MMJ in Swedish media :)

[SaraBananaBear]

I was just reading this article thingy by a Swedish journalist and I thought I'd share it with you all :)

Source for those who'd rather read it in Swedish:
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/kronikorer/markuslarsson/article8009865.ab
Translation mostly via Google translate (which leaves a lot to wish at times):

(Published on the 24th of October, written by Markus Larsson)
The world's best bands played in a magical barn
With a deep sigh I have to say:

I should have been in New York this week.

Last weekend, My Morning Jacket appeared in a barn in Woodstock, New York, in front of about 250 people. For an American rock band that sells out Madison Square Garden, it is a very small stage.

But this isn't just any barn.

This particular barn is part of "The barn". "The barn" is also a home and a studio owned by Levon Helm, who played drums and sang in The Band. During the 2000s, Helm, who suffered from throat cancer in the 90s, arranged several regular concerts at his home to collect money for cancer research and pay his own bills. The concerts are called "Midnight Ramble" and consists of, other than Levon Helm himself, a house band and invited guests.

Jamming until long after midnight
Over the years, artists like Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Norah Jones, Dr. John and Allen Toussaint have been jamming with Levon until long after midnight.

This year it was My Morning Jacket's turn. The long night ended with the band's lead singer, Jim James, doing The Band's "The Weight" and "It Makes No Difference", supported by, among others, Levon Helm and Donald Fagen from Steely Dan.

And anyone who is interested in closing circles can immediately start drawing a new one. No other band manages The Band's legacy and spirit in a better and clearer way than My Morning Jacket. Listening to their music feels like flipping through American music history, from cover to cover.

Have never had a big hit
But the quintet from Louisville, Kentucky, is not The Band. They are the world's best band right now.

My Morning Jacket are never stuck in the past. The group released their first album the same year as file-sharing site Napster was launched in 1999. Napster made music consumption boundless. Genres and years and now and then no longer mattered, because everything could be downloaded simultaneously. My Morning Jacket CDs and concerts, which range from gospel and space-funk, Black Sabbath and Lionel Richie's "All Night Long", reflects this attitude.

The group has never had a big hit. They sell mediocre amounts of downloads and physical disks compared to Lady Gaga. They do not market their tours through interviews in major media. Yet magazines like Rolling Stone have been following every single step they have taken so far this year.

Played all five albums
My Morning Jacket lets fans take care of their promotion. On their own website, for example, they link to various sites that publishes bootlegs.

The band is a network, a community, a growing Facebook group where fans above all share unofficial live recordings with each other. The group's concerts are therefore canonized almost in advance.

"Midnight Ramble" was really just a warm-up before the five famous concerts that My Morning Jacket made at Terminal 5 in New York earlier in the week. As a belated tenth anniversary the group performed their five studio discs in its entirety: "The Tennessee Fire," "At Dawn", "It Still Moves", "Z" and "Evil Urges". Plus obscure b-sides and cover songs associated with the albums.

"What the hell was I thinking?"
I've been hanging on the blog The Steam Engine and Youtube with an alarming frequency the last seven days. Read reviews and looked at the clips with a lump in my throat and a clammy cold sweat realization: "I could have been there, I should have been there, what the hell was I thinking?"

If someone had recorded the concerts when the world was analog, the double or triple album would immediately have received the same status as Deep Purple's "Made in Japan" and Thin Lizzy's  "Live and dangerous".

But then we would certainly have had to wait until next Christmas. Nowadays, I can have the concerts on my desk tomorrow morning.

In a zip file.

I have already set the alarm clock


Oh how I adore this man for trying to spread the word about MMJ in Sweden by writing articles like this again and again. Next to the article he also linked to a Spotify playlist he made named "My Morning Jacket: Cosmic soul rebels" - A short introduction to a better and more beautiful world with a lot of reverb.  :D

And then it spreads:
"In the Kingdom of Sweden last week, in the newspaper Aftonbladet, I read an article by Markus Larsson, entitled 'Värdens bästa band spelade i en magisk lada'.

