Another Jim-terview

[johnnYYac]

Governors Ball Music Festival preview: My Morning Jacket, Drake, The Black Keys, more to play Randalls Island Park

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/music/governors-ball-music-festival-preview-drake-the-black-keys-bjork-my-morning-jacket-more-1.10463087

By STEVE KNOPPER. Special to Newsday

A year ago, Jim James of My Morning Jacket joined Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons, and other stars to set never-released Bob Dylan lyrics from his 45-year-old "Basement Tapes" to music. James immediately noticed that his interpretation of a particular Dylan song didn't sound like anybody else's version. "Elvis would write bashing punk lyrics to the same set of music I wrote a slow, soft love song to," James, 37, recalls by phone from his Louisville, Kentucky, home. "It was funny to see how those same words affected us so differently. It made me question: 'What is a song?' "

In 17 years of playing with My Morning Jacket -- which will be playing June 5 at next weekend's Governors Ball Music Festival -- as well as putting out a solo album called "Regions of Light and Sound of God" in 2013, James tends to write his lush, heavily arranged rock songs on the happy side. "Wordless Chorus" is all smiling and pleasure, and "I'm Amazed" rhymes "soothing" and "amusing." But even James has his grumpy moments -- MMJ's new album, "The Waterfall," includes a breakup song, "Get the Point," and "Big Decisions" sharply wonders, "What do you want me to do? Make all the big decisions for you?"

"I do get angry sometimes. I definitely don't think that's my main tool in my toolbox, but it does come out a lot, and that's one of the reasons why music is so healthy," he says.

Big summer shows coming to LI, NYC
While making "The Waterfall" with his longtime bandmates in Stinson Beach, a beatific area surrounded by redwoods in Northern California, James' back went out. He turned out to have a herniated disc, requiring surgery, and he spent two months lying in bed. James can't recall whether the injury directly inspired the more pointed songs on "The Waterfall," but they have a pinched-nerve quality that's unusual in MMJ's catalog, supplementing more typical material like the soaring "Believe (Nobody Knows)." "I've had back problems for the last 10 years or so," James says. "The pain slowly went away, and we were out there at the studio, so it was like, 'Well, we're here, I might as well make the best of it.' So I tried to work through it. I think I didn't have that much of a choice."

The band had gone into the "Waterfall" sessions with no discernible vision or agenda -- James, guitarist Carl Broemel, bassist Tom Blankenship, keyboardist Bo Koster and drummer Patrick Hallahan worked up 24 songs for the album, then put out 10. "I had tons of ideas and emotions, so we really just set out to play some music and not be attached to the outcome," James says. "There wasn't a concept or an idea or anything we were chasing, and that was really freeing. I really enjoyed that process a lot more."

My Morning Jacket formed as a rickety-sounding band whose slow-paced harmonies recalled the otherworldly quality of The Band and Dusty Springfield's "Dusty in Memphis." As it grew in popularity, MMJ expanded its spacey sound, to the point that 2005's "Z" is full of electronic effects and complex keyboard arrangements. Like Michael Jackson or Brian Wilson, James is the type of songwriter who hears entire musical passages in his head, then translates them for the rest of the band to play.

And like Jackson and Wilson, James is also a workaholic. He trains himself to meditate daily. "I'm trying to get better about that. But it's just tough -- I get excited about things," he says. "It's hard for me to stop. You feel like every second you're not working, you lose precious time." On the other hand, due to the extra songs left behind after putting out "The Waterfall," MMJ hopes to release a follow-up album more quickly than usual.

Meanwhile, James has returned to his latest hobby: trashing Nashville. He told Rolling Stone recently that "modern country is deliberately dumbing down the human race." In a 20-minute interview, he politely requests to correct the record. He was not trashing country music. He loves Johnny Cash, Hank Williams and experimental newcomers such as Sturgill Simpson. Mainstream country hits, he says, are victims of "over-commercialization." Says James: "I feel like country should be by the people, for the people, to liberate people. And I feel like modern country is made by computers, to hold people down. That makes me really sad. It's something that needs to be talked about."

