On May 25th 2011 The New York Times published an interview the Jim James, Patrick Hallahan, Todd Haynes and Tucker Martine, done by Nate Chinen. The original interview can be found here.
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At a climactic moment in “Circuital,” the title track of My Morning Jacket’s new album, things take a turn toward the homestretch. “Out on the circuit, on the hallowed ground,” the band’s lead singer, Jim James, wails, a hint of hoarseness creeping into his voice, “ending up in the same place that we started out.”
Bass and drums chug heavily behind him, while a piano spools out major-key arpeggios. There’s an acoustic guitar, briskly strummed, and an electric guitar, all humid twang.
The vibe falls somewhere between fastidious studio product and booming concert recording, a balance that ideally suits My Morning Jacket, a spectacular live band started in 1998 and now approaching the height of its powers. “Circuital” was recorded here in the band’s hometown, mainly in a rickety church gymnasium, direct to analog tape. In a pointed contrast to its last studio album, “Evil Urges,” which was made in a top-flight New York studio with state-of-the-art techniques, it delivers a distillation of the band’s sound, a ruggedly reverberant amalgam far easier to recognize than categorize.
“This was kind of full circle,” Mr. James said of the nature of the recording.
Hence the album’s title, with its suggestion of completion, though “Circuital” could also be taken to suggest a victory lap, given that it opens with a song called “Victory Dance.” Some exultation feels warranted in any case. My Morning Jacket has earned a robust fan base without hit singles or savvy licensing deals, becoming a powerhouse one tour date at a time. (This summer brings headlining slots at Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza and others.)
All this has happened during a period of constriction and fragmentation for the music business — and maybe partly because of it, given the industry’s grudging respect for niche dominion. Sales figures have never been the best metric for My Morning Jacket, but since the band signed with ATO Records, each studio album has been bigger than the last. “It Still Moves” (2003) reached No. 121 on the Billboard 200, followed by “Z” (2005), which hit No. 67. “Evil Urges” (2008) broke into the Top 10; “Circuital,” the band’s sixth and one of its strongest, should keep the trend going.
“ ‘Circuital’ has a really declarative, anthemic sound and spirit,” said the filmmaker Todd Haynes, who will direct a live webcast of My Morning Jacket’s concert at the Louisville Palace Theater on Tuesday, to coincide with the album’s release. “And it feels to me like a new dawn, a new baptism, a return to the start.”
The band’s members — Mr. James, the bassist Tom Blankenship, the drummer Patrick Hallahan, the guitarist Carl Broemel and the keyboardist Bo Koster — returned to their makeshift studio last month to reacquaint themselves with their new songs and prepare for the tour. After a dinner break one night at Jack Fry’s, a former bookmaking parlor turned white-tablecloth restaurant, they headed back to the church, where their gear and instruments lay sprawled across the gymnasium floor.
At one end of the room a heavy curtain framed a stage; at the other end a balcony glowed with a string of Christmas lights. Mr. James stood to one side as his band mates played a round of Bonus Sandwich, the hoops game they invented during the long process of recording.
“Our first session it was 100 degrees, no air-conditioning, no computers, just us sweating,” Mr. James said, grinning fondly at the recollection. “That contributed to the overall thing. We were set up in a circle, and we let it all be.”
The credits for “Circuital” include the phrase “recorded in heaven.” A tour of the church suggested a distinctly faded glory, the feeling of a congregation winnowed by age and attrition. A sign on the wall of the sanctuary read “Attendance Last Sunday 18/Attendance Today 20.” In the basement a cobwebbed Boy Scout meeting room was strewn with dioramas and rummage-sale items. Mr. James, sifting through dusty LPs, decided to borrow a few: Gregory Abbott, Van Halen, Chaka Khan.
My Morning Jacket has always had a slippery relationship to genre: it’s a guitar-driven rock band just as likely to access country, R&B or whatever else. “Holdin’ on to Black Metal,” from “Circuital,” has bleating horns and a fuzz-tone riff borrowed from a track on the 2009 compilation “Siamese Soul: Thai Pop Spectacular Vol. 2 1960s-1980s” on Sublime Frequencies.
Mr. James, a singer-songwriter of protean instinct, receives due credit for the band’s multiplicity. But its hometown might be another important factor.