It was about the world's best band, My Morning Jacket from Louisville, Kentucky. I had never heard about them before, so I downloaded their music from the Ovi store and... Larsson was right, it is the world's best band."
- Páll Stefánsson, Iceland review online
From: http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_life/?cat_id=16567&ew_0_a_id=369789  

[Ruckus]

Great stuff SBB!  I continue to hope that you get to see them sooner than later.  By the way, your boys Dungen killed it opening for them on Monday

[Ghosts_on_TV]

Jasons blog getting a Sweedish shout out, nice!

[SaraBananaBear]

Great stuff SBB!  I continue to hope that you get to see them sooner than later.  By the way, your boys Dungen killed it opening for them on Monday

Thank you so much, I hope so too! And woop, woop, go Dungen for representing Sweden, I should have tried hitching a ride with them... oh well, what's a royal ball...  :'( (some Disney mice better come cheer me up soon damnit!) ;)

[SaraBananaBear]

Jasons blog getting a Sweedish shout out, nice!

Yup, it's not the first time either, TSE's been mentioned in three articles now I think...  :)

[Soulshine]

Jason! Nice.   ;)

[SaraBananaBear]

Jasons blog getting a Sweedish shout out, nice!

Yup, it's not the first time either, TSE's been mentioned in three articles now I think...  :)

Here's another time:
My Morning Jacket (band)
It all started when some kind soul posted over 50 cover songs by My Morning Jacket on the site You Ain't No Picasso. My Morning Jacket and the group's lead singer Jim James has a exquisite taste with a total lack of blinders. In their world Lionel Richie's "All Night Long" is just as important as Bob Dylan's "You're a big girl now". Almost everything is brilliant. Then I stumble into the music blog The Steam Engine, which high lights lots of brilliant live concerts and unreleased tracks with MMJ, Ryan Adams and Monsters of Folk. Then friends and colleagues begin to e-mail over their own y Morning Jacket cover findings Most recently a cover of famous Berlin song "Take My Breath Away" tumbled into the hard drive. I don't need to listen to anything else for the rest of the year. Talk to you in 2011.

:)

[tdb810]

Great article!

Go Jason -- worldwide!!!

[darkglow]

cosmic soul rebels!!!???!??!!!! that might be the greatest superlative i've ever heard.. IN MY LIFE

[SaraBananaBear]

cosmic soul rebels!!!???!??!!!! that might be the greatest superlative i've ever heard.. IN MY LIFE

I know right! I love it so much! Great!  :D

[BH]

Love seeing this!  Thanks SBB!

[twofingers]

Haha, thanks guys! Sara is always so awesome about letting me know too. I'm a big fan of this guy, I need to send him an email!

[kydiddle]

Haha, thanks guys! Sara is always so awesome about letting me know too. I'm a big fan of this guy, I need to send him an email!

You'll have Swedish groupies now.  ;D

[twofingers]

Haha, thanks guys! Sara is always so awesome about letting me know too. I'm a big fan of this guy, I need to send him an email!

You'll have Swedish groupies now.  ;D

HAHAHAHAHA. I sent that guy an email thanking him for mentioning TSE and I translated it to Swedish with Google Translate. Hope that shit's accurate.

[kydiddle]

Haha, thanks guys! Sara is always so awesome about letting me know too. I'm a big fan of this guy, I need to send him an email!

You'll have Swedish groupies now.  ;D

HAHAHAHAHA. I sent that guy an email thanking him for mentioning TSE and I translated it to Swedish with Google Translate. Hope that shit's accurate.

HA! I imagine some awful Liz Lemon translation going on here, Jason. :)

[twofingers]

Haha, thanks guys! Sara is always so awesome about letting me know too. I'm a big fan of this guy, I need to send him an email!

You'll have Swedish groupies now.  ;D

HAHAHAHAHA. I sent that guy an email thanking him for mentioning TSE and I translated it to Swedish with Google Translate. Hope that shit's accurate.

HA! I imagine some awful Liz Lemon translation going on here, Jason. :)

That's exactly what I kept thinking!

[SaraBananaBear]

Let's just say that Sonic Magazine ♥ My Morning Jacket with all their heart, cover + 12 pages. Been meaning to scan and share this for quite a while... (Thanks JY for the inspiration to finally do it). Also, I'm sorry if the translation doesn't make sense at times... 