[ruralt]

Glad Jim cleared up the bit on his comments to Rolling Stone.  When I read the original I figured he meant pop country, but I disagreed with the idea that pop country dumbs people down - I think it's the reverse, and Nashville just makes easily digested music for very passive listeners because Nashville is great at figuring out how to make money.  Maybe it's a cyclical thing, and one perpetually feeds the other.  And although country music could be accused of having more racists in its demographic than other genres, I find it hard to believe that it makes people take pride in being racist these days.  Has anyone listened to the pop country station recently?  People are rapping and Jason Aldean's putting out songs that should be on urban contemporary stations.  They might be trying to say, "Hey! Look at us! We're not racist!" way too hard, more than anything.

If he says that it holds people down, I can sort of see where he's coming from.  But to me it's hard to tell if life is imitating "art" or the reverse.  A lot of pop country fodder revolves around partying - on the tailgate, on the lake, on the beach, at the bar.  Usually with some babble about the long work week that preceded it.  Where I come from, that really is all a lot of people do.  There's nothing else to do, usually.  And they seem content with it.  Most of them are good people, in my experience.  It is for the people - the people who listen to the pop country stations.  Are they trapped in that lifestyle, and is it a result of the music, or does the music get made because people want to listen to something like "Pontoon" when they're on the lake for Memorial Day?  In times like that, who's to say those people aren't getting, er, liberated?  Freedom is different things for different people.  For some people, it's just getting shitfaced on Coors Light and passing out in an inner tube on Independence Day.  Adorable Jim, not everything has to be so deep. (Not being condescending.)

And I don't personally know any Nashville songwriters, but I'm going to hazard a guess and say it is most likely not by the people.  It's by people being told by some other guy to write something that the people will eat up.  Or they write the songs because they know anything else has a slim chance of getting picked up for recording.  I think this is more the fault of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 than anything else, but that's  another dissertation in another thread.

I think most of the terrible stuff he (might be) thinking of is just a result of the braggadocio of the "Bro Country" guys (and their prototypes that came before them).  If anyone here likes that stuff, I'm sorry, but the only people I know who like it are dumber than a box of hair.  And they take pride in how boneheaded they are, because it's reinforced by the music of Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, etc. (or their songwriters, whatever).  And the production is usually so awful I'm pretty sure it's illegal somewhere.  So if that's what Jim had in mind when he made those comments, I totally feel him.  If not, well, me and him could probably go round and round on this subject after a couple of drinks.  Bro country is really just a small segment of the spectrum, but the loud asshole usually gets all the attention and colors the rest.  One thing we're definitely in agreement on is how commercialized the genre has become.  The problem to me, is figuring out who made who.

Pop country isn't all bad, though.  Some of it is actually almost okay.

This concludes my novel.  He said it needs to be talked about. 

[ALady]

I'm just excited for the Sturgill shout-out :)

[johnnYYac]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/05/premiere-my-morning-jacket-s-new-video.html?via=twitter_page

We caught up with James to discuss the song, the new album, thinking for yourself, and the frustrating hypocrisy and "basicness" of the music media.

The Waterfall has been called a 'dark album.' Why do you think that is? Was it your intention?

I don't think that's true. I don't look at it as a dark album. You know, people's perceptions of things are so different that it's hard. I don't think anything is right or wrong. I think there's some dark in it, but I don't look at it as a 'dark album.' For me it's about balance. Having gone through dark stuff and made it, or trying to be reborn from dark stuff. Changing, you know? Trying to make changes that are hopefully positive. But yeah, I don't really look at it that way.

When you wrote the album, were you working through a dark time?

Not necessarily. I think life is a lot more complex than we label it. There's times in your life when everything's insane. It's pretty much always insane, you know? I feel everything all the time. On a given day, even if you're sad, you might have a few laughs. For me making music is like making time capsules, I feel like you're constantly taking these things from your life and writing them down and putting them in a time capsule and burying it in the ground, you know? Then walking away from it and starting in on the next time capsule. I don't think I've ever set out to write a break up record or a non-break up record or a party record or whatever, those are just general terms. Life is more complex than that.

Why do you think so many music critics compartmentalize stuff like that? Is it just easier and safer for them to quickly classify something and sell the idea than to actually listen and think about and try to interpret an album?

