LEO - Z Review, Article, Q & A

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The following can be found at http://www.leoweekly.com/

Boys, express yourselves
My Morning Jacket gets weird(er) with Z


My Morning Jacket's second major label album, Z, hit the streets yesterday amid major buzz. The band is playing against type, such as it is, and has embraced the art of self-editing. From left, they are: Carl Broemel, Two Tone Tommy, Bo Koster, Jim James (seated) and Patrick Hallahan. (Photo by Danny Clinch)
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by stephen george
 

Memo from the LEO music desk

To: Stephen George, factotum
Re: My Morning Jacket's Z ... time to learn sign language ... the New Dumb Century is not a place where garage rock is recorded in a garage ... we're Still Moving ... a magnificent feat ... no more grain silos

Dear Writer/Reviewer/General Hack,
Your assignment: Take this album [encl. My Morning Jacket's Z] and feed it to your CD player, at high volume, for a minimum 30 minutes per day for one solid month. Interview as many band members as you can wrangle in the same place, and produce 2,000 vibrant words about the whole thing for publication on Oct. 5. Here's the trick: As you know, the mainstream music press have been energetically humping MMJ for at least three years. In fact, some of our more fetid "competition" recently ran an "exclusive" interview — which curiously failed to focus a dime's worth of attention on this album.

However, bear in mind this desk's firm belief that writers from either Coast, whose prose has been inflected with such affection for MMJ, have been charmed not only by the vexing and fathomless character of the jams but by the collective length and weight of band members' hair. Further, they have exhibited one too many flippant doses of incredulity that our state seems too quaint and redneck to have produced such a citadel of originality.

Having listened to this record a number of times already, it is now unequivocal truth that MMJ cannot be pigeonholed. Read: Don't even try. As for the album, you'll drool. And if you turn that in, we'll cut off your nipples and feed them to your ass. Good luck, Kid.
Affectionately,
LEO Music Desk

We, the Louisville-based music-appreciating community, are at the same time lucky fan-boys [or girls] and dumb brute-thinkers. Our good fortune, of course, has manifested itself in our city's comparatively substantial aural output. There are the typical names — ahem, Slint — that connote the sound [or better, the vibe] that has been historically associated with our River. But, like a bathtub overfilled with bloodwater, we have come dangerously close to that vein's ultimate saturation point.

Then there's My Morning Jacket, who have taken a goddamn cannon to the Louisville canon and embarrassed us all for giving them the Rodney Dangerfield as the 1990s unfurled into the New Dumb Century like a crude tweed carpet. This is their sixth year as a band, Z is their fourth album, and if there is a God claiming to represent anything remote to this universe, MMJ will be bigger than Her by this time next year.

Although it could be said that Louisville's scene is famously unhip to star treatment of our bands, we're all sycophants when it pays well. I'll be the first to admit that when I heard the chatter about Jim James' new project five or six years ago, I figured it'd be another Hotel Roy, his a short-lived, U2-ish project. I banished it from my waking thoughts. Of course, shortly thereafter [in 1999], The Tennessee Fire made me feel stupid for not noticing sooner. Then, two years later, At Dawn: I was convinced, as were many, that MMJ was set to ride the indie rock steed through the desert of rat club-Ford Econoline obscurity, into a fertile crescent of rock where James would immediately be anointed King and given a giant beat-down stick in the shape of a Gibson Flying V. [That, mind you, is not a world where mainstreams flow. That's not to say that there aren't a thousand Conor Obersts digging trenches for such sweetwater to cascade and someday gush freely; that just wasn't the deal a couple years ago.]

The "Cliff's Notes" of MMJ's epic ascendant tale are these: Someone of considerable rock pedigree "noticed" the band — as well as about 500,000 people not of such a breed — and soon after touring with some massive mainstream artists, the band signed to ATO [a division of RCA piloted by Dave Matthews]. They holed away in their "home studio" — at former guitarist Johnny Quaid's grandparent's Shelbyville farm — and recorded It Still Moves, a behemoth long-player that blew a lot of minds when it came out in 2003, for a lot of reasons, some worth mining but most obvious to anyone who's heard the thing.

