing up [laughs]. Editing has nothing to do with it. I think on the DVD version Cameron is going to put more of the band scene in as an extra. You'll see we're that animated all the time. We were talking about incorporating [the fictitious band in the film] into our set but we didn't want to kill ourselves, so we'll just do it on the big screen.
Tommy: We didn't spend that much time-- three or four days in Kentucky outside Lexington and two weeks in L.A.-- which are all the scenes inside the ballroom. It was great.
Koster: I wasn't there the whole time because I wasn't in the movie. Patrick was the keyboard player 'cause [actor] Paul Schneider was the singer and drummer. There was no room for little old Bo [feigns crying].
Broemel: I was the acoustic guitar player. It was fun to be a part of it even for a few days, to be on the set and see how it all goes down. It was exciting to have a big flaming bird fly over my head. I felt the heat from it. It was kinda exhilarating. The first time it fell in the wrong spot so that was a little scary.
Pitchfork: Any trepidation about doing the archetypal anthem of southern rock? Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird" is one of those songs with a lot of baggage.
Tommy: It started out with us giving each other looks like, "I can't believe we're going to do this, the band that everybody says we're like." [He adopts a cartoonish drawl]. Those longhaired hippies from Kentucky! In the end, we're doing it [for] Cameron Crowe and we believe in him, so why not?
Hallahan: We were definitely taken aback at first. Once we read the script and saw it in context it made perfect sense.
Broemel: If you think about it, people are gonna scream that at our shows anyway. I think we're all so sick of hearing about southern rock that we don't even care. Let's just go for it and do it. How can you say no? I have the utmost respect for Lynyrd Skynyrd and that song is an amazing song but we're trying hard to not get caught up in that stuff like the rebel association. That's the negative part of southern rock.
Koster: I read a lot of reviews that talk about southern rock and I get surprised how many times they mention Lynyrd Skynyrd. I just don't hear it. I understand when they hear "southern" in us but not Skynyrd.
Pitchfork: One of the things I love about MMJ is there seem to be no limitations to what kind of music you'll play. If you dig a dub beat then you'll play it, but you might join it to an ambient jam or a '60s pop tune arrangement. Given that range, what do you think are the defining characteristics of the band's sound?
Broemel: Jim's voice is a huge part. Patrick's right foot is a huge part of it. Everybody has their own little thing to contribute. As far musical ideas, the sky's the limit. There's things we probably don't think about that will always be there, but I have no idea what the next record will be like. We'll work and rework a song. "Into The Woods" had three or four incarnations that we thought were pretty cool before we finalized what we wanted to do with it. The same goes for "Off the Record" which wasn't a reggae-feeling song at first. All the songs are great as just acoustic songs, too.
Tommy: Obviously, the reverb-- especially on the vocals and drums. I think those sounds are kind of a signature. You always know it's My Morning Jacket when you hear the drums start. Songwriting-wise we'll always be all over the map but production wise there's always little hints of what came before, a My Morning Jacket vein that runs through everything.
Hallahan: If you don't have any prejudice in the music you listen to you shouldn't have any prejudice in the music you play.
Koster: There's a certain mysterious quality to everything. I always feel like I'm in another time or place when I play this music. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a movie or something. That's a testament to Jim and his imagination. His songwriting is very non-literal a lot of the time, and there's a fantasy element to some things.
Pitchfork: Well, you had a forest on stage at the Fillmore in San Francisco. And the band invited the audience to dress up like faeries, wizards, and goblins.
Koster: Yeah, that was pretty literal [laughs]. We just came up with the idea of letting the people who came to the show interpret this ambiguous paragraph we sent out. It's kind of the way we do a lot of things, ambiguously. It's not something we can deconstruct or control. It's more like a feeling.
Pitchfork: The band has been playing to larger audiences over the past couple of years. My sense, and I'm not alone in thinking this, is you'll eventually be playing coliseums and stadiums. How do you feel about the prospect of rocking massive spots like Red Rocks or Madison Square Garden?
Koster: That sounds great, I've heard people say that before. It's so weird to think about because it's just my life everyday. And the lifestyle can be so fast-paced, where you play so many shows and meet so many people that you forget a lot of moments that you have. So thinking about the future, or the past even, can bog you down.
Tommy: I'm not sure how to feel about it. We've done some hockey arenas on the Foo Fighters tour and we did Dave Matthews for a short one-week run and Wilco, too, which was an amphitheatre thing. So, we've had a taste of it. It's kind of cool in a way because it's this huge arena rock thing like Ted Nugent, Kiss or whoever. At the same time I love the really tiny venues, too. Like when we played Madison, at a sports bar where there was no barrier and the stage was two-feet high. So, you're right there in front of the crowd. I'd always prefer to play the smaller place over the bigger place anytime just for the crowd interaction. Also, when the space on stage is so tight that you're on top of each other then the energy just kind of flows between all of us because we're touching each other all the time.
Pitchfork: But bigger means massive props, dwarves and flashpots! I really liked the Squallis Puppeteers you had at Bonnaroo last summer-- freaky 10-foot tall cockroaches and Loony Tunes symphony conductors just wandering around you as you played. What can I say, My Morning Jacket does strange on a big scale and that's one aspect of the bigger venues it'd be cool to see you really explore. That and flashpots, of course.
Tommy: Yeah, that would be awesome to have a bunch of mini-tours that only lasted one or two weeks where there's always a different background and it's a different experience every time-- having a show tailored to different markets.
Koster: That's really the cool part of becoming more successful-- the ability to do a few things you couldn't do as a smaller band.
Pitchfork: Like hitting Iron Maiden's garage sale?
Koster: Stonehenge!
Pitchfork: Since Jim is the only one not joining this little roundtable, tell us one thing we should know about Jim James?
Hallahan: Want me to make fun of him? I'm just joking. To be perfectly honest, he's one of the most incredible people in existence on this planet. He never ceases to amaze me. He never stops making me laugh. I want to kiss and smack him all at the same time. He's been my best friend since fourth grade. He's a special person and a gift to this world.
Koster: When I think of Jim I always think of his ability to get everyone in a good mood. He has a real skill for getting a whole room in on a joke or a whole room focused on listening to a song. When I first met him that was my favorite thing to do with Jim. Late at night he'd get his iPod and just DJ for me for an hour. He has an amazing feel.
And he's hilarious. That's a big contradiction in him, where he can be completely sincere and serious and really take a lot of care in everything he does but at the same time he can be very carefree and childlike. One of the main things I learned from him was to stop compartmentalizing things and deconstructing moments and instead just feel them as if we were still children. 'Cause when you're six years old you're an artist. Those are the most creative moments of anyone's life. He still has that wide-eyed wonder through it all. There's no pretension at all to anything he does.
Broemel: Jim's a pretty damn good DJ. When we're on the bus it'll be late and we're pulling away and we'll have people on the bus and he'll find the perfect song for the moment. Everybody will have their eyes closed listening to whatever he puts on.
Pitchfork: That's beautiful. It's always great when somebody can capture a moment in song and kind of still everybody.
Broemel: I think that's what we're all searching for-- to try and create songs that are perfect for a lot of moments.