Yeah. Obviously there's many different critics, and there's great music critics, and there's bad music critics, and average music critics, and everything in between. There are time when it's tempting to try to get into some kind of metaphysical combat with somebody that you feel has done you wrong with their review or opinion, but you can't really go down that road. Because then you're giving them too much power. Who knows how they were feeling when they listened to the record? Maybe they were feeling dark, or maybe they were feeling happy. That's one of the most beautiful things about music, is that perception is limitless, so subjective, everything is wide open. So I try not to... It's so hard, when you hear all these things about your music, to not let it get into your head and fuck with you, positively or negatively.

Do you ever think about that, those exterior opinions, as you're writing? Does the public perception of a song or album ever change the meaning to you?

I would be lying if I said it didn't hurt or it didn't feel good. But for me, even within an album, it's so song-by-song based. The song portrays how I'm feeling at the time. I try to include humor in some of the music, and I think people have a really hard time with that because it's not the coolest thing in the world. There's some kind of cool contest, and everybody is trying to win. I was made fun of for being a nerd in school, so I guess I don't understand that whole cool process, no matter how hard I try, and in some ways that's really liberating. It's just weird, because people jump on the damn bandwagon. Like, people love to hate our Evil Urges record, because we tried a few things on that. And I'm really proud of that record. I really like it. It's such a fucking mind trip.

The song we're premiering is "Compound Fracture." What was in your mind or what was behind that song?

I was thinking about life and trying to be a good person and thinking for yourself. The point of it is that there is no evil and there is no good, and how religion can get you into a cloud and somebody can tell you they think something is evil that you clearly don't think is wrong. I think about it as a warning, or a wake up call for somebody to think for themselves. It's tied in with another song, "Believe," where I say 'believe what you want to believe, because nobody can prove anything anyway.' I grew up in the Catholic church, and homosexuality is not looked upon in a good light, which I think is so, so wrong and so hypocritical, because they're saying 'love your brother. Oh, but don't love this brother.' When you're coming in to your own or you're a teenager and trying to decide what's right and wrong, we all need encouragement to look in our hearts and just feel what we feel. Love is love, and as long as people are loving each other they should be able to love whoever they want. It's the most beautiful thing in the world.

So basically, the takeaway is, "Don't get caught up in the bullshit."

Yeah, it's so easy to get caught up in the propaganda. Just like we were talking about with the critics and the press and reviews, it's so easy for somebody to read a review of a record and if somebody trashes it be like, 'Oh I hate this record, too!'  And it's like, 'You didn't even listen to the fucking record.'

[ellisintransit]

Thanks for continuing to post these great reads.  I fucking love Jim James.

[rincon2]

"It's just weird, because people jump on the damn bandwagon. Like, people love to hate our Evil Urges record, because we tried a few things on that. And I'm really proud of that record. I really like it. It's such a fucking mind trip."

^^^^My favorite quote. ^^^^ EU is slammed more for what it is not, ISM, Z, etc., than for what it is, a brilliant eclectic collection of original music that pays homage to multiple varied inspirational artists.

[Lonndown27]

Evil Urges blew my fucking mind apart all throughout that hedonistic romp of a Summer in 2008  I fucking love it to this day even more, especially how its played live. OKONOKOS II with Evil Urges / older non first OKONOKOS tracks from 2008-2010 would be fucking crazy awesome 

[ffghtrs]

I love Jim's comment on Country...I knew exactly what he meant.  Country is great music when its done right.  as well as most music.  I"m not really a rap or hip hop fan but my god there is some great rap and hip hop out there that blows my mind and i just simply love. and Pop music today is so shitty that it makes sense that the commercialized redundancy that is pop music would piss someone off who makes good pop rock music.  yeah i'm done ranting and i love you all and Jim James and co. especially!

[johnnYYac]

http://shepherdexpress.com/article-25971-my-morning-jacket-return-wiser-than-ever.html

[ruralt]

http://shepherdexpress.com/article-25971-my-morning-jacket-return-wiser-than-ever.html

The article closes with Jim saying, "I think we've grown with this record."  I know we're only a little over a month into all of this, but it's starting to sink in, for me anyway, how true that is.  The Waterfall just keeps getting better and better.  I'm fascinated by this album.