Features

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

Photo by Michael Weintrob

Have you talked about how this album is going to translate live beyond “Highly Suspicious”? How do you congeal how you think things are going to be experienced from the crowd’s perspective?

Carl: We always have rehearsal, like anybody. You gotta figure it out and what’s missing—start playing this and that—and what’s absolutely important. This song needs to be there. It’s fun to throw these songs into the mess with all of the old songs, too, and see how they react. It’s still experimental ‘cause once you make the record, you spend all this time finding sounds.

You’re so in your head.

Carl: And getting into it and getting the perfect sound for everything and making each song sound different and then having to do that and having to play through all these songs. In rehearsal setting, it’s like, “Oh my god, we’ve spent like an entire day on this song. What do I do right now?” ‘Cause I have to play it now.

And you have to let all those sound things kind of go in a weird way because you have to just keep playing things.

Carl: Yeah, we just figure it out slowly. We’re still kind of in the middle of that

Bo: I don’t think we’re too anal either in terms of replicating sounds on the record. I already know “Touch Me, Part 1” is gonna be totally different. I can already tell. Like when we play it the first couple times it’s gonna have a different grittier feel.

Carl: It’s a smokier, sleazier song. It’s not as robotic.

Have you guys ever had that experience where a fan is pissed that you don’t do it the way you used to. Do you find that you get confronted with that?

Jim: There’s some stuff off the first record that we maybe do a little different, but I think we pretty much stick to things as they’re set. Because I feel like we already have a lot of variety and stuff so if we want to do something different, we can just play a different song we don’t necessarily need to do a reggae version of a song that’s not reggae, you know what I mean? Like change a song intentionally just to change it. But there are certain songs that are allowed to be different but I don’t know. I think for the most part we’ve got our system of things that happen and it’s all kind of orchestrated more than I think people realize it is. There are certain instances where we’ll let ourselves go into space.

I was hearing a lot of Prince on this record. It has a dance quality. Where did that come from?

Jim: Prince comes up a lot but there wasn’t much thought about Prince. I mean I love Prince. He’s the baddest motherfucker on the planet since James Brown died. I’m with Prince, I’m his number one supporter. But I feel like dance music and hip-hop music especially nowadays is kind of what makes the world go around. We’ve all always been into dance music and hip-hop at least to a certain extent, so on this record, I think we just kind of wanted to get everything. We started doing that on Z but we wanted to get the stuff more sucked in and more tight to where it’s not like we’re trying to make a hip-hop record but it’s like the drums and the bass are really propulsive and really getting you in that frame of mind but then there’s still room for the rest of us to do our thing over the top of it. We’re not like, “Here’s our hip-hop record,” ‘cause that’s just not what we do.

The drum beat was what I got caught up in because every song you’re going different than what I picture you as a drummer doing. On “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream” you go from small drum kit to big drum kit in that section where you guys unleash half way in. What do you spend your time doing? Do you ever play to a click track to nail that shit down?

Patrick: I don’t ever practice with a click track. We definitely used a click track sometimes with some of those songs just to maintain a certain tempo with it—a song has its own little character and you gotta find that character. And the tempo is part of that character and it defines the pace of that song and it exists at its best point, you know? I played to a click on a couple songs on this album and it was instrumental in holding it down. It’s a lot of fun to just assume different characters when you’re playing. It’s easy to just do the quote-unquote Bonham thing—to just fly off the handle and go all over the place, but to study a certain part of it. It’s amazing. It really is. When you have this driving beat going and you see four other guys bobbing their heads and carrying on this little line going through, it really just makes the greatest sense in the world to me.