My Morning Jacket - Interview - Spring 2008
By: Charlie Potter
I meet Jim James and keyboarder Carl Broemel in the lobby of the hotel they are staying at (K West in Shepherd's Bush), and I nervously shake their hands with my rather sweaty ones on what is a ridiculously hot day.
In the hotel lobby I admit to not knowing anything about football after being asked about the match (it was the 'big match' on this very night), at which point I imagine they are thinking 'who is this jabbering sweaty idiot who knows nothing about his own culture?' But much to my surprise and delight, rather than being offended by my general unworthiness, this My Morning Jacket duo are relaxed, polite and patient from start to end.
Rockfeedback: London is quite a long way to come for a solo show, are you doing anything else whilst you're out here?
Jim James: "Well, mainly we came for press. We went to Holland and did press for a couple of days, and then we came here for three days, and then we're going to do a solo show."
RFB: When you do a solo show, how does it equate in terms of bringing the album tracks out on stage?
JJ: "Well, most of the songs start out acoustic anyway, just me and my acoustic guitar, at my desk playing around, it's quite a natural thing because that's where it all starts. For the last year now we've been doing shows together and Carl's been playing pedal steel. It's just been really nice."
RFB: In terms of the performance, do you try and make it more intimate, or is it just the same on a smaller scale?
JJ: "Yeah definitely, it's more of an intimate, quiet thing, where everybody is chilled out, and it makes you think about the song differently. It's still the same song but it's more condensed."
RFB: Do the other band members ever get jealous?
JJ: (laughs) "I don't think so, because everybody understands that this is how the songs start, and we've always made it a policy that everybody can do whatever they want. If people want to work with other people or if people want to do their own thing, it's cool."
Carl Broemel: "A lot of the time during our tours with the whole band, we'll be like 'Jim why don't you go do a song', literally because I think it adds a lot to the variety of the show."
RFB: So will you be playing much stuff off Evil Urges tomorrow night?
JJ: "Yeah we'll be playing quite a bit."
RFB: So, Evil Urges, it's quite playful, the first few tracks especially. Personally I thought that the artwork was also very strange, all of which I found quite exciting. Is this the general trajectory you're travelling on now, is it just going to get weirder and weirder from here, or are you going to try and bring it back down to ground a bit?
JJ: (laughs) "Things are so weird anyway in the world, what we do is just kind of a reflection back of the world and how weird it seems to us. I always like it when stuff makes your brain think and makes you wonder why it is the way it is, I think that's a goal to a lot of the stuff we do, hopefully so people can get something out of it for themselves, but maybe the first time they see it they're like, 'what does that mean?'"
RFB: Having quite a diverse fan base, do you ever worry about alienating them, by throwing in these curve balls here and there?
JJ: "Not really, we don't really talk very much about what we do, we just kind of do it, and you always know that somebody's going to hate it and somebody's going to love it. Every time we put out a record it's always that way, some people think it's stupid and they hate it, and some people think it's awesome and they love it, some people only like the quieter stuff and some people only like the more rockin' stuff, and after a while you just hope that everybody likes it, but you know that some people aren't going to."
RFB: I actually think that the way the album is sequenced is quite strange, it's quite interesting and unusual to put the two rocky ones right near the end, did you put quite a lot of thought into how you did that?
JJ: "We did, we went over it a lot and rearranged the order and took stuff out and moved it around, the order just seemed like the most logical journey, it just seemed like it started you out somewhere that was cool and weird and took you into some more familiar territory, some quieter territory and then took you back up at the end where you are just kinda' rockin', and then it goes into this big weird bit where it kind of dissolves and implodes or something."
RFB: Obviously you have had a few line up changes in the past, but you've been with this line up a little while now and your success has been steadily growing and growing the whole time, perhaps that's why to me Evil Urges seems like quite a comfortable album in a way...
JJ: "That's good, that's good that you'd say that, I agree, we've been together for about 4 years now with this line up, and we did Z the record before and we got to do the live record together, so we've got a few things under our belt, and we definitely all feel a little more comfortable."
RFB: So what was it like recording the album, where did you record it?
JJ: "We got together at Colorado at first to kind of play the songs and knock them around, and we recorded it New York City, at Aviator studio."
RFB: Did you spend quite a lot of time recording it, compared to other records?
JJ: "It was pretty quick, we spent about a month, we went in about Halloween and we were done by thanksgiving, then we went up to Nashville for a couple of weeks to finish up some guitar and vocal stuff, so it took us probably about 6 weeks to make the record."
RFB: Was it nice to record in the middle of a city for a change?