Sociologically speaking, that album represented at long last something profoundly original from a young rock band shelved in the same racks as most penny-a-line twentysomething garage bands, recorded not in an actual garage but on a fucking farm of all places [milieu of the now-infamous grain silo/reverb chamber], deeply rooted in a tradition as old as the band members themselves, informed very obviously by Neil Young, Bob Dylan, the Allman Brothers, ZZ Top and The Band.

Gathered around plates of top-shelf sushi at Tokyo Japanese Restaurant in Louisville a couple weeks ago, James, drummer Patrick Hallahan and bassist Two-Tone Tommy Blankenship rapped about, among a good bit of other stuff, the Hirsute Myth that evolved from the critical response to It Still Moves, enlivened by the myriad concert reviews perpetuating the shoeless Kentucky gruff image that, to anyone who lives near reality, is as normal as eating sushi in a Japanese restaurant.

"We got sick of it pretty quickly," Hallahan says.

"Everybody bases so much on physical appearance, you know," James continues. "We've always tried to be against that, because we just wear T-shirts; if we've got a beard, we've got a beard; if we've shaved, we've shaved. Who fucking cares, you know?"
Although it seems he might be, James is not incredulous while saying this. His timbre retains its lazy balance, and his "i's" still come through like a Southerner's.

"If we go bald and lose our hair, we can't help that, and we're still going to play the same. I just wish people would fucking close their eyes and write about the music. It's just stupid."

Two-Tone Tommy, who assumes the role of the sleeping rhythm section dragon with particular grace and ease, speaks.

"It's not a conscious decision to play the way we do onstage or anything," he says. "We don't think any of that out. It's more like, 'I need a shirt today because I don't like to walk around shirtless.'"

Everyone laughs. These guys are not angry or spiteful, despite how it seems they react to what some called shtick — the metal-dude-bobblehead-from-behind-a-mannish-mane pastiche, the bearded-and-shoeless-onstage-refined-redneck confabulation. The three are refreshingly self-aware, and by all outward appearances entirely banal. They joke about Thundercats and video games over lunch. They gush about records — Sam Cooke, The Band and so on.

"We've always taken pride in the fact that we don't care about [fashion], and we're not fashionable little model boys that don't know how to rock but sell records to tons of teenage girls because it's just about the fashion," James says.

He's as right as he is gingerly dismissive of this line of questioning. So when I arrive home later that afternoon, I do this: close my eyes and listen.

Z's utter lack of but a single Southern Rawk digression is irrefutable evidence of this band's potential to morph its own brand of sound. The record is so vastly different than its predecessors that it's almost silly to even try and juxtapose it with its immediate ancestor. And yet, despite that, it's apparent as soon as the full band erupts into the staggered first notes of "Wordless Chorus" that it is MMJ.

It seems that everyone likes to attribute such recognition to James' vast and splendorous tenor. That's indisputable. But his voice is not the sole factor in the band's matchless sound. Hallahan's drums are thunder in open season and restrained on rainy days, on the order of Zep's Bonham; Two-Tone Tommy thumps the funk log with rubberband agility and locks in every instance possible with Hallahan as the two make the tight, refined backfill that lends confidence to Hallahan's characterization of Z as "album concentrate." Bo Koster's watery keyboards slip around James' vocal melodies, chasing but not competing, while Carl Broemel's guitar winds alongside James', slapping high-fives when such an explosion is called for, but for the most part caressing the melody like a mother would her newborn.

The moderation here is baldly spectacular, more so considering that moderation was about the last word in the English language appropriate to It Still Moves.

