My Morning Jacket My Morning Jacket

• 1 Regularly Scheduled Programming 03:45
• 2 Love Love Love 03:42
• 3 In Color 07:21
• 4 Least Expected 04:40
• 5 Never In The Real World 05:49
• 6 The Devil's In The Details 09:09
• 7 Lucky To Be Alive 04:24
• 8 Complex 04:19
• 9 Out Of Range, Pt. 2 04:26
• 10 Penny For Your Thoughts 04:47
• 11 I Never Could Get Enough 08:17
• Total Runtime 01:00:39

Info zu My Morning Jacket

On their long-awaited new full-length—a self-titled body of work that marks their ninth studio album—My Morning Jacket reaffirm the rarefied magic that’s made them so beloved, embedding every song with moments of discovery, revelation, and ecstatic catharsis.

“…the new kings of expand-your-mind, religious-experience rock…” – New York Times

Widely ranked among the greatest live bands of their generation, My Morning Jacket have long maintained their status as one of the most vital forces in American rock-and-roll. With their thrillingly expansive and eclectic sound, the Louisville-bred band has influenced an entire era of musicians, largely by staying one step ahead of mainstream pop culture and following their instincts to endless innovation. On their long-awaited new full-length—a self-titled body of work that marks their ninth studio album—My Morning Jacket reaffirm the rarefied magic that’s made them so beloved, embedding every song with moments of discovery, revelation, and ecstatic catharsis.

Their first new music since 2015’s Grammy Award-nominated The Waterfall, My Morning Jacket came to life after a nearly permanent hiatus for the band (vocalist/guitar Jim James, bassist Tom Blankenship, drummer Patrick Hallahan, guitarist Carl Broemel, and keyboardist Bo Koster). “We didn’t know if we’d make another record again,” James admits. “For a long time I was feeling burnt-out, and unsure if I wanted to do this anymore.” During that hiatus, James and Broemel each released a series of acclaimed solo projects, while Koster toured the world as part of Roger Waters’ band and all members except James played in Ray LaMontagne’s band. But after performing four shows in summer 2019 (beginning with two mind-blowing nights at Red Rocks Amphitheatre), My Morning Jacket was overcome with the urge to carry on. “It’d been so long since we’d played together, there was that question of ‘Is this maybe going to be a wake-up call that it’s time for us to move on?’” Blankenship recalls. “But then as soon as we got onstage, it felt like coming home.”

That November, My Morning Jacket headed to Los Angeles studio 64 Sound and spent several weeks working on new songs in intentional seclusion. “We’ve realized that the addition of any one person changes the vibe, so it was just us in the studio the whole time,” says James, who produced and engineered My Morning Jacket. “I told everybody to just bring whatever felt comfortable to them, to avoid getting caught up in trying out 80 different amps or 4,000 pedals before we cut a song. I just wanted us to have fun and not get too precious about it.” With that first session yielding a bounty of new material, the band returned to 64 Sound the following February and completed the initial recording just a day before the world went into lockdown. “Coming out of those sessions was so illuminating,” says Hallahan. “It shined a light on the special energy that happens when it’s just the five of us in a room together. It felt like we’d built a fort and we were all playing around in it.”

Thanks in no small part to that sense of playfulness, My Morning Jacket harnesses the hypnotic intensity of their live show more fully than ever—a major triumph for a band whose storied history includes a four-hour-long, 35-song, rain-drenched set at Bonnaroo 2008. “For years we’ve been trying to capture that feeling of the five of us vamping on something with absolutely no road map,” notes Hallahan. In channeling that free-flowing spirit, the album imparts countless moments of wild transcendence. “It feels like nowadays everyone’s afraid to get raucous or silly, but that reckless explosion of rock-and-roll is something we really try to hold onto,” says James.

For all its unbridled joy, My Morning Jacket again reveals the band’s hunger for exploring the most nuanced and layered existential questions in song form. To that end, the album opens on “Regularly Scheduled Programming” and its poetic commentary on the impulse to numb out in order to escape a painful reality. “This song really hits home for me after what we’ve gone through with the pandemic,” says James. “But even before then, it felt like so many of us were trading real life for social media, trading our own stories for the storylines on TV, trading our consciousness for drugs. We need to help each other wake up to real love before it’s too late.” One of several songs featuring the heavenly backing vocals of Briana Lee and Maiya Sykes, “Regularly Scheduled Programming” unfolds as a gloriously spacey number, beginning on a bit of psychedelic poetry (“Diamonds are growing in the garden/Raindrops are filling up the sea”) and ultimately building to its resolute conclusion (“One shot at redemption: a mighty and sacred love”).