JJ: "It was, it was really good, it was just really different for us. We're used to being out in the middle of nowhere, I think that people always want to try want they don't have, I think bands from the city want to go out in the country, and the bands from the country want to come into the city. We had already done a lot of stuff out in the middle of nowhere, and it was a lot tougher to do it in the city, but we kind of wanted it to be tough so it would make us work differently."
RFB: I don't think there are a lot of bands that could have got away with doing a double live album like your Okonokos, but it's worked brilliantly for you guys. Obviously there is a lot of emphasis on your live show, how do the solid documents that are your records fit into the live aspect of what you do, which you probably spend far more time on, how do you think they relate?
JJ: "I think it's all different pieces of the same thing, because a recording is like a bunch of little live snap shots captured then held together, but you're like, this is a recording... but even that recording is still just one moment in time, so it's cool both ways because recording for us is really microscopic, you're really looking at that moment in time and thinking, 'is this the perfect moment in time that will be the recording forever?' and doing a lot of decision making. Live you get to just do it and don't even think about it - you're just firing songs off. We design a record to put everything that we want to be into it, it's going to last forever physically, and the live show is just a fleeting moment, so they're all just different reflections of the same thing.
RFB: So a bit like a historical document, of the band at that point?
JJ: "Exactly"
RFB: Do you listen to your old albums much?
JJ: "Well, when we make them we listen to them like a million times, but not much afterwards. Sometimes we'll go back to check a song if we're forgetting something, and sometimes when we're making a new record, I'll go back and listen to something else on one of the older records, just to see how it compares or something."
RFB: It's interesting that artists seem to go either way, you get the ones that are so obsessed with their own music that they listen to it all the time, almost as if that's the only reason that they make music...
JJ: "I do that when I'm doing songs first off, when we're doing demos, thinking about the songs and listening to it a lot, I'll record something and then put it on my iPod and walk around with it, I'll listen to it and try and figure it out, but once we've made a record, you've put so much time and thought into it, once it's all done you just kinda want to escape from it for a while."
RFB: One of the influences I heard on the album, I don't know if I'm just imagining this but on the track 'Sec' Walking', to me it sounded, especially with the backing vocals, quite a lot like Supertramp, who I am quite a big fan of.
(confused laughter slowly swells in the room).
JJ: "That's crazy."
RFB: I wondered if I was on the mark or whether there were any other particularly big influences on it?
JJ: "I have never heard anyone reference Supertramp before, that's awesome. All I know is that one hit Supertramp song."
RFB: Umm, that's, probably... (thinking to myself 'what do you mean that one hit, Supertramp have had loads of hits, they're amazing...')
(Jim starts humming 'The Logical Song'.)
RFB: Yeah, 'The Logical Song' (I always thought that 'Dreamer' was a bigger hit)... Well Crime of the Century and Breakfast in America are both incredible albums... If you like that sort of thing.
JJ: "Really? Well, I don't know, I haven't heard enough, but I don't like that one song that I have heard, the hit song."
RFB: That's their worst song [not strictly true], I promise. But in terms of influences, was there anything particularly big?
JJ: "Mainly just Supertramp."
RFB: Just that one Supertramp song that you don't like...
JJ: "Absolutely."
RFB: So you've got another huge tour coming up in Summer/Autumn...
JJ: "Yeah, were doing here in June/July and the States in August/September. It'll be cool, we haven't done a big tour in a while."
RFB: Do you enjoy being on the road?
JJ: "It's half and half, sometimes you get driven crazy, you hate it and you want to go home, and then sometimes you love it and it's really fun. It just depends on the night, you know how different days are just different. I didn't do anything different the last two nights. It's funny because two nights ago I was laying in bed and I was thinking 'god, it's good to be alive', but then last night I went to see a show, I didn't drink anything and I was just sat there thinking 'I feel kinda creepy right now.'
CB: "I couldn't sleep last night at all, it might have been the Vietnimease Iced Coffee that we had dinner."
JJ: "Touché, old chum."
RFB: I noticed that in quite a few of your songs there's quite a lot of positive advice, do you ever feel like your talking directly to your fans, or are you more singing to yourself?
JJ: "I don't ever really see it as singing it to the fans, but I guess you are when you're making a record - you know people are going to be listening to it. I think for me it's more speaking to a particular person. Sometimes there'll be something that I'm singing in my songs, and I know I will be saying it to a particular person, even though they might not know it. I'm more having conversations in my own head or with somebody in the music."
On the way back down the hall I comment how the hallway looks like something from a David Lynch film. Carl comments that he has been expecting to see a infant ride round the corner on a tricycle. So, we're talking different directors, but we're on the same wave length. I shake their hands and leave, feeling like I have just had a really nice chat with some really nice guys.
Artists in this article: My Morning Jacket