Cover Story: My Morning Jacket
My Morning Jacket:
Urge Overkill?
When My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James spoke to Illinois Entertainer in 2002, his point was drowned out by an enigmatic admission. Expressing the relationship between his band – having just released the wide-eyed, country psychedelia of At Dawn (Darla) – and their native Louisville, he casually offered “I think our sound came from God.”
Appearing: October 9th and 10th at Chicago Theatre in Chicago. Shows postponed due to injury.
The conversation quickly detoured into a spiritual maze, reconciling James’ Catholic upbringing with a less-structured, but no-less-consuming focus on energy. While emphasizing this eccentricity, we dropped a more poignant passage to our story’s page-74 jump: “We wanna try to do everything by the time we’re finished. We’re not trying to stick to any certain sound or try to keep things in one arena.”
He wasn’t kidding. The ensuing It Still Moves and Z didn’t exactly napalm MMJ’s reverb-charged, self-medicated-Neil-Young atmosphere, but this summer’s Evil Urges does immediately. The title track and “Touch Me Or I’m Going To Scream Pt. 1” make good on James’ latent Prince fixation, when along comes “Highly Suspicious” to cancel negotiations with a grating falsetto and mechanized chanting. They’re acts of a band firmly in control of their ambitions – or one hellbent on self-destruction.
“This is definitely an album about risk,” says drummer Patrick Hallahan, months removed from the summer’s initial backlash. “Even the recording of it and the way we went about this album, it was all about taking ourselves out of our comfort zones and seeing what that produced.”
Taking the audience out of theirs never factored. “I really didn’t care if anybody liked it or not,” he admits. “I was just really proud of everybody and how they played and how it ended up sounding.”
Before this MMJ story gets away from itself, it must be noted Evil Urges is not Lou Reed’s notorious Metal Machine Music. In a short while, the band nestle into a familiar paradox of classic rock bluster and claustrophobic intimacy. The band’s architect, James tangentially ties his subjects to desire and human interaction and, on “Librarian,” turns in one of the creepiest stalker songs since The Doors’ “Hello, I Love You.” When turning the lights off, however, the band tuck in a Flaming Lips-ish “Touch Me” reprise, suggesting this conversation’s far from over.
“I don’t know that it’s a fear of repeating ourselves,” Hallahan reasons, “but a quest for growth – a quest to figure out more things. We’ve figured out some things and want to know more.”
The quest began as a mere inquiry; James created the band as a side-project that greeted 1999 with an album, The Tennessee Fire. Only in the Netherlands were things aflame though, where a Dutch film crew manufactured a documentary about MMJ and showered their music with praise. At Dawn, however, persuaded American critics, who became entranced by the album’s epic reverb and grain-silo-recorded vocals. Though their albums and EPs’ languid pacing and cosmic country suggested otherwise, concerts became known as “incendiary” and rallied rebel pockets of jam fans and astute indie rockers. In a shrewd move, the band moved to Dave Matthews’ RCA boutique label, ATO, which engendered interest from Matthews’ massive base, who helped fill halls to capacity upon the release of 2004’s It Still Moves.
Soon, progressive radio stations became their playground where modest hits (“Golden,” “One Big Holiday”) set the stage for even larger shows and the towering reggae of Z‘s “Off The Record.” Each album bore quiet though positive steps in new directions, and made the alt-country tags applied in the At Dawn days seem quaint – even more so by James’ habit of being photographed balancing a Flying V.
But Evil Urges‘ timing hints at a big break. It follows on the heels of double-live monster Okonokos, perhaps mimicking the proximity of The Who’s Tommy to Live At Leeds, or how Wilco’s Kicking Television closed one door and Sky Blue Sky pulled up the dad-rock shade. Hallahan isn’t eager to play along.
“I think with some of the other [albums],” he says, “you get so pressed for time that certain things don’t get done the way you want them to, or certain songs don’t make it on the album. This time, it all kind of clicked and worked out.”
— Steve Forstneger
For more, grab the October issue of Illinois Entertainer, available free throughout Chicagoland.