An album that endlessly wanders into new psychic terrain, My Morning Jacket next delivers the mantra-like directive of “Love Love Love,” a groove-driven and sweetly euphoric track. “That one’s trying to steer the ship away from everything I’m talking about in ‘Regularly Scheduled Programming’ and speak toward positivity and pure love, finding truth within yourself and in the world around you,” says James. From there, the band drifts into the delicate majesty on “In Color,” a gorgeously wayward epic graced with a feverish riff that came to James in a dream. “‘In Color’ is just a simple statement of wishing everyone could agree that difference is what makes life beautiful, and that things look better with all of us here: every shade of the rainbow, every gender and race and sexual orientation,” says James. “If you deny that, you’re missing out on one of the greatest joys in life: the wonders of what people can give to each other.”

One of the most frenetic offerings on My Morning Jacket, “Complex” brings a shred-heavy urgency to James’s self-reflection. “In a lot of ways I feel like I’m a puzzle piece that won’t fit,” he says. “There’s so much in life that I can’t figure out, like how to make a relationship work or how to make a career work in a way I feel fully satisfied with. ‘Complex’ is sort of me asking, ‘What am I missing here?’” In its convergence of intense introspection and outward-looking inquiry, My Morning Jacket achieves a particularly riveting power on the nine-minute-long “The Devil’s in the Details.” “That song came from thinking about being an adolescent and growing up at the mall,” says James. “It’s like this strange in-between place for when you can’t quite be part of the world yet — and on top of that there’s the horror of the mall and how much of what’s sold there is made through slave labor. I wrote that song so that nothing gets resolved; I wanted to leave the listener with an unsettled feeling.” At the very opposite end of the emotional spectrum, My Morning Jacketcloses out with “I Never Could Get Enough,” an otherworldly love song that precisely captures the rapture of infatuation. “I’m really proud of that one; I love that it’s a little slow and moody and lets you get lost in it,” says Blankenship. “It’s like the song’s not demanding you to be involved the whole time — you can just let it play and go off into your own world for a while.”

For My Morning Jacket, the ability to supply those sublimely dazed moments is closely tied to the uncalculated nature of the album-making process. “Everyone in the room was willing to let the songs come together naturally, which I think allowed for a lot of exploration,” says Hallahan. “This is what it sounds like when we get out of the way and let the music go where it wants.” And within that surrender is a profound sense of purpose, a commitment to providing listeners with the kind of emotional outlet that feels more essential all the time. “I hope this album brings people a lot of joy and relief, especially since we’ve all been cooped up for so long,” says James. “I know that feeling you get from driving around blasting music you love, or even lying in bed and crying to the music you love. The fact that we’re able to be a part of people’s lives in that way is so magical to us, and it feels really good that we’re still around to keep doing that.”

My Morning Jacket

My Morning Jacket
For more than 25 years, My Morning Jacket have achieved an incredibly rare feat in the world of rock & roll, upholding a long-established cultural legacy while sustaining all the curiosity and creative hunger of their very earliest days. In a monumental step for the Louisville-bred five-piece—vocalist/guitarist Jim James, bassist Tom Blankenship, guitarist Carl Broemel, drummer Patrick Hallahan, keyboardist Bo Koster—their tenth studio album finds the band deviating from their typically self-produced approach and teaming up with multi-GRAMMY® Award-winner Brendan O’Brien (one of the most esteemed producers in rock music, known for his extensive work with Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam). Arriving as My Morning Jacket celebrates the 20th anniversary of their landmark album Z (a lavishly acclaimed LP that landed on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), is once again expands the limits of their sound and elevates their artistry to unprecedented heights. The result: the most masterfully realized work yet from a band fully committed to their belief in music as a conduit for revelation of all kinds.

Mostly created at Henson Recording Studios in Los Angeles, is serves as the follow-up to their 2021 self-titled full-length—an album praised by the likes of MOJO, who noted that “the magic of this group has always been their ability to translate the elemental into the transcendental…a miracle they pull off frequently on My Morning Jacket.” For James—who’s produced or co-produced all of the band’s studio albums since their 1999 debut Tennessee Fire—the decision to work with O’Brien stemmed from a newfound willingness to open up their process and involve an outside creative force in shaping the latest iteration of My Morning Jacket’s restlessly inventive yet nuanced form of psych-rock. “Up until now I’ve never been able to let go and allow someone else to steer the ship,” he says. “It almost felt like an out-of-body experience to step back and give control over to someone who’s far more accomplished and made so many more records than us, but in the end I was able to enjoy the process maybe more than I ever have before.”

Prior to joining O’Brien in the studio, My Morning Jacket got together for two separate and highly exploratory writing and recording sessions, eventually amassing over a hundred demos of potential tracks for the album. “What’s amazing is that we came in with so many ideas, but working with Brendan inspired me so much that I wrote a bunch of completely new songs, which ended up making up about half the record,” says James. “We were trying things we’d never done before and letting Brendan guide us toward what he thought worked best, and because of that all our expectations went right out the window.” When it came time to name the album, the band chose a title that speaks to the infinitely unpredictable nature of music-making. “I like how the word is indicates a sense of presence in the now—there’s no logic or rationale behind this record; it just is,” says James. “All these songs came into existence out of an attempt to connect with something beyond the human experiment, which for me is the whole purpose of music.”

