On September 15th 2011 Austinist published an interview with Bo Koster, done by Julie S. The original interview can be found here.
Keywords: Festivals,
My Morning Jacket albums tend to have a way of growing on you, seeping into your consciousness over time until you need it more and more. The Louisville natives' live shows on the other hand are essentially instantaneously captivating, sucking you in with Jim James' highly reverbed vocals, Bo Koster's keyboard and percussion skills, Tom Blankenship thumping bass, Patrick Hallahan's persistent drums, and Carl Broemer's guitar/pedal steel guitar/saxophone chops. Austin's only chance in 2011 to experience MMJ is this Saturday night at ACL Festival, and Bo Koster talked with Austinist to give us some insight ahead of time.
My Morning Jacket is playing more festivals than ever before - do you guys find it challenging at all playing in front of larger festival audiences that may not be as familiar with your music or does it just help bring in more fans?
It’s hard to tell sometimes. Sometimes it feels like we’re playing to a crowd of people who’ve never seen us before, and they’re confused at first but then we get everybody in. And then sometimes it feels like we’re playing a normal show, mostly just our fans, so it just depends on the festival. I feel like in Austin, usually we play for people that at least have heard of us, but it’s kind of up to the music gods sometimes.
True! Next up is a tour of Europe with The Head and The Heart. How did that come to be?
Yeah, we’re excited about that. We had some weird connections - my girlfriend is from Seattle and she used to do work for SubPop, so I first heard about them through her when I went to see them in L.A. Then they played a show with us in London, just kind of a one-off when we played the Somerset House there a few months back. They were great, seemed like a perfect fit, and they seemed excited about it, so it worked out. They’re a great opener because they have so much positive energy, they move around, and play up-tempo songs.
MMJ has played some marathon sets, like the three hours at Bonnaroo 2008, which was amazing. If there were no venue time limits put in place, is there a perfect set length for you or would it depend on something else?
It’s hard because we now have six records, spanning almost ten years, and some songs are super fan favorites, but some work better in festival settings than others. So we try to do our best in covering all the records and putting on a show that’s good for a festival, because we know people are standing around all day. They made the commitment to be there for the whole weekend, they’re putting in a lot of energy just to be there, so I feel it’s our duty to come out there and bring a lot of energy and give them something that they’re going to get excited about.
That’s great. You’ve got a bunch of records, you’ve been in this for ten years and it’s still for the fans. Do you have a favorite song to play then?
There are so many that I still enjoy playing. It’s funny, you know, we play “One Big Holiday” every show. I don’t think we’ve ever played a show where we didn’t play that song. It feels like Groundhog Day every time we play it, but it’s always fun and kind of exciting. I’m always in awe of that.
It speaks to the songs themselves, which have a lot of ins and outs, a lot of things happening in terms of the music. The song “Circuital” off your latest album is what, seven, eight minutes long? And it doesn’t get boring at all.
Yeah. That’s definitely one of my favorites to play. I love all the different colors and different parts in that song for sure.
Speaking of Circuital, the album was recorded in a church gymnasium, right?
Yeah, it was mostly at the church gymnasium. But also there was a little chapel on the side of the gymnasium, and most of the live tracking was done there.
Oh, so did you use that as kind of an isolation booth then, the side chapel?
Yeah, it gave the recording some natural reverb with the guitar amps and such. There wasn’t a lot of room, since it was kind of built on an angle, so we couldn’t really record in there. But I think we did some vocals in there, and guitar sounds, stuff like that. We tried to use a lot of the church. A lot of the piano work I did eventually in a tiny little prayer room with all these prayer books. It looked like it was straight out of 1982 or the late 70s. You can hear on “Moving Away” at the end of the track, it was raining outside and it’s right on the street so you can kind of hear the cars driving by at the end of that song. We definitely tried to get the sound of the church.
It definitely has an imprint on the overall recording.
When you do stuff live like that, you can’t help but capture the moment in the space that you’re in. That’s what we really liked about recording live, and recording in that unique space. When you listen to the record, you can feel the space, you can feel the place, it feels really real. Whereas some other modern records are chopped up, and everything is isolated, like it could have been recorded anywhere. It wouldn’t have mattered where it was recorded.
Absolutely. So is that the plan going forward then, continuing in that sort of manner? I mean, you guys have always been a heavily reverbed and very intense live band. But you are constantly changing as well.
It will be interesting to see where we go. We don’t really talk about it too much. You know, we are who we are, and we like what we like. We like certain sounds, and sometimes it changes and sometimes it stays the same. I wouldn’t be surprised if we did something again that was similar, because it was such a positive experience. You never know what kind of inspiration can come along, kind of change the direction.
It’s funny, we talk about the process a lot. You go in with this idea, and you’re like “this song is going to sound like this, and this record has to be at least five songs, and it’ll sound like this, and we can just fill in the blank, and it’ll be this kind of record, and this kind of song will be first, and whatever.”
But by the end, the record just kind of makes itself. It does what it wants to do, and you’re not really in control of it. You just have to kind of surrender. The more you try to control it, the less magic is there.
Sure, and that kind of goes back to the overproduced, everything isolated, situation. You lose the magic.
Well, some of those records are cool. We love hip hop records. There’s no sound of the room or real reverb in hip hop records though. It all has its time and place. But for us, we kind of went another way this time. We always try to do it that way. V was recorded a lot like that. We were all in the room together, and you hear the big sound of the studio that we recorded in.