(page 1)

(page 2)
Calm street in Louisville
In the ten years since Sonic last interviewed Jim James and his crew, the quintet has gone from overlooked indie oddballs to hyped rock heavy weights. This does not mean that they're showing signs of self-absorption or stress. In Kentucky's largest city Pierre Hellqvist met with a My Morning Jacket nestled in harmony.

Kägelbanan in Stockholm, November 2003. Five hair monsters trudge up on stage. One must make an effort to see as much as a glimpse of the faces of any of them. They plug in their instruments and all of Katarinaberget is transformed into a high-voltage electric field. Except in the most peaceful moments, including a stunning acoustic part towards the end of the show, every member is head banging and rocking out from start to finish. Like a tornado the music pulls away everything in its path, especially preconceptions. It derails any habitual idea they audience may have about indie rock, country rock, southern rock and psychedelic rock, probably because it is all of that all at once, presented in a shock wave of guitar excess and magnetic energy that draws an initially slightly skeptical audience further and further into the room. A process that is accelerated by the front man singing like a reverb drenched angel, particularly evident in the mid tempo miracles such as »The Way That He Sings" and "Lowdown" in which his voice soars forward on the volume strong wings of the guitars.

While this obviously sound like a giant post construction, it isn't particularly difficult to right there and then realize that it hardly will be much longer before much larger droves of people will get to experience the same ... magic.

- It wasn't like I was working at a café one day, only to be snorting coke off hookers in a limousine the next day.

Jim James smiles a little (with what I can only translate as tongue-in-cheek, but that might not be right) as he sits with a cup of green tea and an appetizing bowl of berries and muesli in front of him at the diner table at Lynn's Paradise Cafe in Louisville. The My Morning Jacket singer is of course aware that the band's popularity curve has been pointing straight up in the last six or seven years, it's just that he doesn't feel like it has been all that dramatic.

Even if the road to the position that My Morning Jacket now enjoy has been graspable for the band members themselves - there was no sudden hit that brought them here, "just" hard work on the road - as an outsider you can still note some changes in their reality. When I spoke with Jim James in 2001 for Sonic number three, I was able to work it all out directly with him, afterwards I even got an handwritten letter from him. This time, it took about of a couple hundred e-mails, text messages and phone calls to the Swedish distributor;

(page 3)

the English record company and the band's U.S. management to get an interview. Ten years ago it was really only people in the Benelux countries that cared about the slightly odd Kentucky quintet. Today, the band can sell out Madison Square Garden in New York and are often part of the main attractions at large American music festivals. The machinery that surrounds them is quite different, to put it gently.

- I'm actually quite unaware that this is the case, says Jim James. Even if everything has grown for us, it has never reached incomprehensible levels. Like for example when we played Radio City Music Hall in New York after the release of Evil Urges. We thought that was huge, we could hardly believe our eyes, people were screaming for us. The gig after that was in Sheffield, England in front of a hundred persons who could not have cared less [crosses arms demonstratively]. We didn't understand anything. 'What's going on?'

- Everything has been so strange for us, especially in Europe, where we after two canceled tours have kind of faded a bit. Really, it's only when I haven't been feeling well that I have felt that things - especially touring pace - have been spiraling out of control. In 2005 I became ill with pneumonia and was close to having a heart attack, my heart swelled up so I had to stay in hospital for several weeks. In 2008 I fell off the stage [laughs] in Iowa City and got a lot of internal injuries that took me out of action for a few months...

After the latter incident, which among other things resulted in canceled gigs in Stockholm and Lund, Jim James returned to Louisville after a period of New York exile. He felt that he needed a quieter environment to recover. Back home in the bluegrass and bourbon belt he, who is  originally named James Edward Olliges Jr., found a "really cool" house that he just

(page 4)

could not resist. But paying for both this and a New York apartment became a little overwhelming, so he decided to leave the big city completely.

Things fell into place, he says. But it is probably also about the front man coming to grips with life and becoming more comfortable with the attention that success inevitably brings.

