My Morning Jacket are making their mission bigger than just the music. With One Big Family, and One Big Holiday, the band is spreading love. The thing is, this love they are spreading just sounds so damn good. We talk with Jim James about it and discover why he is one of the best dudes working in music.

SEASON 11, EP 4: my morning jacket and jim james share the love

A new album release by your favourite band is an important event. Thank god for this. A new album is a reprieve, an escape, a comfort and a joy. Of course, to experience all these emotions you do have to take the time to really listen. I particularly love that a record has the power to be your own personal time machine. When I first played back the new My Morning Jacket album, simply titled is, I was transported back in time to the late 70s, back to my childhood. A time of albums on vinyl or cassette, played on ‘music centres’ (that’s what we called hi-fi systems in Northern England back then). A time when ELO or Supertramp, or The Stranglers or Queen, would make albums consisting of singles with accessible catchy melodies mixed with more exotic, experimental songs that were probably marked during the recording process as ‘album tracks’. A time when you could expect each and every album released by a band to have a different, distinctive character from the last one. It was a time of greater attention and patience and a slower, simpler pace of life. 70s memories are especially magical for me, so a soundtrack courtesy Jim James & co is a total treat. 

It isn’t fashionable music that My Morning Jacket creates. Indeed, their alchemical meld of alt-country rock and late era Beatlesesque psychedelia make MMJ sound always like a band out of time. That’s just how Jim James intended it. Music perfect for sucking you into their timeless orbit. And no real desire beyond that. It’s how Jim James operates these days - put your best work out there into the universe and then what will be will be:

“Of course we all want our work to be successful, me included. But I’ve ridden the rollercoaster so many times now, I know the outcome is always the same, whether people like a record or not, I still had to deal with my own depression and self loathing. External validation will not fill that hole, you can only do it yourself, love yourself and try to see things more clearly”. 

It’s funny sometimes, how long a music recommendation can take to sink in. I was first introduced to MMJ in the early 2000s around the time of the band’s third album It Still Moves (the one with the Grizzly Bear on the cover). I tried it, but couldn’t take to it - something about the reverb drenched production shut me out of the band’s songs. Apparently Jim James recorded his vocals in the hallway for their first three albums and that would help to explain it. I paid more attention to the single The Day Is Coming on heavy rotation on the BBC’s 6 Music station, from their album Circuital. And when that album became 2011’s holiday listening of choice well, that was that. I was hooked and forever associating the band’s songs with escape, nature, exploration and relaxation. I went back to their breakthrough album Z, and have listened religiously to everything since. And I mean religiously. To my ears there is something spiritual about MMJ and Mr James in particular. 

Writing in Rolling Stone when reviewing Z, David Fricke once said about MMJ: “America is a lot closer to getting its own Radiohead, and it isn't Wilco". It’s easy to see why Fricke wrote that. MMJ are so much the sum of their influences, so organically blended into a sound unique to themselves, their music simply arrives as if delivered straight from divinity. Jim James sees it this way, though he is the last person to have any god complex. Instead, he is humble about it all. 

“Music comes from the divine, or god or the universe, nobody really knows. Melodies come to me all the time, those are like seeds. And the lyrics sometimes will come in dreams but then lyrics are where the work comes in, shaping the words into something that people will understand”. 

MMJ’s music is both life-affirming but also challenging. Like Radiohead, this band does not shy away from dissonance, off kilter time signatures and ear-splitting guitar work, but there is always the emergence of beauty from the noise. This abruptly contrasting style takes a backseat on is. Instead, the songs are what matters most on this album. Legendary rock producer Brendan O'Brien (Pearl Jam, Springsteen and ACDC) has pushed Jim James and his band to be even more in service of the songs than they have been before. But the melodies and grooves are so strong, it works wonders such that the album stands up as one of their best so far. Pretty good show after 25 years and 10 LP records.

And Jim James loves LP records:

“I love the album as an art form. It’s important as artists to do what you love, and don’t worry about the world and what the world’s gonna do. It’s cool even if people love one song, but if they are gonna take the journey of the album, that’s my dream. We aspire to make music in that format, but even if one person loves one song, that's still so awesome”. 

All power to My Morning Jacket and their One Big Family. The band has been steadily building its own fan community, through its ‘One Big Holiday’ festival, and now its own archive and web community. It’s the future for all bands - a way to work at one with their fan bases to create something beyond what the traditional music industry, with its broken business models and greedy tech platforms, cannot currently provide. 

“It’s such a blessing, we pinch ourselves all the time. With One Big Holiday, we’d see the same people coming. We’d hear about the friendships people were forming, it brings our world so much more life and so much more joy, it’s our own universe. That energy between the band and our fans is like a circle. It really makes the whole thing worthwhile”.

Yes, yes it does.

The new album is, is out now, It really is. On Bandcamp.