"We didn't want to make a record that was just trying to be different," James says. "The less-is-more approach is kind of the theme on this record. It Still Moves was everybody playing all the time, you know, we count to four and everybody just starts playing and plays for like a fucking hour. Which is cool. I'm glad that exists because that has its place in time, and this record has its place in time. It's more concise, and we tried to concentrate on everybody not playing until you had to play."

Such change didn't necessarily come hard, although practically everything about writing and recording Z was a foreign experience for the band. Founding members Danny Cash and Johnny Quaid were gone, not content to continue the heavy road schedule. After rethinking the band's future, the remaining three pitched forward, finding Koster and Broemel and fusing their sound again as a quintet on the road.

When the time came for the new record, the three originals rented a house in Old Louisville and spent several months writing. Koster and Broemel soon joined them, and off the five were to Allaire Studios, nestled in the rich musical landscape that is Woodstock, N.Y. There, producer John Leckie [tape operator on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, among many others] lent some quality control to the process, which James credits as the Briton's major contribution to the record. To wit: He helped the band self-edit.

"If we would've done it at home again, I don't think it would've had the sonic depth it has, because we might've gone for some of the same tricks [as It Still Moves]," he says. "The songs would've been the same, but the listen wouldn't have been the same. Leckie kind of came in and he didn't really change anything, like he didn't tell us to move this chorus here or move this verse, he just listened to it all and would tell us if we were playing something too long or too short. Or if we did a take and he thought it was kind of OK, whereas we'd all be happy and think we were done, we'd be like 'Sweet!' and he'd be like [adopts a superior British accent], 'Well, mates, I don't think that's quite it.'"

The listen, as it were, is a rock band rediscovering its propensity for a tight, four-minute pop song, supplemented by a rich, textured backdrop of arcs and swells, halcyon dreams given life through Technicolor instruments.

"Wordless Chorus" opens the record with a sensuous progression of deep synthesized boops, an immediate call for distinction, difference. The tune is devoid of guitars until the sunshine chorus, trading the au natural vibes of MMJ past for a woven soundscape backbeat. Perhaps most offsetting is the absence of reverb on James' voice. Rather, the band used an effect typically saved for a snare drum echo on the verses, releasing the 'verb only on the exploding "oohs" and "ahhs" of the refrain.

"It Beats for You" and "Gideon" are both open and airy, the latter carrying the instrumental weight of a mid-1980s power ballad. Lyrically, it's James' most literal piece, a mélange of messages about the fear, violence and organized religion that's currently pervading — nay, threatening — American society.

The two build to "What a Wonderful Man," an upbeat tune with a clear tension between the sad, tribute lyrics and the shimmering riffs. It's also where the band gets all raucous and nasty for the first time, with a quick verse-chorus progression before James lets out a squeak-wail and he and Broemel engage some serious stoner-rock riffage. But it only lasts four bars. Remember, this is a different MMJ.

The pair of songs that define the record's all-important middle likewise represent its intermission. "Off the Record" starts with a straight rip from the "Hawaii Five-O" theme, all choppy and catchy, then goes reggae-like into some ear-pleasing verse-chorus-verse work before sliding into a refrained slow jam whose mood invokes Air or, less blatantly, the Stones' "Can't You Hear Me Knocking."

Once the tide crests, the carnivalesque "Into the Woods" drops in with weird, non sequitur lyrics like A kitten on fire/a baby in a blender/both sound as sweet/as a night of surrender and Now open your mouth/here comes the spoon/you're gonna eat what I give you/you're gonna like it real good. The song closes with a chamber choir chanting.

Yes, yes, we will eat it and like it. Please, carry on.

Z decelerates at nearly the same rate and pattern with which it skidded into the median. "Anytime" is fast by MMJ standards, and infectious by anyone's, radiant and terse at an apposite four minutes. The choice line: What Madonna said really helped/she said "Boy, you better learn to express yourself."

