My Morning Jacket moved on from the fissure with the soulful cosmic swoon of this rearranged reggae rock reverie. They had released two albums ( The Tennessee Fire in 1999 and At Dawn in 2001) on independent Darla Records before signing with the Dave Matthews RCA imprint ATO Records for It Still Moves in 2003). Danny Cash and Johnny Quaid left the band in 2004 and were replaced by Bo Koster and Carl Broemel. For their next album 'Z' , the band decided to forgo recording again at the Above the Cadillac Studio and its 'magical' grain silo at the Olliges family farm in Shelbyville, Kentucky. Jim James (James Edward Olliges) and John Leckie co-produced the sessions in the Catskill Mountains at Allaire Studios in Shokan, New York which featured Tom Blankenship on bass guitar; Carl Broemel on guitar, vocals, pedal steel, and saxophone; Patrick Hallahan on drums and percussion; Jim James on vocals, lead guitar, and rhythm guitar; and Bo Koster on keyboards, vocals, piano, organ, looping, and percussion; with Andrew Bird adding strings, and whistles on "Gideon", "Into the Woods", and "It Beats 4 U"; and M. Ward doing the acoustic guitar and choirs on "Into the Woods". Blankenship: "It didn't feel right, it felt like a ghost town, going out there to the studio [in Shelbyville]. We had milked that place creatively. Then we decided, 'Hey, we have two new members in the band, so we should just do everything differently.'...[Allaire is] so secluded, it took a half-hour just to drive up the driveway. We had been talking for years about really locking ourselves in when we did an album, and now there was no excuse but to be in the studio all the time. You'd wake up and have breakfast and grab your coffee and walk into the control room."
James: The place we recorded, was like an old mansion, that they built back in the 20's, that sits on top of its own mountain and overlooks like, all the rest of the mountains and it was blizzarding and snowing and we were locked in there for like a month. It's kinda like the Shining.
Broemel: "Jim's voice is a huge part [of our sound]. Patrick's right foot is a huge part of it. Everybody has their own little thing to contribute. As far musical ideas, the sky's the limit. There's things we probably don't think about that will always be there, but I have no idea what the next record will be like. We'll work and rework a song. "Into The Woods" had three or four incarnations that we thought were pretty cool before we finalized what we wanted to do with it. The same goes for "Off the Record" which wasn't a reggae-feeling song at first. All the songs are great as just acoustic songs, too. "
Hallahan: "If you don't have any prejudice in the music you listen to you shouldn't have any prejudice in the music you play. "
Koster: "There's a certain mysterious quality to everything. I always feel like I'm in another time or place when I play this music. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a movie or something. That's a testament to Jim and his imagination. His songwriting is very non-literal a lot of the time, and there's a fantasy element to some things. "
James: "Just one letter not connected to any other letters or vowels at all. I like the shape of it. You can bend it to make a triangle. You can lop off one end to make a 7. I feel like it had a lot going for it. It’s also the last letter, the 26th letter in the alphabet, and I wrote all the songs when I was 26 ...I thought [the cover art by Louisville artist Kathleen Lolley] set a good tone about the world within us and going inside and being more within yourself, is how I took it. It’s something that I try really hard to do, to stop thinking and stop the mental noise and chatter in my mind. It really is like static, just a thousand voices and mental movies in your mind and when you stop and you just concentrate on your surroundings or where you are, it’s really like turning off a loud radio that’s just playing a bunch of shit"
Blankenship: “Whenever I was talking about the title people would think it was going to be our last record. I thought that was funny. Or someone said we were going to start going backwards. After Z we’d do Y and just keep going that way ...Obviously, the reverb-- especially on the vocals and drums. I think those sounds are kind of a signature [to our sound]. You always know it's My Morning Jacket when you hear the drums start. Songwriting-wise we'll always be all over the map but production wise there's always little hints of what came before, a My Morning Jacket vein that runs through everything. "
'Z' reached number seventy-four in the UK, seventy-one in Belgium, and sixty-seven in the US.
http://www.mymorningjacket.com/ Gideon
VIDEO Off the Record
VIDEO 'Z' full album:
VIDEO
All songs written by Jim James, except where noted:
00:00 - Wordless Chorus
04:09 - It Beats 4 U
07:51 - Gideon
11:21 - What a Wonderful Man
13:43 - Off the Record (James, Tom Blankenship, Patrick Hallahan)
19:09 - Into the Woods
24:25 - Anytime
28:16 - Lay Low
34:18 - Knot Comes Loose
38:09 - Dondante
My Morning Jacket moved on to the majors while staying on the farm for the emotional echo of this spacey southern sprawl. After building their reputation with two albums on independent Darla Records, the band signed with RCA subsidiary According to Our Records (ATO Records) to record 'It Still Moves'
Jim James produced the sessions at Above the Cadillac Studios at Quaid's grandparents' farm in Shelbyville, Kentucky. James explains: "We live in a different world than the world that my favorite records were made in. For us to make records that I think sound good, we need to create our own world...That whole garage we turn into a giant reverb chamber for the drums. Pull all the cars out and mic it up. There are also a couple of silos out back, and we turn those into old-fashioned reverb chambers — put a speaker in the bottom and throw a microphone up top... We ran some Ethernet cable out to the silo — it was the cheapest, because we had to run 600 feet of cable out there." The result meant that they could easily send everything — from a single snare hit to the entire album — out to the silo for reverb treatment and back to the mixing board...We're five dudes in a van; we can't always convey everything live. We have to look at [performance] in a different sense — you're trapped in a van all day, spending nights in different hotel rooms, so by the time we get on stage, we don't hold anything back. A record is going to last forever. We try to think about it and add everything that we want to hear forever — whether we're here for 20 more years or two more days." 'It Still Moves' http://www.mymorningjacket.com/ "One Big Holiday" – 5:21
VIDEO "Dancefloors" – 5:38
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXh7BrishrQ VIDEO "Easy Morning Rebel" – 5:09
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy8KeqSML0k "Rollin' Back" – 7:50
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0Bl3K9mGKg "One in the Same" – 6:23
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKJOFsKs82I VIDEO All songs written and composed by Jim James.