You also helped produce the Delta Spirit record.
Eli Thompson and I co-produced it. He mostly engineered it, and I was considered almost like a consultant, or a player-coach because I played on a lot of the songs. I was a part of the band for a lot of the time, and other times I was behind the boards, giving my input there. It was a collaborative effort, for sure.
So are you looking to get more on that side of the glass, sharing your time behind the console and keyboards?
I am. I’ve always been somebody who has played in a lot of different scenarios. And working with younger bands that are hungry and have fire in their belly and really want to make something great - that’s really inspiring and it’s definitely something I feel I have a knack for, keeping people positive and helping them along the way. Eli and I are definitely continuing to work on records together.
Is there a certain studio you guys are working out of or is it dependent upon the band, wherever they need you?
Every band is different; every band has different ideas about what they want and different dreams and hopes at how they want to record the album. The most important thing when you’re working with the band is to be ego-less and learn as much about them as you can to find out what they want to do and what kind of record they want to make and then help them realize that goal. I never want to be the kind of producer that comes in and make it sound like my record. There are some producers where you hear their work and can go “oh that’s a so-and-so record. All the sounds are the same, that’s his guitar sound, that’s his drum sound or whatever”. That’s not something I’m really interested in.
Right! Then you’re kind of taking away the individuality of the band your trying to capture there.
It’s like being in a relationship. You can’t do what you want all the time and dictate everything that goes on, it’s a partnership and when you’re producing it’s more their record then yours, actually it’s all their record. So I help them realize that, and help them find their way. Sometimes it’s just a matter of asking a question. For example, what do you like? Why do you like that? Okay, how do we go about getting that?
You’ve mentioned before how you like to support local businesses, how important that is to you. Have you ever had a chance to visit any in Austin like Waterloo records?
Oh yeah, we go to Waterloo every time we’re in Austin. I remember hearing something about a signing there this year. [Ed. Note: The signing is actually at the Waterloo tent on site at Zilker, 5pm Saturday.]
We have a lot of close ties in Austin. We have a lot of close friends down there. Little Johnson is a very close friend of ours and we always meet up with him and he shows us around the town and we know the C3 guys. One of the keyboard companies, Open Labs, is based out of Austin so I always catch up with them too.
It sounds like a mini-homecoming for y’all to get back here!
Yeah, and Tom’s wife has worked at SXSW. She’s one of the original people involved so Austin is definitely like a home away from home from us.
I mean how cool is Austin? They have Austin City Limits the television show, and all those cool venues, like Stubbs. It’s definitely a special place and anything we can do to support local businesses we’re going to do. We view them as sacred places, as like an opera house or an art museum. We think that it’s important in our culture to still have those things so whatever we can do we’re going to do.
Absolutely. There’s been talk about a live box set in the works. Is there any word on planned release dates or additional info as to what material might be included in it?
We do plan on releasing the T5, five nights we played each record at Terminal 5 in NYC, in some shape or form. It’s just a mountain of work to get through in terms of having everybody listen to the music, mixing it, putting it together and since we just put out a record the timing isn’t great to put out something else like that. That’s going be a big project - we’re going to do it in the near future but we’re probably not going have a whole lot of time while we’re still touring. Not quite sure if the covers will be in the box set - I'm not sure how the licensing works. So we'll have to figure that out but definitely we're going to put something out, in some shape or form, in the near future.
Sounds like there is a lot of work ahead for you guys!
It takes all five of us to sit down and listen to like 99 songs or something. It’s a lot of work just to listen to it and make notes. We have to figure out how to mix it and it usually takes about a month to mix a record that has 10 songs. So to mix a live record with like 90-some songs will be quite an undertaking.
Looking forward to the release. Does the band ever plans to play the song "Run Thru" in its entirety again or are you just going to tease and torture fans with the short version from here on out.
I think it's teasing and torturing me! (Laughs)
It's funny, that moment in the show has worked really well from a showmanship aspect because of the light and the way it transitions from one song into that part, it's become kind of a thing that we do with our lighting director, with the clock arms. So we kind of got into a rut with that because it works so well with the transition between those two tunes - “Smokin From Shootin” and “Run Thru”. We get into habits and then we fall out of habits. And if you follow the band long enough you watch us get into habits doing one thing over and over and then we get out of it, start another thing. So we'll definitely play it all the way through again eventually.
Good to hear. Anything you’re excited about for Austin City Limits Festival?
I’m excited for some of the side shows. I know that Bright Eyes is playing Stubbs at the same time we're playing and Stevie Wonder will be across the park so it's going be a tough choice for the people in Austin.
We hope they come out and see us though! I don't think we've actually scheduled a tour date there this year because of ACL, and Patrick's wife is about to have a baby, so it's a bit of hodgepodge tour route. I don't think we have an Austin date lined up anytime soon.
So this is the one chance for everybody to see My Morning Jacket this year! Are you guys going to be able to stick around for the whole festival?
I think so, most of us are staying until Sunday. Jim's going to be playing a solo gig with Iron & Wine on Sunday night as well, which will be a treat. It was a total bummer though when we heard we're playing at the same time as Stevie Wonder, since now we can't see him! Hopefully we play for two hours and he plays for two hours so that people can split it down the middle.
