American Songwriter (2011)

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On March 1st 2011 American Songwriter published an interview with the band written by Sean L. Maloney, the original interview can be found here.

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Louisville, Kentucky’s My Morning Jacket are a bit of an enigma. In the twelve years since their debut album, The Tennessee Fire, they’ve amassed an enormous, diverse and devout following, garnered commercial and critical success and yet still managed to fly just below the radar of mainstream America. This may be due in part to the fact that My Morning Jacket have taken each new level of success as an opportunity for new creative pathways, challenging themselves and their audience each time they enter the studio, painting with a broader palette on each go round. From the feedback strewn country rock of their debut, to the Dadaist-funk workouts of 2008’s Evil Urges, and across hundreds upon hundreds of live shows, this is a band that has refused to rest on its laurels.

My Morning Jacket sat down with American Songwriter recently to talk about their upcoming sixth studio album and the process and craft of creating music. Recorded in a church in their hometown and mixed at Nashville’s Blackbird Studio, the latest album finds the band in a positive psychic space, a band that has come full circle and come out better for it. Free from industry pressure, creating their sound from the ground up – not unlike their days as an indie band recording in rural Kentucky – and fresh off performing their entire recorded output in five nights at Terminal 5 in New York City, My Morning Jacket clearly have a renewed vigor and excitement more akin to a rookie sensation than seasoned veterans. That excitement spills onto the tape as we discuss intuition in songwriting, recording in non-traditional spaces and the evolution of one of America’s most beguiling bands.

How would you say your creative process is different now than on My Morning Jacket’s debut album, The Tennessee Fire?

Jim James [guitar, vocals]: Well, it’s a lot different now. Tennessee Fire started out with just myself, playing at open mic nights and stuff like that. My cousin John came in and was interested in helping me. He had some equipment and a studio in Shelbyville. He helped me start recording and we started playing open mic nights together. We were having a good time and decided it should be more of a band. The first two records blossomed that way, from more of a – I won’t say simpler – more of an acoustic place that came to the band, because we had such fun playing live.

My cousin John and I, we were playing with Tom and our first drummer J. [Glenn], who were in a different band at the time. And we got to bring those guys in, and that worked out pretty good. It’s been a long way around. Every record has been different; we usually take the same path.

A big difference with the last two records was that we didn’t have a studio of our own. We made The Tennessee Fire and At Dawn and It Still Moves at the studio in Shelbyville, at John’s grandparents’ farm, and when he left the band, we left the farm. At that time, Carl and Bo came and joined the band. For Z, or Evil Urges – the last record – we all would go for a month or so and do a rehearsal period of working on songs and refining them. And then when that was over, we’d go to the studio and start our recording session.

This record is different in that we wanted to make it all one process – the process of refinement was the recording session. Some songs were easier, and some were tougher, but the process was going from the little seed of a demo that I’d given the guys, to working through it over and over and over, and recording it several times. Then coming back and being like, “It’s good but it’s too slow, let’s try it faster,” and listening to it and going “It sounds good, but this shouldn’t be there, that should be there” – doing it over and over and over until it felt like it really came into its own.

Patrick Hallahan [drums]: I think that we’re listening to what the song is telling us it needs. Like he was saying, it’s going to tell you if it’s too fast or too slow – we’ll be thinking about it too intensely, so we’re playing it too intensely and it just sounds choked at that point. We’ve done our best to just shut up and listen to what the song needs, instead of trying to force it into a hole that it doesn’t belong in.

Carl Broemel [guitar, pedal steel]: For our other two records, Jim would do demos and he’d have a pretty good idea of all the little parts. Then we’d have to go back and redo it all in a better situation. Now, the first time the song actually comes together, it’s done. Or maybe the first time we play it a certain way, it’s done. It’s totally “Oh is that it? Oh, that’s it!” I mean, we’re not sure what we’re gonna do.

So it’s more of the moment, rather than having a plan of attack?

