On June 9th 2008 Blurt Online published an interview with the band, done by Andy Tennille. The original interview can be found here.
Keywords: Librarian,
“I love Prince. I adore him. I think he’s the baddest motherfucker on the planet after James Brown died. But to me, I think the comparisons are silly.”
Jim James runs a hand through his dirty blonde locks and shakes his head dismissively. It’s mid-March and the 30-year-old frontman of My Morning Jacket is sitting on a couch in a midtown-Manhattan apartment talking about the supposed influence of His Purple Majesty on Evil Urges, the band’s fifth studio album and the follow-up to 2005’s universally lauded Z.
The week before, James and his bandmates – drummer Patrick Hallahan, bassist “Two Tone” Tommy Blankenship, multi-instrumentalist Carl Broemel and keysmith Bo Koster – torched the stage of the Austin Music Hall at SXSW, debuting eight songs off the new record. The next day, Blogger Nation was abuzz with reports that the dance grooves and falsetto wails on tunes like “Highly Suspicious” and “Evil Urges” were the direct result of James’ obsession with the Purple One. Almost every article that’s hit newsstands in the run up to the album’s release has referenced Paisley Park, so after nearly a week of press meetings, James is ready to set the record straight on why some of the tracks off his newest masterpiece have the sweaty feel of an intergalactic dance club.
“A lot of it comes from the energy and the tightness of this city,” James says. “You hear about so many bands coming to New York to make their ‘New York’ record and all that shit. I feel like we didn’t really come here to make a record about New York, or about meeting girls in bars, or about topical New York things, but it’s just so different here. I love so many other big cities: I love Chicago and I love L.A., but nowhere else but New York do you have this energy with so many different types of people crammed in together. If you’re going to work riding the subway every single day, you’re in contact with every other race, every other religion, every other everything. I just think more people need to experience that.”
As much as the incredible diversity and palpable energy of the City that Never Sleeps influenced the urban vibe on Evil Urges, however, the soul of the album was found 1,600 miles away in the mountains of Colorado.
“Those four weeks will definitely be something I look back on in 20 years as a really special moment, for sure,” says Bo Koster, of the month the band spent last June prepping the new material at Hideaway Studio, a rustic ranch and recording facility 35 miles northwest of Colorado Springs at the base of the Rocky Mountains. “It just reminded me of what I think is important in life and the things that I want to accomplish right now. You don’t often get to have your four best friends in the world that you share your life with in a place like that, all alone. Just us by ourselves, playing music.”
“It was just one of the coolest times for us, as a band,” says Carl Broemel, the Nashville-based guitarist and saxophonist who joined My Morning Jacket with Koster in 2004 following the departure of original members Johnny Quaid and Danny Cash. “We had a little compound, with a barn that we’d rehearse in and a little studio to record in. When the storms came through, we had to unplug everything, so right when we were getting down to work, we might have to stop and go look at the sky for a while. You couldn’t force things. We all lived in the same house and cooked dinner together every night. It was like another level of connection developed between the five of us.”
In a band that measures its inner-relationships in decades rather than years (James and Patrick Hallahan met more than 20 years ago in Sunday school), Koster and Broemel are still the new kids on the block. But a lot has happened since they came aboard almost four years ago: the group recorded and released Z, played countless concerts and toured the world over, opened for Pearl Jam and Bob Dylan and issued Okonokos, a live CD/DVD that documented their two sold-out performances at San Francisco’s historic Fillmore auditorium in November 2005. Shortly after the Fillmore shows, James was hospitalized with pneumonia, exhausted by the band’s relentless touring schedule. The group was forced to cancel its New Year’s Eve appearance at Madison Square Garden opening for the Black Crowes, and all future touring plans were put on hold as James was relegated to bed rest.
“We went through a lot of stuff after Z, just with me getting sick and being fragged by touring again,” James says. “It was a dark time. After it was over, I felt like I got a chance to live some life that really spoke to me, and the songs came out of it.”
Refreshed and re-energized, James fleshed out the songs for Evil Urges during the spring of 2006 while at a log cabin in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. He subsequently brought to Colorado what his bandmates say was the most concise set of demos he’d ever presented to them.
“They couldn’t be any more lean than they were,” says Tommy Blankenship. “It wasn’t half-formed ideas — not that other demos had been - but on earlier records, the demos seemed like they were Jim trying to feel his way through the songs. With this batch, it was like Jim was saying, ‘Here are the songs.’”