"Lay Low" is that aforementioned Southern Rawk digression, the second longest and most-It Still Moves song around these parts. "Knot Comes Loose" is a low-key remembrance of a past love, with an oddly settling Latin inflection on the piano/guitar/hand drum arrangement that slides into closer "Dondante," an atmospheric deluge with a climax way too first-class to give away here. Just know that it will please you. As far as bringing closure to a sit-down-and-listen-straight-thru kind of album, it does so in majestic, devastating fashion.

The real coup for MMJ is that they're making — to great critical acclaim — complete albums in a radio-friendly-unit-shifting world of The Single. Z is truly a listener's album, made for the Whole Experience, not a few key moments. Perhaps inspired by the setting — The Band recorded its famous debut Music from Big Pink nearby — MMJ went full bore to make a singular, 40-minute piece of music that's so well sequenced it never slows or speeds enough, never gets so loud or quiet, as to let its centrifugal force lug it off the axis.

[tdan]

Will the real MMJ please stand up?
What happened with Interview magazine


The Interview magazine photo that never ran. That's Dennis Sheridan, far left, and Brandon Jones, far right. (Photo by Geoff Oliver Bugbee)
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Andy Warhol started Interview Magazine in the 1970s with the idea that coupling celebrities for one-on-one interviews with one another would make for more creative, interesting reading than the typical Q&A. The model was revolutionary in publishing, as it excused the journalist almost entirely from the process.

A piece featuring My Morning Jacket was scheduled for next month's Interview. It has been canceled. Although representatives from the magazine declined to comment directly for this story, they would acknowledge that the piece has, in fact, been killed.

Why?

In short, photographs. Interview contracted Louisville free-lance photographer Geoff Oliver Bugbee [a frequent LEO contributor] to conduct the shoot. Bugbee secured the picturesque Peterson-Dumesnil House in Crescent Hill, hired Hair Stroebel stylist Sarah Bard-Lunn (at the magazine's urging) and spoke with MMJ's Jim James briefly about ideas for the shoot, although almost immediately James was resistant to the idea of being groomed.

"They were just going to wear their own thing," Bugbee said. "That was established."

The band showed up for the shoot already in costume (see accompanying photo).

Although less than ideal, it was still all well and good. The real problem arose later, when it became apparent that, despite the fact that five people showed up for the shoot, MMJ members Carl Broemel and Bo Koster weren't in the photos.

Dennis Sheridan and Brandon Jones were. Sheridan and his wife own the popular Knit Nook, and he fronts the band Follow the Train. He's not in MMJ. Nor is Jones, a local filmmaker.

When I told James, Hallahan and Two Tone Tommy that Interview killed the piece because of the photos, they laughed.

"I wish people would be a little more creative and open to doing something outside the box," James said.

Although clearly disappointed that the glossy wouldn't get weird for the band, the MMJ guys were most apologetic to Bugbee, saying it was never their intention to get a local photographer sideways with a national publication.

[tdan]

Q&A with MMJ
 
Stephen George speaks with Jim James, Two Tone Tommy and Patrick Hallahan of My Morning Jacket

LEO: So let's talk about the new record, which is getting absolutely phenomenal reviews so far. Mojo gave it five stars and called it a "religious experience." Alternative Press says it's a masterpiece. What would you guys call it?
JJ: I'd call it a religious masterpiece. (Laughter) It will replace Catholicism and Christianity. You can quote us and say that it will be the basis to replace Christianity.
TTT: Rethink your love of Jesus.

