On June 15th 2008 The Star published an interview with Patrick Hallahan, done by Raju Mudhar. The original interview can be found here.
Keywords: Songwriting, Evil Urges, The Sound, Genre
While they've long been hailed as the new saviours of southern rock, My Morning Jacket has never been comfortable with labels.
Known for their shaggy looks, psychedelic touchstones and amazing live show, the band greatly expanded their sonic template with 2006's Z, and continues to experiment with the just-released Evil Urges – notable for funk-driven tracks and lead singer Jim James busting out a Prince-like falsetto on songs like "Highly Suspicious." The Kentucky-based band just announced a big New Year's Eve concert at Madison Square Garden. We caught up with drummer Patrick Hallahan before the band hit the road for tomorrow's North by Northeast show at Kool Haus.
I've seen some of your new promotional pics, and you guys look so clean-cut now. So the question is, do you still rock as hard?
Patrick Hallahan: (laughing) Oh no, with the hair goes the rock. It's just a sad, sad thing. You know what, I'll leave that up to your interpretation for when we play Toronto. How about that?
What was different about recording this album?
PH: We just tried to take ourselves out of our normal element. For starters we took the demos – this band started with Jim as a singer/songwriter and he added on people – so he kind of sits around and writes demos when we're off the road. He then hands them over to us and we knock them around, and add our two cents, or five cents, or however much our additions are, and we did that in Colorado this time. ... We secluded ourselves from the world and put together the potential songs for the album, and then sat on it for about two months to let it marinate, and then went to Manhattan and did completely the opposite of what we normally do, and worked in a studio that only allowed us to work for 12 hours a day. We were in the middle of the lion's den in midtown Manhattan. It was an amazing experience. It was certainly different from what we're used to, where we're removed from everything (in Kentucky) and have complete control over when we want to record, so it definitely lended itself to a different outcome.
The band sound is becoming more refined and seems much cleaner. Is that what you wanted to do?
PH: I think we're getting that comment a lot, because we're definitely practising a less-is-more mantra, and I think that that creates more space for individual instruments to shine, whereas having everybody play at once, that doesn't sound clean at all.... We're really trying to create musical space between tracks as opposed to cramming it with sound all the time.
What do people – specifically journalists like me – always get wrong about you guys?
PH: Well, we don't like being pigeonholed, period. I think we got tired of the southern rock hillbillies from Kentucky thing. All the Lynyrd Skynyrd references and types of things. We just got tired of lazy journalists that assume that we're from Kentucky, so we're not wearing shoes. Or we're hippies.... But how would they know what we're really like? That's why we don't complain about it any more.
