Carl Broemel at Glastonbury festival, 2008, photo by Robert Richards
On June 15th 2008 The New York Times published an interview with the band, done by Ben Sisario. The original article can be found here
Keywords: Jim James
TWO days after performing on “Saturday Night Live” with his band, My Morning Jacket, Jim James sat in a French coffeehouse in Manhattan, fretting over his life lines. Being on the show was his “biggest childhood rock dream ever,” he said. And in the parlance of “kosmic consciousness” — a philosophy Mr. James has been studying that divides mental and spiritual development into separate “lines” — it fit right in with his going-gangbusters music line. There are the enthusiastic reviews for the band’s new album, “Evil Urges,” for example, and its concert on Friday at Radio City Music Hall, which sold out in 22 minutes.
And yet Mr. James, who recently turned 30, can’t stop thinking about other paths.
“Like, maybe I want to be a better basketball player,” he said, running a hand through shaggy brown curls matted by a knit cap. “Or I want to learn how to paint better. Or maybe I want to be better in relationships. I feel fortunate on the music side of my personality, but the other sides need some more development. And in order to jump-start that growth, I needed to move outside my comfort zone.”
Since its founding a decade ago in Louisville, Ky., My Morning Jacket has been following a career trajectory increasingly rare in rock. Relying on sweat and word of mouth rather than YouTube moments and product endorsements, the five-man band has established itself as a transcendent live act and a worthy inheritor of the roots-rock tradition of Neil Young and the Allman Brothers. The benefit has been a robust touring base that provides the band with most of its income; the downside is record sales that don’t reflect its hard-won prominence.
“Evil Urges,” released on Tuesday by ATO Records, is My Morning Jacket’s most commercial effort, a bid for a mainstream breakthrough at a moment when all the right promotional stars — the cover of Spin last month, a prominent Bonnaroo booking — are in place. Songs like “Highly Suspicious” have the kind of taut, invigorating guitar riffs best heard blaring from car stereos, while quieter, more graceful songs mix musky Southern rock with something psychedelic and grand.
But “Evil Urges” is also the band’s most ambitious and challenging work, full of left-field electronic experiments and songs that seem to rebel against every expectation. In conversation the band members greet the possibility of fame with a shrug — perhaps wise self-protection in an era when the definition of success is being scaled down.
“Every record you make, you want it to be a hit, even if it’s not going to sell 20 million copies,” Mr. James said. “This record is the same as last time. People say ‘Highly Suspicious’ could be a hit, or ‘Thank You Too!,’ that could be a slow hit. But they’ve been saying that for years. I don’t have any control over it.”
Tom Blankenship, the bassist and a founding member, was almost excessively modest in explaining his expectations for the new album. “Once we played outside of Kentucky,” he said by phone from Louisville, “I felt like everything was icing on top of a really nice cake.”
For Mr. James the idea of leaving his comfort zone also has a literal, geographical meaning. This spring he moved from Louisville to Manhattan and began renting an apartment in Chelsea, on the type of block that real-estate ads do not exaggerate in calling leafy, picturesque, to die for. It’s a move that might suggest a status grab, but on a crisp May afternoon Mr. James strolled through the neighborhood in rumpled tan corduroys and work boots, with pinchable baby fat visible through his shirt. He looked less like a budding star than a college sophomore in search of a Hacky Sack game.
Although the members of My Morning Jacket — which also includes Patrick Hallahan on drums, Bo Koster on keyboards and Carl Broemel on guitar — have scattered across the country, Kentucky remains the band’s headquarters and the basis of its musical identity. Its first three albums were made at the family farm of a former guitar player, Johnny Quaid, with Mr. James’s vocals recorded in a grain silo for maximum reverberation.
With “Evil Urges” the band sought to make a tighter and more forceful record than it had before and chose to work with Joe Chiccarelli, who has produced albums for the White Stripes and the Shins. When he heard Mr. James’s funk- and electronic-influenced demo tapes, he persuaded the band to come to New York, where it recorded the album over five weeks last winter, staying in corporate apartments in Midtown.
“I said to Jim, ‘This is not the record to go and hide away in the woods,’ ” Mr. Chiccarelli said. “These are much more open and accessible, groove-oriented, rhythmic sounds. This is a city record.”