“When we got the demos, we all agreed that we shouldn’t hear our own instrument too much, because we didn’t want his ideas on the demos to infect what we would do for the album,” says Hallahan. “But when he played us ‘Touch Me, Part One’ for the first time, we were all like, ‘Where did this come from? Why didn’t you play this for us sooner?’ The rhythms he came up with on that were just too hard to ignore. They were awesome.”
While songs like “Aluminum Park,” ‘Sec Walkin’” and “I’m Amazed” were quintessential My Morning Jacket creations, the silk-sheet sensuality of the two-part suite “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream” and the robotic funk of “Highly Suspicious” were driven by beats James dreamed up after a friend encouraged him to experiment with drum programming tools.
“Normally, I just do four-track stuff, but for this record, I got a computer set up with some drum programs,” James explains. “I really wanted to tighten all the screws down and make these songs more rhythmically propulsive. Hip-hop and soul music are really one of the only things left that unify people right now, musically. I think most of it’s because of the movement and what it does when it gets into your body. So I really wanted to incorporate that into our music. I wanted this record to be this big weird, propulsive thing where you’re like, ‘Should I dance to it? Or should I not dance? Should I rock out to it?’”
As defined as most of James’ demos were, some of the songs on Evil Urges – such as the title track – were birthed the old-fashioned way: on the rehearsal room floor.
“It’s hard to even recall the exact process of writing that song,” Blankenship says, of “Evil Urges.” “Jim came in one day and he basically had these two parts: the intro part and the second verse. It was just one of those times where five people just play whatever comes into their minds and magic happens.”
“That song in particular is probably the best representation on this album of what we do as band when we come together,” Hallahan adds. “Jim came in with two parts and was like, ‘Let’s go play.’ And everybody just clicked.”
In the end, the month James and company spent in the mountains of Colorado was the kind of galvanizing experience that they needed following the trials and tribulations of the previous year. “It was definitely a defining moment for the band,” says Hallahan. “We play music together and share in that bond, but it was just amazing to break bread together and drinking wine looking at a sunset over Pike’s Peak after a hard day’s work. Colorado was a very spiritual, bonding process for us.”
“Jim and I talked for several months about where he wanted to make the record,” says Joe Chiccarelli, the Los Angeles-based producer (Frank Zappa, The Shins, The White Stripes) who manned the knobs on Evil Urges. “In the past, they’d done all these rural, off-the-beaten-track studios, because they liked the isolation of working out in the middle of nowhere. But when I heard the demos, I thought the material was so upbeat and alive and had this great sense of groove to it that I told Jim that it sounded like an urban record to me. I thought they needed to record in a city.”
Finding the right place to achieve the sounds James envisioned wasn’t an easy task. Band members were sent to studios across the country — from Louisiana to the Pacific Northwest — in search of the perfect home for the album. Even when he walked into the hallowed halls of Avatar Studios in midtown Manhattan, where the likes of Dylan, Bowie, Clapton and Springsteen had come before him, James was still unsure that he’d found the right place.
“I thought it was cool with all the history and everything,” he says, “but I was trying to look at the recording of the album from the perspective of a job that had to be done. It was almost like picking out a good workbench that had a good vise on it and all the right hammers and tools that we needed. When it came down to making this record, we wanted it to be precise and we wanted it to be really locked in, and that took a lot of work. That’s one of the reasons we came to New York, because we thought that the energy here and the constraints of working in a city would add to the sense of urgency on the album.”
“You can’t walk out your door in New York and not be kind of swept up into the current of the city,” Blankenship says. “And I think that seeped into things we were doing musically on the album. I think this album is more in your face, in a way. The vocals are real upfront and things generally sound tighter and more immediate.”
Not only did the immediacy and urgency of New York influence the making of Evil Urges, but the focus James paid to the rhythms in writing the songs for the album forced the band to explore new sonic territory in the studio.
“We spent a lot of time in the studio looking for different sounds, because the sounds of the record were just as important as the arrangements of the songs,” Koster says. “Every song was its own baby. Just think about all the different kind of beats Patrick played in a single song. He didn’t have eight rock songs and one or two ballads. Every song had a different feel that required a different approach from him. We all had to do that in our own way.”
The result is an album that’s sonically diverse and builds on the blueprint the band laid out with 2005’s Z. While much of the credit is due to James as the band’s songwriter, the frontman is quick to credit Koster and Broemel as the main reason why My Morning Jacket’s last two albums have been so ambitiously expansive.
