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Five Guys and A Lady: Grace Potter Interviews My Morning Jacket (Relix Revisited)

Photo by Michael Weintrob

I feel like this record has more of everybody’s personality. I can see your faces when I listen to it. I can see you getting the ideas and laying them out. How did you guys write this record?

Patrick Callahan (drummer): It starts the same way every album does. Jim sits in his world and comes up with pretty much the structure of the whole thing and makes demos of it and hands it off to us and this time he went above and beyond the call of duty. How long were you at the cabin recording?

What cabin? Where was it?

Patrick: Virginia. The Shenandoah Valley, right? The only reason I know that is ‘cause I went down there like two weeks later.

Jim James (lead singer/guitarist): It was near Luray Caverns.

So you still kind of keep to the thing where you don’t ever write on the road?

Jim: I can’t really, can you?

It’s the only place I can do it really. I don’t write at home.

Jim: Really? I can’t write on the road.

So you just compile everything over the course of a short amount of time?

Jim: Well, I have to live life and get new life experiences—get new things happening. So I wrote everything I wrote over a period of a couple years and then made demos. My buddy talked me into getting [digital music editing software] Cubase. Have you ever used Cubase?

Uh-huh.

Jim: And Reason. So I was doing a lot of drum programming and beats and stuff like that.

So, a backing vocal like the one on “Highly Suspicious,” does that come to you in the cabin in the woods with the wood fire burning?

Jim: Yeah. It comes as a simple robotic idea which then we turn into more of an Italian pizzeria where we all gather around the wood hearth and make it into a real boy.

Who’s the dough?

Carl Broemel (guitarist): You bring in the pepperoni

Bo Koster (keyboards): I bring-a the oregano

Jim: I bring-a the rigatoni

[group laughter]

But who thought of those backup vocals for “Highly Suspicious” and who’s going do them onstage?

Jim: The goal of the backup vocals is for them to sound like angry British police officers knocking down your door with billy clubs. And we’ve hired robots to do those onstage

And they’re gonna actually do them?

Patrick: Yep. And we built them ourselves.

It reminded me a little bit of “The Monster Mash,” not in a bad way.

Jim: It’s cartoonish.

Who actually did those vocals in the recording?

Jim: Robots.

Awesome.

Patrick: English robots. With bobby hats.