- When My Morning Jacket's popularity soared, around "Z", it was probably a little awkward being Jim James here in town, says Jeffrey Lee Puckett who has been writing about music for the Louisville newspaper The Courier-Journal for sixteen years. As polite as Jim is, he always takes the time to talk to every fan that comes up to him. He has told me that it at times could be a bit much with all the attention. But these days I think that people here have become accustomed to seeing him now and then.

- For the most part it is pretty quiet now, Jim James says himself. Sometimes people come up and say hello, but not much more. We're are also keeping fairly low profile here in town.

- You have to realize that band's status here is unprecedented, continues Jeffrey Lee Puckett. While someone like Will Oldham is respected and worshiped in some circles, he has never really reached a wider audience. Other fairly well known bands here, like Slint, Rodan and Rachel, have, at most, become cult favorites. My Morning Jacket however are popular among all different kinds of Louisville citizens. Almost from the very beginning their concerts attracted an interesting mix of people, from teenagers to people 60+. They are without a doubt,  the greatest band to ever have come out here.

Retro kitschy Lynn's Paradise Café has been named by Esquire as "one of America's four most festive restaurants". This morning it's pretty quiet, albeit charming. From the speakers pours Jimmy Cliff, Steve Earle and Stones "Monkey Man" as phenomenal breakfasts and brunches are served. Their rich wild mushroom scramble alone is reason to schedule a stop in Louisville on your next trip through the United States.

More specifically, it is the Highlands you should go to. If downtown Louisville is a strangely desolate concrete and glass bubble - so deserted that I too scared to visit both the Muhammad Ali Center and "The Great Gatsby"-familiar Seelbach Hotel (»Muhlbach Hotel" in F. Scott Fitzgerald's book) - this small part of town is charming. Yes, it's the kind of bohemian neighborhood that's always possible to find in every American city of a certain size. Here antique shops, artists' studios and record stores (including the city's flagship Ear X-TACy) intermingle and share space with bars, beekeepers and backyards where you can hear the cackling sounds of chickens. One should not miss Barrett Liquors, whose low key gentleman of a manager share lots of tips on "real bourbon" - including a beautifully aged Van Winkle-bottle for twelve hundred dollars - if you anwer »Jim Beam, Four Roses, Wild Turkey, Maker's Mark " when asked about which Kentucky bourbon you know if.

Put another way, if you want to get a glimpse of something as rare as a My Morning Jacket-member off tour odds are you'll find them in this area. It was also where the band recorded "Circuital," the band's sixth album - actually the first one that's been recorded in Louisville.

Consequently, there's something homely and peaceful about the end result. You can almost tell

(page 5)
from Jim James, soberly dressed in all black and with abundant, freshly showered hair combed back. He seems almost too prosperous and content, much more concrete and less fuzzy/odd/weird than the popular image of him sometimes might suggest. Awe-inspiring in several ways, but without making any fuss.

- Jim has a heart of gold. He is one of the most genuine people here on earth. I admire everything about him and his music making. There is no doubt that Jim was born to play and experiment with music and to lead a band, says singer-songwriter M.Ward, good friend and fellow band member in the joint side project Monsters Of Folk.

- When Conor [Oberst, of Bright Eyes, also Monsters Of Folk-member] introduced me and Jim to each other many years ago, we were already fans of each others music. But I don't really understand how Conor could know that we would work so well on a personal level.

Although a little of the flipped (freaky?) and sometimes eerie parts from "Evil Urges" has lingered in "Circuital"-tracks such as bizarre "Holdin 'on to Black Metal" and demonic "Victory Dance" the new album is overall far warmer, more down to earth and less sprawling. Embodied by loving blue eyed soul ballads like "Movin 'Away," "Wonderful (The Way I Feel)" and "Slow Slow Tune". Being a My Morning Jacket album it's unusually concise and masters the skill of both refering back to the sometimes dreamy country rusticity from their early records at the same time as it clearly marks out the direction of something new and unknown.


Okay, more to follow, but I got tired and the translations started to go from bad to worse.

[justbcuzido]

Thank you Sara, this is really great so far! Also the translations are fine, no need to worry.

[SaraBananaBear]

Thank you Sara, this is really great so far! Also the translations are fine, no need to worry.

Glad you like it and thank you!

[LeanneP]

Great works Sara!    THis is a great article. I'm looking forward to reading more.