Features

My Morning Jacket: Miles And Miles Of Reverb (Relix Revisited)

Today we turn back the clock to 2003 with the First Relix feature on My Morning Jacket. The group will return to the stage next week in Nashville. It’s also worthy to note that William Bowers, whose story on the group is mentioned in this piece, contributed a follow-up as part of our Relix cover story in June.

I met My Morning Jacket at 11am and we walked a couple of blocks to Chez Le Chef, a unique culinary outpost in the cultural wasteland of the mid-twenties on the east side of Manhattan. The restaurant, much like the band, is an anomaly run by a man with a tireless imagination and a penchant for making art out of the ordinary. During the meal, the waiter offered a basket of bread to lead singer, guitarist and composer Jim James, stating only, “Ra.” James, confused, graciously accepted the offering and then, joined by his bandmates, laughed about the prospect of a baby Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun, appearing beneath the folded white napkin, beams of sunlight binding us.

With My Morning Jacket, expect the unexpected. If the band had its wish, you wouldn’t know what they look like, looks being entirely irrelevant to their mission of connecting with people through music. This might explain why on stage they appear, with one clean-cut exception (keyboardist Danny Cash), as shaggy, hair-obscured enigmas shooting from one corner to another, uniting in a thrashing, circular bond in the middle and bouncing away—manic Muppets awash in a mess of focused, head-banging bliss, cranking out heartbreaking melodies.

Their debut album, Tennessee Fire, was released on Darla Records in 1999 and the band—all of whom hail from Louisville, Kentucky and its surrounding areas—began a three-year odyssey of underground attention and acclaim, which included the replacing of members and the addition of new ones. The release of their second album, At Dawn, took them around the world, won over more fans and ultimately landed them at ATO records and their new major-label debut, It Still Moves. Not radically different than their two previous albums, ISM is perhaps the band’s best work to date—a moving manifesto detailing the roads we choose to go down and the roads that choose us. “We do intend each album as a journey and each album as a different journey,” says James. “That’s why they are usually so long and there’s so much going on. I just think the world I so fast-paced right now; it is so cut and dry and so much of music, there’s no mystery or weirdness behind it.”