CB: We’re recording everything but sometimes you’re like, “Oh, we just played and I think that might be the record.” It’s not just, “Oh, we’re gonna make the record now.” It’s a slightly different state of mind.

JJ: It’s a different process. It took us a little while to get used to it, ‘cause you’re like, “I don’t know what’s going on!” Even if it’s literally the first time we’ve all played it together, everyone’s analyzing it – this is good, this is bad, you know, the whole thing. But it’s kinda cool because you’re already in the process of trying to make it realized. Some people say don’t ever make a demo of a song that’s too fleshed out – because you’ll fall in love with that demo. You’ll put a lot of the song’s original spiritual intent – too much of it – into it, so by the time you make the real recording, you’ve wasted a lot of that early energy. It’s already gone on this demo somewhere.

This time, I tried to make really loose demos, and it’s been a fun way of trying to work them out. I’d always tried to make fairly explained demos, so they knew what I was talking about. A lot of songs are so simple, but there’s this other thing going on on top of it. If it’s not there I’m just like, “Well, it’s just a C chord over and over and over again… You’re gonna love it, it’s going to be great.” But you don’t really know until the thing is on top of it.

What was the songwriting process like?

JJ: It just kind of comes in waves, that’s the way my brain works. I work in a three-part phase, where something has to come to me in a very raw, rough form, like a melody and a drum beat. Then I’ll take some time at home and sit with it and work with it, and try to make it a more realized thing. The third step is to show it to the guys and see what they think about it, throw our input on it, and turn it into what it becomes for us. It’s weird. Unless something comes, I don’t have a reason to sit down and work, or sit down at a desk with a guitar and start strumming to see what happens.

So you’re not a Tom T. Hall, two songs before you can go play golf, crank-em-out sort of guy?

JJ: I don’t know…We were at the Turnip Truck today, and this woman was trying to tell us about different kinds of fish oil supplements and stuff like that. As we were leaving to go, she had four different varieties on the table, talking about each one. I was like, “What’s best for this? Some are better for your brain, some are better for your heart, which one has everything in it?” She said, “Just trust your intuition. Your intuition is gonna tell you which one you want.” And it did – my intuition kept saying “the pink bottle, the pink bottle.”

Songwriting is a very similar process. It’s all about intuition – this thing pops into your head for a reason and it’s up to you to follow it. It’s like there’s a spirit, or intuitive network, that comes through all of us, but most people don’t take the time to think about it or remember it. These little things pop into our heads – it’s just a process of intuition. The initial thought comes in a baby state, and you work on that some more.

We’re working on a song in the studio right now trying to finish it – just a tiny example – and there’s this riff that keeps popping in my head every time I hear the chorus that I never heard before. So it’s my job once we to get to a point, to say, “Oh, I’ve got this thing I need to track down, I gotta follow.” Those little ghost voices that pop in your head. They’re often triggered by little things. Sometimes they’re not triggered by anything.

Do you ever watch Mad Men? There’s an episode where, the Kinsey guy with the beard, who looks like Orson Welles… there’s a night where he’s up drinking, working on this campaign, trying to get the perfect slogan. He gets pretty drunk and he’s eating, trying to figure something out. And he gets the inspiration , it pops into his head … it’s his intuition that tells him to do something. And he’s all excited and runs back in the office and falls asleep on the couch, drunk, without having written down his idea. When he wakes up the next morning it’s gone and he’s totally f**ked, ‘cause he totally forgot it.

That’s a good example about how the ghost voice comes to your head and you have to remember it, write it down, or record it, or it’s just gone. The advent of cell phone recorders has been huge for me, ‘cause you’ve always got it. If I’m in the bathroom at a restaurant and an idea pops into my head – bang – and it’s saved. It’s pretty great.

Do you think that it’s a more collaborative record? Not that you weren’t making collaborative records before, but do you think that this time there were more shared brain waves?