Through their collaboration with O’Brien, My Morning Jacket experienced many breakthroughs that strengthened their ability to directly channel the ineffable spirit of unfettered expression—including, most significantly, their ingenious use of the many recordings James had created on his own. “In the past I’ve had a tendency to fall in love with the demo version of a song and then feel so frustrated that we could never recreate that exact feeling for the record, but now I’ve built my own studio and started recording in a more legitimate way,” he says. “With Brendan, we took a lot of the recordings I’d already put my heart and soul into and used that as the framework for the song, then played live or recorded new things on top of that. It allowed us to retain the magic of when the song first came to be, and then meld that with what we’d created together as a band.”

In a prime example of that elegant merging of worlds, is begins with “Out in the Open”: a sublime and sprawling epic centered on a brightly fluttering riff James spontaneously composed on ukulele deep in the pandemic. “I’d made a demo of that riff and recorded it well, so instead of trying to replicate it we just used that initial piece that I fell in love with,” he says. In keeping with My Morning Jacket’s affinity for lyrics with an existential bent, “Out in the Open” soon evolved into an exultant meditation on the beauty and terror of being truly known. “The lyrics came from thinking about how it can be such a relief to be out in the open with all your truths, but also how it’s scary to have nothing to hide behind, nothing to protect you,” says James. “It’s about trying to be open and truthful, and focusing on what will lead you to a place of warmth and light.”

Another track with charmed origins, the album’s ravishing lead single “Time Waited” emerged from a sample of a spellbinding piano part lifted from pedal-steel virtuoso Buddy Emmons’ lost classic album Emmons Guitar Inc. “I made a loop of that piano intro and listened as I went for a walk, and all these melodies started coming to me,” James recalls. “For a long time I didn’t have lyrics, but then I had a dream where I was in a café and a song was playing, and the lyrics to that song became the lyrics to ‘Time Waited’—the melodies just fit perfectly.” Graced with a cascade of lush and lovely guitar work from James and Broemel (on both electric and 12-string acoustic), “Time Waited” ultimately arrives as a love song for the ages, imbued with equal parts wide-eyed romanticism and wistful recognition of love’s intrinsic fragility.

Over the course of its ten eclectic songs, is reveals a band whose voracious creative appetite is wholly matched by a deft command of their visionary musicality. To that end, “Half a Lifetime” finds My Morning Jacket reimagining a demo unearthed from the Z sessions, transforming the stripped-back slow-burner into a larger-than-life anthem lit up in wildly frenzied guitar riffs. “It’s about doing whatever it takes to get where you need to go, instead of bailing when things get hard—which is funny considering that it literally took a half a lifetime to finish,” says James. On “Everyday Magic,” the band presents a joyful piece of power-pop that slips into a dance-ready free-for-all at the bridge, with Koster’s shimmering melodies magnifying its euphoric mood. “I tend to be addicted to craziness and explosive ups and downs, but ‘Everyday Magic’ came from meeting someone who taught me to see the magic in the simple things we often take for granted,” James says. Next, on “I Can Hear Your Love,” is maintains that blissed-out tone as My Morning Jacket’s playful harmonies and breezy rhythms capture the unequivocal sweetness of mutual infatuation. And on “Squid Ink,” the band lean into their love for ’70s psychedelic-funk and deliver a delightfully warped track powered by Blankenship and Hallahan’s massively heavy grooves and a bit of shapeshifting vocal work from James. “The idea behind ‘Squid Ink’ is that certain people carry a negativity that fills the room like a squid shooting ink into the water,” says James, noting that the song arose from a basement jam with Hallahan. “It’s about trying to get out of those murky waters by believing in yourself, and when Patrick and I were jamming I got the idea to sing part of the chorus really low—almost like putting a beard on the face of the vocal.”

For My Morning Jacket, one of the greatest thrills in creating such an adventurous body of work lies in the chance to breathe new energy into their historically stunning and hard-driving live show—an element that’s repeatedly found them ranked among the greatest live acts in music today, in addition to earning top billing at some of the world’s biggest festivals. “Whenever we do multiple nights in one city we make sure to do completely different setlists each night, so that we never repeat any of the songs,” says James. “It’s really exciting to have a whole new album of songs to add to the set, especially songs that we all can’t wait to play and that will end up giving us all these different ways of connecting with the people who come out to see us.”

In reflecting on My Morning Jacket’s crossing of the ten-album milestone, James points to the “undeniable force of loving” as the most essential factor in the band’s longevity and unending enchantment with the process of musical creation. “One of the cool things about being around this long is that we’re not afraid to scrap something if we don’t absolutely love it,” he says. “It feels really great to have a collection of songs we all love this much, and to know that we worked as hard as we possibly could on them. Hopefully those songs will be helpful to people and give them some kind of peace as they try to deal with the insanity of the world—because that’s what music does for me, and doing the same for others is always my greatest dream come true.”

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