“To me, it’s like the ultimate cake we’ve got going on with Carl and Bo,” James says with a laugh. “Tom, Patrick and I are all untrained musicians and they’re both trained in school. They’re both multi-instrumentalists and yet they’re creative and relaxed. During our shows, Bo’s back there doing so much shit, between playing keys and making samples. Carl’s out there playing electric guitar, steel and fucking saxophone. It’s just incredible. They are what make us able to execute the vision completely. I feel like the band was good before they got in, but once they got in, it was like the music came together with all the details filled in. All the colors were there.”
“Bo and Carl’s involvement with the vocals on this album was just incredible,” agrees Hallahan. “They had never done that before with us. When we made Z, they were still feeling out their roles, on and off stage, so this album is really about their hard work. We can throw anything at them now, and they’ll throw it right back at you and make it better than you ever could have expected.”
In addition to the album’s musical diversity, the songs on Evil Urges, James notes, represent some of his most personal lyrics to date. “This record’s been a weird one for me, because a lot of it is tied up in a massive positive relationship that I had that ended right when we started recording the record. So a lot of the songs come from a really positive place but I was really bummed out when I was actually recording them.” Indeed, songs like “Thank You Too,” “Look At You” and the two-part “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream” sound like open letters of love and lust, while the acoustic tenderness of “Librarian” — which James suggests additionally stems from his “bad habit” of falling in love but not doing anything about it — seems to get to the heart of the matter for the songwriter.
As much as the album deals with his tumultuous love life, James also turns the camera outward on Evil Urges, crafting commentaries on social unity (“Remnants”), moral confusion (“Evil Urges”) and the chaotic state of the world (“I’m Amazed”).
“I think the theme that runs through the album is that maybe there isn’t any good or bad,” James explains. “People always want it to be red or blue, good or bad, or black or white, but it’s not always that easy. It’s wild to me to think of people involved in certain religions believe in their minds that they’re doing good things, things that are supposedly going to get them to heaven or get them to the next phase or whatever, when in reality those things seem really horrible and harmful. It’s confusing to me, and it’s a confusing time in the world right now. It’s a weird time to be alive. I think everybody feels it, so my hope is that people can relate to this record. I hope it’s something that is part of the time in some way, but that’s something that time and space will decide.”
“I think this record is a lot more outward looking and less introspective than Z,” Koster says. “That record was more of an intimate record in a way, between the five of us as a band and Jim as the songwriter. The themes on it are pretty deeply personal, but this one has a more universal, almost populist feel. Instead of it being about his individual feelings or emotions or fantasies, I feel like Jim’s talking to people and he’s almost preaching on certain songs on this record.”
And it’s that evangelistic tone that reveals the deeper sources of influence and inspiration woven into the fabric of Evil Urges. The echoes of Prince’s falsetto may have provided a handy reference for the critics, but James is reaching back beyond Sign O’ The Times to the records and artists that informed Prince’s best work.
“It’s just cool how you can be both grooved and be moved spirituality and emotionally, just through listening to Curtis Mayfield. He’s like the ultimate to me. Talk about one of the most brilliant human beings that ever lived: he was trying to unify people through music,” James says. “His playing, singing, structures, arrangements…after I heard Curtis Mayfield, I was hooked. I mean, I listened to the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and people like that way before I ever heard Curtis Mayfield, and they’re all fine and good, but now that I’ve heard Curtis Mayfield, now that we have albums like [Marvin Gaye’s] What’s Going On in our vocabulary, now that I’ve heard Sam Cooke sing ‘A Change is Gonna Come,’ the rest of it starts to seem silly.”
It’s no coincidence that James’ appreciation and greater understanding of the emotional depth of soul music occurred in the same year that he faced his own mortality through illness, overcame his first real adult romantic relationship and celebrated his thirtieth birthday. In the end, Evil Urges almost feels like an awakening, a watershed album that reveals the growth of a man who’s emerging as a more confident artist, bandleader and lyricist concerned with the larger issues and questions that surround him.
“I think Jim has a very clear vision right now of what he wants his music to be and he’s very much in touch with the heart and soul of his songs,” producer Chiccarelli notes. “That’s one of his incredible strengths and what makes him one of the greatest songwriters out there, I believe. He’s willing to let go enough that as long as the whole intent, the feeling and the emotion of the song is right, all the colors and details seem to fall into place.”
“He’s more confident in his role as the frontman of this band and I think it’s reflected in how he approaches his singing on this album,” adds Hallahan. “When he steps up to that microphone, he owns that microphone. Instead of him standing back and hiding behind the reverb, the vocals are very upfront and very present on this album. And he’s more willing to try new things. I’m really proud of him.
“Jim jumped a hurdle in his life, and the proof is in this album. You just hear it — he grew up.”