LEO: Everyone's saying, and I would agree, how different it is from the last record. I think a lot of times bands will realize that it's time for a change, after they've had a couple of the same kinds of records, they make a conscious effort to change. But this one sounds like a change that was a lot more organic.
JJ: Definitely, yeah. I think we all like all kinds of music and listen to all kinds of music, and we didn't want to make a record that was just trying to be different, you know, like "let's not do anything like we did before. Let's make a hip-hop record." We wanted to keep some aspect of the weirdness we had before but also tie in as many different aspects as possible. The less-is-more approach is kind of the theme on this record. It Still Moves was everybody playing all the time, you know, we count to four and everybody just starts playing and play for like a fucking hour. Which is cool. I'm glad that exists because that has its place in time, and this record has its place in time. It's more concise, and we tried to concentrate on everybody not playing until you had to play.
PH: It's like album concentrate. (Laughter)

LEO: This was the first time you've worked with an actual producer, and in a studio that's not yours.
JJ: Yeah, all that was different.
PH: All kinds of new variables, really.
JJ: It started with John (Quaid) and Danny (Cash) leaving, Bo (Koster) and Carl (Broemel) coming in.
PH: I guess being together and playing live for so long (with Bo and Carl) made us even tighter of a band. We even wrote it outside of — even the place where we actually put together the album wasn't the (Shelbyville) farm either, so —
JJ: We rented a house down on Third Street, in Old Louisville, and got together, just the three of us for a while, and put the songs together, then Bo and Carl came in and we worked on it with them. And with (producer, credited on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, among many others) John Leckie too, I kind of look at it like, all the songs had already been written, and the record would probably be the same, although I don't think it would've been as good, because it wouldn't have had the quality control that John Leckie brought to it. And if we would've done it at home again, I don't think it would've had the sonic depth it has, because we might've gone for some of the same tricks. The songs would've been the same, but the listen wouldn't have been the same. Leckie kind of came in and he didn't really change anything, like he didn't tell us to move this chorus here or move this verse, he just listened to it all and would tell us if we were playing something too long or too short. Or if we did a take and he thought it was kind of OK, whereas we'd all be happy and think we were done, we'd be like "Sweet!" and he'd be like (adopts a superior British accent), "Well mates, I don't think that's quite it." (Laughter)

LEO: Sort of on the same theme on the differences between the last record and this one, I was reading this morning in Men's Fitness...(everyone sighs)...that Z "rocks in a way that will make your braless girlfriend get on your shoulders and take off her top."
JJ: That's just idiocy.
TTT: That's the first sign that he didn't listen to the record.
All: Exactly! (Laughter)
PH: Didn't listen to the record, hasn't kept up with the band the past few years.

LEO: I was going to say, if there is one definable way that this is really different, it's that it's not that kind of rock'n roll.
PH: Lazy, lazy journalism.
JJ: It's hilarious.

LEO: So do you guys read the press about you?
JJ: Yeah, I do. I try not to, but people keep sending it to me, and it's impossible not to look if somebody sends you, like, "look, you guys got five stars from Mojo!"

LEO: Did you see the picture in Mojo?
PH: Yeah, that's fucked up. (Laughter)

LEO: Do you ever consider (the press)?
PH: You consider the source.
JJ: I try to read it and forget about it, because if you start thinking about it too much, it really fucks with your head. It really hurts when people say bad things, and it really feels good when people say good things, but still it's all coming through this huge screen of warped reality that doesn't even matter anyway. I think we've always tried to stay on a good level with each other, and try to entertain ourselves first and foremost, because that's the only way you can defend your work, whether people say it's shit or whether they say it's great, because you still gotta play it all the time, and you still gotta talk about it all the time, you still gotta listen to it all the time. I think the only way that really works for the band is if they really believe in it and believe in each other, so then it doesn't really matter. I think if you build something just in hopes of getting good praise on it, it puts a lot more air in your head.
PH: Well put. (Laughter)