JJ: I think we’ve been on a shared brain wave path for a while. It’s a looser path. Z was looser than Evil Urges. On Evil Urges, we deliberately tried to get it as exact as we could – which we had never done – but I think that for us, that was kind of a stressful process that we didn’t end up enjoying, and didn’t want to replicate. This process has been a lot more free. We found an organic space that was kind of our own – it wasn’t a normal studio – to really grow and make the record in, and explore by ourselves.

CB: We got our hands dirtier. There’s nobody there telling you, “The drums always sound good over there, guitar always sounds good over here.”

Bo Koster [keyboard]: If someone was confused or something wasn’t working, we helped each other figure the puzzle out. If there was a problem, a puzzle that couldn’t be solved, it was a collaborative problem-solving sort of thing. Whereas before we had two, three months to figure it out. We could take it home, figure it out on our own, or talk with somebody and be like, “What do you think I should do there?” But here, every time we played a song we’d all go back and talk with Tucker [Martine, producer] and Kev [Ratterman, engineer]. It was more collaborative in that way.

JJ: Sometimes the song is literally nothing but a drum beat and a bass line and a keyboard part, so there’s not much going on. So what is going on has to be happening, you know what I mean?

PH: Everybody in the band has really learned to let each other be who or what they’re going to be, instead of…

BK: …Trying to push things.

PH: Over time, spending so many minutes in small spaces together, we really figured out how to work with each other.

That seems like a good mental space to be in.

JJ: And it was really old school, because we were doing it all to tape. No Internet, no lap tops, no computer in the control room. It was like we were marooned on a fantastic desert island, with this gymnasium full of equipment.

PH: This whole session has been a lot of fun. We didn’t choose the easiest path. We literally had to go into a space that wasn’t made for recording and build forts and build tents around my drum kit, and move around the room and put acoustic absorbent material down on the floor until we got it right. We had to build it from scratch and tear it down, build it back up and tear it down again – we got our hands dirty, like Carl was saying.

CB: You could hear it in the tracks, you could hear the humidity in the air. It’s weird. That’s the other thing – we were all trying to play, all five of us together, as much as possible almost one hundred percent of the time, with vocals too. But we were getting full-on live takes, especially in July.

What did you use for equipment?

JJ: We just took a lot of different old mics and a Studer tape machine. We monitored on a shitty mix console. There was a lot of great gear in there. The hard part of it was solving problems when gear broke – ‘cause a lot of stuff broke and there’s no studio tech or anybody to fix it other than us, so we had some pretty interesting adventures trying to fix stuff on our own. But we got through it; we figured it all out.

I feel like that’s always been our path, with just the way we started out in Shelbyville at my cousin’s studio. It’s always just us out in Shelbyville, Kentucky, with nobody around and if something broke you had to figure out a creative way to fix it. Or else, if you couldn’t, you were f**ked. [Laughs.] You just had to stop. We ran into that a few times. I think the spirits lead us to some kind of cool things that made it right for us. We found a cool piano that brought into the session a lot of magic.

CB: We did some recording with the doors open, and there’s no isolation really. On the day we recorded the song where the piano’s really prominent, you can hear the cars driving by in the rain. We didn’t intend to do it, but there was no way to not do it. A window that’s eighty years old doesn’t really shield you from the elements. You’re kind of exposed.

JJ: This is also the first record we ever made in Louisville, which was cool for us. We made our first three records in Shelbyville, and made our fourth record in upstate New York and our fifth record in New York City.

You also did some work at Blackbird Studio, in Nashville.

JJ: After being in so non-conventional an environment for recording, we wanted to take it all into a – I don’t want to say conventional, because Blackbird has a lot of great gear – but into a real studio. To really listen to all the sounds, to really focus on the mix, make sure that the sounds we got were right.