“Evil Urges” is full of contradictions. It is a city record, with amorous, Prince-derived funk on the title track and off-kilter electronica in the two-part “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream.” It also has some of the band’s most beautiful, pastoral ballads, like “Look at You,” and even antique country bubble gum, in the charming “Sec Walkin’.” But for every peaceful moment there is an opposite impulse toward anxiety and paranoia, and the album is filled with oblique, self-questioning lyrics. The connecting thread is a struggle to break free of all restraints.
“I don’t want people to think anything when they hear ‘My Morning Jacket,’ ”Mr. James said. “I just want them to think of a question mark.”
From its debut, “The Tennessee Fire,” in 1999, My Morning Jacket has been tinkering with its formula, adding and subtracting electronics, R&B rhythms and country. At its most orthodox the band has sounded like a second coming of Crazy Horse; at its most abstract, an earthier, American Radiohead. The constant has been Mr. James’s voice, a plaintive, eerily expressive high tenor somewhere between Mr. Young and “Lay Lady Lay”-period Bob Dylan.
When Todd Haynes was making his Dylan film “I’m Not There,” he needed someone to sing “Goin’ to Acapulco,” and Mr. James was called after two singers fell through. The recording was made at the 11th hour and rushed to Mr. Haynes, who said he was stunned by its otherworldliness. “There’s something truly extraordinary and unique about the acoustics of his voice,” he said. “It comes with its own reverb, its own echo, something that’s completely innate to him.”
The first name Mr. James mentions when discussing his vocal influences is Kermit the Frog. “I remember hearing Kermit sing and then finding out that that was actually a real person singing,” he said, “That kind of blew my mind. I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s actually a real dude.’ ” Only after some Muppet reminiscence did he get to human inspirations: Richard Manuel from the Band, Roy Orbison, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Mr. Dylan, Mr. Young — distinctive tenors, mostly.
As a group of road warriors playing a style that comes down from bearded 1970s rock, My Morning Jacket is in a sense anachronistic. But with record sales representing a shrinking source of revenue for most musicians, the band’s strength as a live draw also gives it a smart advantage. Besides its Radio City show, it has a full American and European tour planned through the fall and will play Madison Square Garden on New Year’s Eve.
Yet in an industry in which numbers mean everything, My Morning Jacket’s record sales don’t match its profile. “Z,” from 2005, is its biggest seller at 212,000; its four studio albums have sold fewer than 500,000 copies altogether, according to Nielsen SoundScan, low even for a midlevel rock act.
High-intensity concerts have made up for that gap somewhat, earning the band a reputation as one of the best live acts in rock. But Norm Winer, program director of WXRT-FM in Chicago and one of My Morning Jacket’s biggest radio supporters, criticized the band for making albums that lack the vitality of its concerts. “Here’s a band that thrives on spectacle, that really wants to be the center of the universe and can justify that presence there,” Mr. Winer said. “And yet in the studio it’s so subdued.”
And while many acts have turned to Madison Avenue for ancillary income, My Morning Jacket has remained ambivalent about using its music for advertising. Four years ago its song “Mahgeetah” was used in a beer commercial, but the group says that it gave away some of its earnings to charity and hasn’t done a commercial deal since. Its manager, Mike Martinovich, said the band has not ruled out these opportunities but that they conflict with a wish to hold onto a sense of mystery in its music.
“When you license a song to a commercial,” Mr. Martinovich said, “you run the risk of limiting the meanings the song can have to your audience. If an artist wants to preserve a listener’s ability to have a personal interpretation of a lyric, he may have to forgo the financial gain associated with a commercial license.”
Picking at a Nutella banana crepe Mr. James seemed most interested in recounting the mundane details of his new life in New York: dealing with sign-or-die real-estate agents, rushing home for a mattress delivery, studying strangers’ faces on the subway. He loves prowling the streets unrecognized, he said, something that had become impossible in Louisville.
He lighted up with excitement when recounting the postperformance hooting and backslapping at “Saturday Night Live.” But despite the group’s hopes for “Evil Urges” Mr. James said he has all but dismissed the possibility of becoming a rock star. The very idea, he said, has been killed by the instant accessibility of the Internet. “The grunge era was the last era of the comic-book size, superhero rock star,” he said. “All you had was that record cover to look at and the videos on MTV, so they were still mysterious, legendary figures.”
By contrast, he said, My Morning Jacket is content to follow a human-size life line. “We’re not unknown,” he said. “We’re not wildly popular. We fit in the middle.”