LEO: When I see you guys hanging out just around town, at shows and parties and what not, you still seem like totally normal, nice guys. Sometimes when artists get the kind of attention you guys have, being humble doesn't transcend.
JJ: We try to be. I don't think any of that (attention) means anything. We want to come back to Louisville and hang out with our friends, and just kick it like we always have. I don't ever want to alienate any of my friends, or make anybody think I'm a fucking pompous asshole. (Laughter) People have such a high, warped vision of what the rock'n roll lifestyle is and what it entails, and they think we're out, like, fucking hookers every night, snorting coke and pounding Jack, flying on airplanes and riding in limousines everywhere. But we're just, like, five dudes riding in a bus (pantomimes riding in a bus), and then we're rockin' (employs universal motion for air guitar, to much laughter and applause), then we're riding in the bus again (the bus move again, now with more laughter), then we're home eatin' sushi, then we're rockin', then we're ridin' in the bus again. (Fits of laughter)

LEO: No shark fishing out of the hotel room window?
JJ: (Laughter) Well, sometimes.
PH: Every once in a while, just to break the monotony. (More laughter)

LEO: I think that's important (to be modest), though, and you guys have all done a good job conveying that in the press.
JJ: Thanks.
PH: It's important.

LEO: What were you guys listening to when you were recording the album?
JJ: A lot of stuff. I was listening to a lot more hip-hop, R&B, soul and stuff, but I still listen to a lot of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, stuff that I've always listened to. I was trying to explain to somebody, I feel like I go through a cycle where, when I first find a musical source, I really fall in love with it, and I feel like I can kind of channel it and create alongside it, subconsciously, and take something away that I can make something unique and my own. But once I get tired of that, I feel like I start getting in that same thought pattern again, like I can't get anything more out of it. Whereas, you know, for the first couple records, I'd really be listening to Roy Orbison and Neil Young or whatever, and really enjoying that, not trying to mimic it but it just influences you so much that you can coexist with it. Then once you've had it for so long, it just doesn't work anymore. So I tend to move from different music. I feel like getting into hip-hop and R&B and stuff, that was a freedom — learning all this new stuff about music that I kind of knew but I didn't really explore, and having that to build a base on but also having past loves of other types of rock'n roll and stuff, so we could make something that was completely our own. It would be stupid for us to try and make some G'ed out hip-hop record, put on backwards baseball caps and stuff. (Laughter)

LEO: Shave your beards.
PH: Yeah. Whole new look. I think it goes along the same lines as that. In short, what he's saying is you have these influences that you don't necessarily mimic, but you can't help, because you love it so much that it leaks into you, you kind of ride the coaster and then it runs out of tracks, you milk it dry. I think, where we were (Allaire Studios in Woodstock, NY) this time as well, that whole area is so musical. I was listening to a lot of The Band because all the guys live around there. Every time I'd listen to Big Pink or something like that you knew it was right down the street, you could hear the same birds chirping. I was in a Dylan-Band frame of mind when I was there. It's just such a magical, woodsy area around there, full of ghosts and spirits and music everywhere.
TTT: I didn't listen to much music. Most of the year, I haven't really bought many records, I haven't really gone out and tried to listen to music, other than what my friends were doing. I think I listened to a lot of Nintendo MIDIs while we were in the studio, because we'd been playing "Ice Hockey" so much, I kept trying to download a bunch of MIDI stuff and import it into GarageBand so it was all played on piano. (Much laughter)
PH: That was the muse for the record. (More laughter)
TTT: But I understand what Jim's saying about taking influence from all different kinds of sources. I think I always try to take the best, or whatever my brain not necessarily thinks is the best but there's some element to it that's unique, of whatever I'm listening to, and kind of incorporate it with what we're doing.

LEO: You've got a good filter. Jim, one of our graphic designers came in the other morning telling me that the three or four songs you played on WFPK the other night were the best he's heard in a damn long time. (James DJ'ed during an interview with WFPK host Scott Mullins)
All: Ooohhh. (Laughter)
JJ: I want to get a show, I want to DJ. I used to DJ in college (University of Kentucky) at the college station. I love DJing, I've always wanted to do that on the side. Well, tell him thanks.