1. "Mahgeetah" 5:56
2. "Dancefloors" 5:38
3. "Golden" 4:39
4. "Master Plan" 5:05
5. "One Big Holiday" 5:21
6. "I Will Sing You Songs" 9:18
7. "Easy Morning Rebel" 5:09
8. "Run Thru" 5:45
9. "Rollin Back" 7:50
10. "Just One Thing" 3:13
11. "Steam Engine" 7:26
12. "One in the Same" 6:23
VIDEO
My Morning Jacket faced mortality and dedicated their love with the adventurous exploration of this musical memento mori. Jim James wrote the songs for 'Evil Urges' "It was hugely painful, horrifically scary. I'd just run myself ragged from touring. I almost died, and I was forced to rest up for several months...For me, 'Evil Urges' 'Super Mario Brothers' James co-produced 'Evil Urges' Avatar Studio in New York. The sessions featured James on vocals, guitars, bass, drums, percussion, and Omnichord; Tom "Two Tone Tommy" Blakenship on bass; Patrick Hallahan on drums and percussion; Carl Broemel on guitars, vocals, pedal steel, and lap steel; Bo Koster on keyboards, programming, vocals, piano, synthesizers, organ, Rhodes, and percussion.
'Evil Urges' "It's kind of all tied into religion confusing people's morality and people always wanting to think that something is either bad or good, whereas in reality I feel that most stuff is more confusing than that. So basically, it's about being confused and feeling that most people are searching for some kind of answer that sometimes people think religion can bring. And lots of times, people will do things that they think are good in the name of religion, but oftentimes they're destructive for the world, although people think they're really being good -- or maybe they are being good, 'cause I'm kind of confused about the whole thing...Every time we make a new album there are certain elements that we started exploring on the record before it that we keep exploring on the record afterwards. It's also definitely a reaction because we try to make every record sound different than the last one, even the equipment we use and the studio we go to and stuff like that. On this record, I wanted to be less organic and tighter, more locked-down, and maybe more propulsive in the rhythm section and tighter in the vocal. Just kind of all-the-way-around tighter. That's definitely a reaction to some of our other records. I just think it's more fun to pick up a new record by a band and hear a completely different record, where you're trying to figure it out and wonder what's going on...We record all the basic tracks including the basic main body of the song live. So everything is always based around us playing it live. But also we like to explore the studio and we like to get into really nitpicking stuff and really building walls of sound and stuff like that. The album will physically last longer than we will unless humans destroy the planet before then. So we try to look at albums as things that will last forever that we put as much time and thought into as possible. The live thing is kind of cool because it's freeing in a way, since it's just going to be that one night. The songs are definitely built to be able to work live, but they're also kind of two different worlds."
http://www.mymorningjacket.com/
"Highly Suspicious" James says: "It confused some people. 'Highly Suspicious' wasn't ironic, I wasn't making fun of it, but I thought it was fun and hilarious. I guess people have a hard time dealing with humour in music. But sometimes life is depressing, and sometimes life is fun, is about just laughing with your friends, and I wanted to express that, as well as the darker stuff." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1MMStUrNGs VIDEO "I'm Amazed" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzdoOGUsEKg VIDEO "Thank You Too!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-sm1T4qJAw VIDEO "Sec Walkin" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eahXNZLVwzM VIDEO "Librarian" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5Es1flO_2M VIDEO "Remnants" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rM_LmvTc0U VIDEO "Smokin from Shootin" – 5:07 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v2ErS5Dz8Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPy7mRwyykU VIDEO "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt.2" – 8:14 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpdwwa7lsUI VIDEO 'Evil Urges' full album:
VIDEO All songs written and composed by Jim James, except where noted. 1. "Evil Urges" My Morning Jacket 5:14
2. "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt. 1" 3:51
3. "Highly Suspicious" 3:07
4. "I'm Amazed" 4:35
5. "Thank You Too!" 4:29
6. "Sec Walkin" 3:37
7. "Two Halves" 2:36
8. "Librarian" 4:18
9. "Look at You" 3:30
10. "Aluminum Park" 3:58
11. "Remnants" 3:04
12. "Smokin from Shootin" 5:07
13. "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt. 2" 8:14
14. "Good Intentions" 0:06
