The New York Times (2011)

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.

Keywords:

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.”

The New York Times interview (2008)

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.”