LEO: I was going to ask you about the lack of reverb on this record, too. It's not gone, but it's not a silo.
JJ: Yeah, I don't think it's about lack. It's about placement. Not having it on all the time, so then when you do have it come in, it means more, because your ears aren't used to it. Like on "Wordless Chorus," during the verses we tried a different effect, something that would normally be used on a snare drum and put that on the vocal, and then when the reverb does come in on the chorus, it hits you like a wall, instead of being there the whole time.
PH: Again, the less-is-more approach.

LEO: I really like bands with song titles here and there that are really self-aware and self-conscious. Like "Wordless Chorus," it has a wordless chorus. And "Off the Record": I may be reading too much into this, but it sounds like a single, like it could be snatched right out of the middle of the record and put on the radio. I'm wondering, does any of that factor in while writing the songs, or is it after the fact?
JJ: It just kind of comes in while I'm writing them. Both of those songs have something to do with not wanting to talk that much. I get real nervous when we're all getting interviewed because I keep wanting to talk about something, because I feel like most of the time in daily conversation you talk with people, or you watch the news, and any time you turn on any fucking news station now it's just fucking four assholes sitting around a table fucking talking at each other, and nobody's listening. I feel like nobody listens anymore. And with "Wordless Chorus," I was just thinking about that and feeling all that, and sometimes I knew what I was saying and sometimes I didn't, and so on the choruses I was just singing, just trying to put the feeling out there that this is how I'm feeling but I don't know what to say about it at all, just singing. And I just thought "Wordless Chorus" would be a good name for that. "Off the Record" is the same thing, about wanting to do something for yourself, wanting to change life for yourself and not have to explain it to anybody. My mom's an artist, and I've been in art school too, and people who are artists all the time have to explain their work, like (adopts an annoyed, goofy affectation), "Why'd you do this? What's this mean? What's this convey about your personal beliefs?" And sometimes it's just like, "fuck that." I'm just doing it for myself because it's awesome. I drew this picture because it fucking looks neat, it looks cool. I made this song because it fucking sounds awesome. I didn't make it because I got stabbed in third grade and I'm manifesting that. (Laughter) I'm sure that stuff's part of it, but sometimes you just make things to make them.

LEO: But you also try to say something in other songs. "Gideon" strikes me like that. There's an obvious statement there. Is it just finding a good balance?
JJ: Yeah, that's part of it all. Sometimes I know what to say and sometimes I don't.
PH: You want an album to be balanced as well. If it's too heady, you can't really escape it, you're too focused on it. So you want to have things that are heady and fun, you know, just make a whole meal out of it.

LEO: Actually, I think on the whole the album is incredibly well balanced. It just kind of makes perfect sense. How much of that is considered, like the song order, and how much is just happenstance?
JJ: It's all thought out. We spend a lot of time thinking about the song order. That's what makes a good album. Because we like making records, we like thinking about what's going to be an awesome song to start with, what's going to be an awesome song to end with. And we always end up in the middle, too. Like this record, we kind of thought that "Into the Woods" might be a cool first song (Ed: it's the sixth), because it seems like it kind of leads in. But the more we thought about it, it doesn't really fit in with the rest of the record, so we felt like starting the record out like that would be kind of weird. "Wordless Chorus" had always been the one in my mind that I thought would be a good opener, cause it starts out with a weird booping, and you don't really know what's going on. And we kind of built it so that "Off the Record" (Ed: fifth song) goes into a big long weird ending and trails out, and "Into the Woods" fades back in. It's a perfect halfway point to separate ten songs.
PH: We like to put an intermission in the album.

LEO: Is that a Theremin in "Into the Woods"?
PH: No.
JJ: It's Carl on steel guitar. And Andrew Bird. It's Carl and Andrew Bird teamed up.

