Press: Cleveland Free Times

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http://www.freetimes.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1497

Preview : American Music : My Morning Jacket has a unique musical vision
By Brian Baker  Wednesday, May 19, 2004
  

MY MORNING JACKET
The band's latest incarnation.
With the release last year of its almost universally lauded major label debut It Still Moves , My Morning Jacket cemented an opinion that a great many people were beginning to formulate based on the band's fascinating catalogue to that point. The natural and classic manner in which guitarist Jim James and My Morning Jacket create musical vistas shows a remarkable sense of musical history and an innate ability to incorporate it into their own unique vision. My Morning Jacket has, in the brief span of five years and over the course of a handful of EPs and three albums, done nothing less than redefine the idea of American music.

My Morning Jacket, M. Ward
8 p.m., Tuesday, May 25
The Odeon
1295 Old River Rd.
216.574.2525
Tickets: $15
 
 
"Variety is the key," says James with pride. "We don't ever want to be pigeonholed as an alt-country band or an indie rock band or a jamcore band. Names are just stupid. We want to explore everything and leave no stone unturned. We want to try to touch on all the different kinds of music we love and try to turn it into our own thing."

The Shelbyville, Kentucky quintet has done just that. It's re-examined the elements that shape homegrown music — country, rock, pop, folk, soul and blues, acid-washed with a touch of psychedelia — and then rewoven them seamlessly into a singular sonic entity that swells and shimmers with the timeless intensity of Neil Young and the contemporary bravado of Wilco. Everything that My Morning Jacket toyed with on its early releases, including the acclaimed full lengths The Tennessee Fire and At Dawn , were rehearsals for the blinding brilliance of It Still Moves .

"I think this record was the first full band record," says James. "I think everything's come together and the songs have really been able to develop and sprawl out and go places they could have never gone before."

MMJ's journey has been decidedly fast since its formation in 1998. After several individual attempts at bands in their Louisville hometown, James and his cousin, guitarist Johnny Quaid, jammed in Quaid's grandparents' barn (which ultimately became MMJ's Above the Cadillac Studio, where all the albums have been recorded).

As MMJ coalesced around James' amazing songs, the band began recording demos and finding its sound. After reading a magazine article about Darla Records, James sent the label a tape ("because I liked the way they looked") and received a contract offer back.

With only limited college and indie radio play, MMJ has garnered a sizable cult fan base in the U.S. but attracted an even larger and more rabid audience in Belgium and the surrounding Benelux region thanks to a Dutch television documentary that followed an early European tour.

After the splendor of 2002's At Dawn , MMJ started to get face time with a lot of labels. James says the band took plenty of time deciding on bumping up to the next level with Dave Matthews' ATO, an imprint of RCA.

"We just felt most comfortable with ATO," says James. "We had to make sure we had complete creative control — control over the artwork and our recording at home in our studio and not having to go somewhere else to make the records. They were totally down."

The band has evolved over the past five years, through a variety of minor and yet substantial line-up changes, with the most monumental change occurring earlier this year when Quaid and keyboardist Danny Cash amicably departed to spend more time at home with their families. The band's winter tour was cancelled to give James time to regroup; in the interim, it completed its first live EP, Acoustic Citsuoca, and began rehearsals with new guitarist Carl Broemel and keyboardist Bo Koster.

Even with a shift as seismic as My Morning Jacket has just experienced, the band's basic philosophy of making music endures.

"We just try to make sure it's interesting and fun," says James. "We want people to know that when we put out an album or when they come to see us live, we're really into it and we really care about what we're doing. We're not trying to be known because we're in a band or do it because we're bored, and we don't want to work at the mall. We really love what we're doing and we hope people can feel that coming from us. That's our only plan — to keep things interesting and special."