“Louisville’s an interesting place because there’s not a forced identity,” said Mr. Hallahan, a childhood friend of Mr. James’s who joined the band in 2002. “It’s not really Southern, it’s not really Northern, we’re not really in the Midwest, we’re not really on the East Coast. There’s no expectations. We can kind of be whatever we want to be, and I think that characteristic comes through in this band. We’re not just one way, ever.”
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Mr. James nodded and said, “We’ve always just done what we’ve done and tried to have fun with it and been stoked that we don’t fit into any categories.”
“But it does get annoying sometimes,” he added, referring to the band’s connections to both the jam-band set and the indie-rock scene. “If there’s a hippie twirling a baton in a field somewhere and we’re getting too hard and too heavy, they get kind of bummed out. And if there’s an indie-rocker, and we play more than 30 seconds of a guitar solo, he’s like: ‘Velvet Underground would’ve never done that. Oh, wait — yeah, they did.’ ”
His band mates laughed. “You Wanna Freak Out?” from “Circuital” seems aimed at the image-conscious indie kids among their fan base: “Play it safe, play it cool/If you ever emote, you’re playing the fool/Is that the way you think it is?”
Mr. James favors cryptic, searching lyrics about issues both personal and existential: the stuff of “Dear God,” for example, one of his contributions to the indie supergroup Monsters of Folk, later sampled for hip-hop use by the Roots. (Monsters of Folk is one of several side outlets for Mr. James, whose full-length solo debut will probably be released next year.) “I feel like a lot of what I write about comes from not understanding who I am, and not understanding my place in the world,” he said.
The band sought to frame those questions in songs captured with oldfangled recording techniques.
“Basically, ” said Tucker Martine, who engineered “Circuital” and produced it with Mr. James, “we made a lot of choices to paint ourselves into corners, because I think everyone believed in what would happen when we all came together to find our way out.” Those restrictions were a first for My Morning Jacket, and a reaction to the more antiseptic, pressured experience behind “Evil Urges.”
“Normally we work in a building-block method, where we’ll get the core rhythm take to tape, and I’ll lay my vocal on top of that,” Mr. James said. “There are still songs on this record where additional stuff was layered” — strings, horns, vocals — “but I’d say about half the songs literally have no overdubs. It’s just us playing in the room.”
Sitting in a church lounge, where some of the quieter songs were recorded, the band members laughed readily about the more laborious aspects of the sessions: the arduous load-in, which required the services of a moving company, and the oppressive heat, which comes across almost tangibly on some of the tracks.
“You’re so uncomfortable that it becomes almost meditative,” Mr. Hallahan said, describing what sounded like a Bikram yoga session. “You’re not even thinking about what you’re playing at that point, you’re just reacting to one another. And it becomes this beautiful thing.”
By an accident of timing that sweltering first session was followed by a five-night retrospective at Terminal 5 in New York, for which the band played its discography in sequence. For Mr. Broemel and Mr. Koster, who joined My Morning Jacket after its third album, that meant learning some songs fresh; for the others the experience was more of a trip. “It was like stepping inside a time machine, smelling the smell of some smoky club that only had 30 people at it,” said Mr. Blankenship, the only current founding member besides Mr. James, “but really getting a sense of how strong the band is now.”
The feeling lingered. “When we went back to the church to record, I think we had a better understanding of ourselves,” Mr. Hallahan said. “Because we had a chance to look back and learn the story of the band over again.”
And that story, with its humble beginnings and steady build, ended up guiding the spirit of the album. “I just wanted, energetically, the circle to be complete,” Mr. James said.
He’s not the type to take that idea lightly. During a recent taping of “VH1 Storytellers” in New York he pointed out that “Circuital,” the song, begins and ends the same way. The taping also yielded a hauntingly beautiful version of “Movin’ Away,” the delicate waltz that closes “Circuital,” with lyrics about leaving home for the sake of love. Mr. James closed his eyes, emotionally transported, throughout his performance — only to be informed that a technical snag would necessitate another. The band played the song again as an encore, and it was fine, though a bit of magic had been lost.
Reminded of that moment weeks later in the church lounge, where “Movin’ Away” was recorded, the band waxed philosophical. The idea of an elusive perfect take was apt, as was the idea of a meaningful imperfection. “At the end of that song,” Mr. James said of the album version, “you can hear the cars driving by right here in the rain.”