LEO: This album is considerably shorter than It Still Moves, and it seems like you guys are a lot more comfortable with a three- or four-minute pop song.
JJ: We've always been comfortable with that. On the first two records there are a lot of short songs, too. I think just cause It Still Moves was our first major label release, it got more played out that we love jamming, that we're always fucking jamming. (Laughter)
PH: Even in our sleep, we're jamming.
JJ: (adopts a stoner inflection) We're just jamming, man. What do y'all want to do? I don't care, let's just fucking jam, dude.
PH: I don't care if it's good or not. Let's just noodle. (Laughter)
JJ: With It Still Moves, we'd been playing those songs live, and carrying them out in parts, just kind of doing it, enjoying playing them that long and adding stuff to them, just kind of going off on that tangent. I think it's hard for people to understand that in the short-term, which is how everybody thinks. I just like to think that maybe, in like five or six years, people if they haven't understood it they will understand it, cause they'll see it as part of the whole picture, and that's just one part of what we were trying to do.

LEO: A lot of the stuff that was being written about you guys a couple years ago seemed to focus on a bunch of longhairs who don't wear shoes onstage and play 20-minute songs. That seems normal to me. Not the 20-minute songs, but dudes with beards and a lot of hair.
JJ: Yeah, of course.

LEO: How did you guys react to all that?
PH: We got sick of it pretty quickly.

LEO: I think a lot of people thought it was shtick, or maybe they wanted to make it a shtick.
PH: Yeah, I think that's more what it was.
JJ: Everybody bases so much on physical appearance, you know. We've always tried to be against that, because we just wear t-shirts, if we've got a beard we've got a beard, if we've shaved we've shaved, who fucking cares, you know? If we go bald and lose our hair, we can't help that, and we're still going to play the same. I just wish people would fucking close their eyes and write about the music. It's just stupid.
PH: Can we gouge their eyes out?
TTT: It's not a conscious decision to play the way we do onstage or anything. We don't think any of that out. It's more like "I need a shirt today because I don't like to walk around shirtless." (Laughter)
PH: It's not like, if today I shaved my head and beard, I would get any better or worse. Nothing would change, except how people would perceive me visually. That's kind of stupid.

LEO: The most ridiculous thing I read after Bonnaroo this year was, "Jim James cut his hair!"
PH: Good god. The world's going to end now.

LEO: It's important to note though, I think, that a lot of the younger rock bands right now are all affectation and posturing.
JJ: Fuckin' A, yeah.

LEO: And then these Kentucky dudes come out and go crazy onstage, like that's something that should be — like being moved by one's music is abnormal or something.
JJ: I agree.
PH: It should be an organic thing.
JJ: At the same time, with that fashion thing, we've always taken pride in the fact that we don't care about that, and we're not fashionable little model boys that don't know how to rock but sell records to tons of teenage girls because it's just about the fashion.

LEO: Getting back to the record, where did "Into the Woods" come from? It's a good intermission, with a carnival feel.
JJ: It's weird, because it's been a lot of different ways. We tried a lot different rhythms. I originally wrote it in a carnival rhythm. They were filming Elizabethtown down on Market, and I went down there one night just to hang out, and it was just so surreal to see Market Street all closed off, and it was lit from above for the shoot, and I was just looking around, looking at a streetlight hanging there, and seeing all the dust all over the streetlight. You don't normally get to see that kind of thing, because you don't normally see a streetlight lit from above with a huge spotlight. It's just kind of like looking at things in a different way. It was so surreal to look at Market Street, a street that I drive up and down every day, all fucked up and frozen in time. I kind of started writing about that, writing that little riff, and I wrote a bunch of different lyrics that never really made it, just kind of settled on the ones that made it.

[kymoose]

Thanks tdan...what a great article.

[shiptain]

agreed. great interview.

[tdan]

No prob.  It kinda sucked when I found it last night.  I was outside at Browning's and when I saw the articles I couldn't read them cause it was already getting dark.

[ChiefOKONO]

those are AWESOME!!! thanks so much for posting.. so many great quotes in there!!!