PH: It’s kinda like building your own fort in the jungle and living there for months at a time and then going back into society – it’s almost like a resort where everything is set up for you. We loaded in our gear and had all our sounds up in five hours, where as when we were doing that in Louisville, we were halfway through setting up gear and running lines. Yeah, it’s interesting. Definitely a dichotomy.

BK: It’s also the first time we’ve split up the tracking in different parts of the year at three different tracking sessions.

PH: I haven’t really felt the pressure on this album – that’s the beauty of splitting it up into three sessions. You’re not just saying, “We’re gonna record in this amount of time.” It’s been beautifully gradual.

CB: The other thing that’s been cool about this record is that Jim has his own studio now at his house for vocals. Back then he did The Tennessee Fire and At Dawn by himself. With this record, because we didn’t have time, because we were at the studio, Jim went back and did a ton of vocal stuff at home.

JJ: I got to spend a lot of time on each cut with effects and stuff at my house by myself. Which was something. It was nice to take all the time in the world and just focus, lock in. On the last two records, when we weren’t in our own studio, we got it done eventually, but it was always more rushed, and more nerve wracking.

It seemed like you were playing down here every three weeks for a few years. And then…

JJ: We’re trying to be more strategic and smarter with our tours. I feel like we’ve been touring a lot, but it’s been more concentrated blasts.

CB: We didn’t do a whole lot of touring last year, but we did some. We did the July sessions and then did a little tour. We played Preservation Hall, and then the Terminal 5 shows. Basically we went to Terminal 5, took a week off and went straight back to the studio. It’s been a lot of unique perspectives to have – it’s nice to record, totally step away from it for two weeks and then listen to it and go, “We like this, we like that.” It takes time to really listen objectively to what you’re doing, because you are so focused on that part, that one thing that’s glaring at you, which most of the time ends up not being that important. And we also had to play every song off of every record at the Terminal 5 shows in five nights. So we played every song that the band has ever put on an album and went back to the studio. And that was another perspective we had – wow, we just played everything, now we’re doing something new.

That’s quite an undertaking – playing your entire catalog in the course of a week. How were the rehearsals leading up to it? Back in the saddle again or was it like ‘Oh, shit’?

JJ: Some of it came back pretty easily – we did covers from each era, B-sides, EP things and stuff like that. It was a lot of memorization, like cramming for a huge test.

CB: Like finals, like we were cramming, but it was really fun. Because when there’s that much material, you can’t practice that much. There’s just not enough time to really iron it out, so there’s room for “hope this works.” And if it does it’s awesome.

JJ: Each night had a different vibe.

PH: Every album has a different vibe. It’s neat to play some of those things – we were playing a lot of songs we don’t normally play, or haven’t ever played before – especially since I’ve been in the band. I’m sure you all have played ‘em live when the albums came out. It was cool to smell the smells and taste the tastes when the memories started coming back. We would start a song and I wasn’t in that space any longer – I was back rehearsing years before looking at horses feeding on hay.

Like the muscle memory comes back to you? Synesthesia comes on?

PH: Yeah. The olfactory sense is the strongest memory inducer. I always start smelling smells again. I can smell the farm, the upstairs apartment at the farm where we used to practice when we were doing the It Still Moves stuff. I can smell that old ballroom that we were doing the Z stuff in, that we were recording in. I wasn’t expecting to have so many memories flash back.

JJ: Yeah, it was a really psychedelic trip down memory lane. A lot of things came up that you don’t really ever plan on coming up again. In most ways I feel like it’s – for everybody – it’s kind of unhealthy to relive their past. [Laughter.]

PH: Or to dwell on it, at least…

JJ: You hear about people going through phases, of reliving their past, or certain eras of their past or whatever. But in this sense it was kind of like a strange review, reliving the past in good ways and bad. If you’re trying to live by the rules you made for yourself ten years ago, ‘cause you’re you now… and you have to do something you thought was good ten years ago… some of it you think is good and holds up, and some of it is like, “How the f**k did I do that?” It’s a stranger to you.