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Into the wild rock yonder

By Ben Sisario
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK
Monday, Jun 16, 2008, Page 13

Fans enjoy My Morning Jacket’s set during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, in April. PHOTO: EPA

Two days after performing on Saturday Night Live with his band, My Morning Jacket, Jim James sat in a French coffeehouse in Manhattan, fretting over his life lines.

Being on the show was his “biggest childhood rock dream ever,” he said. And in the parlance of “kosmic consciousness” — a philosophy James has been studying that divides mental and spiritual development into separate “lines” — it fit right in with his going-gangbusters music line. There are the enthusiastic reviews for the band’s new album, Evil Urges, for example, and its concert on Friday at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, which sold out in 22 minutes.

And yet James, who recently turned 30, can’t stop thinking about other paths.

“Like, maybe I want to be a better basketball player,” he said, running a hand through shaggy brown curls matted by a knit cap. “Or I want to learn how to paint better. Or maybe I want to be better in relationships. I feel fortunate on the music side of my personality, but the other sides need some more development. And in order to jump-start that growth, I needed to move outside my comfort zone.”

My Morning Jacket singer/guitarist Jim James on stage at Coachella. PHOTO: AP

Since its founding a decade ago in Louisville, Kentucky, My Morning Jacket has been following a career trajectory increasingly rare in rock. Relying on sweat and word of mouth rather than YouTube moments and product endorsements, the five-man band has established itself as a transcendent live act and a worthy inheritor of the roots-rock tradition of Neil Young and the Allman Brothers. The benefit has been a robust touring base that provides the band with most of its income; the downside is record sales that don’t reflect its hard-won prominence.

Evil Urges, released last Tuesday by ATO Records, is My Morning Jacket’s most commercial effort, a bid for a mainstream breakthrough at a moment when all the right promotional stars — the cover of Spin last month, a prominent Bonnaroo music festival booking — are in place. Songs like Highly Suspicious have the kind of taut, invigorating guitar riffs best heard blaring from car stereos, while quieter, more graceful songs mix musky Southern rock with something psychedelic and grand.

But Evil Urges is also the band’s most ambitious and challenging work, full of left-field electronic experiments and songs that seem to rebel against every expectation. In conversation the band members greet the possibility of fame with a shrug — perhaps wise self-protection in an era when the definition of success is being scaled down.

“Every record you make, you want it to be a hit, even if it’s not going to sell 20 million copies,” James said. “This record is the same as last time. People say Highly Suspicious could be a hit, or Thank You Too! , that could be a slow hit. But they’ve been saying that for years. I don’t have any control over it.”

Tom Blankenship, the bassist and a founding member, was almost excessively modest in explaining his expectations for the new album. “Once we played outside of Kentucky,” he said by phone from Louisville, “I felt like everything was icing on top of a really nice cake.”

For James the idea of leaving his comfort zone also has a literal, geographical meaning. This spring he moved from Louisville to Manhattan and began renting an apartment in Chelsea, on the type of block that real-estate ads do not exaggerate in calling leafy, picturesque, to die for. It’s a move that might suggest a status grab, but on a crisp May afternoon James strolled through the neighborhood in rumpled tan corduroys and work boots, with pinchable baby fat visible through his shirt. He looked less like a budding star than a college sophomore in search of a Hacky Sack game.

Although the members of My Morning Jacket — which also includes Patrick Hallahan on drums, Bo Koster on keyboards and Carl Broemel on guitar — have scattered across the country, Kentucky remains the band’s headquarters and the basis of its musical identity. Its first three albums were made at the family farm of a former guitar player, Johnny Quaid, with James’ vocals recorded in a grain silo for maximum reverberation.

With Evil Urges the band sought to make a tighter and more forceful record than it had before and chose to work with Joe Chiccarelli, who has produced albums for the White Stripes and the Shins. When he heard James’ funk- and electronic-influenced demo tapes, he persuaded the band to come to New York, where it recorded the album over five weeks last winter, staying in corporate apartments in Midtown.

“I said to Jim, ‘This is not the record to go and hide away in the woods,’” Chiccarelli said. “These are much more open and accessible, groove-oriented, rhythmic sounds. This is a city record.”

Evil Urges is full of contradictions. It is a city record, with amorous, Prince-derived funk on the title track and off-kilter electronica in the two-part Touch Me I’m Going to Scream. It also has some of the band’s most beautiful, pastoral ballads, like Look at You, and even antique country bubble gum, in the charming Sec Walkin’ . But for every peaceful moment there is an opposite impulse toward anxiety and paranoia, and the album is filled with oblique, self-questioning lyrics. The connecting thread is a struggle to break free of all restraints.

“I don’t want people to think anything when they hear ‘My Morning Jacket,’” James said. “I just want them to think of a question mark.”

Picking at a Nutella banana crepe James seemed most interested in recounting the mundane details of his new life in New York: dealing with sign-or-die real-estate agents, rushing home for a mattress delivery, studying strangers’ faces on the subway. He loves prowling the streets unrecognized, he said, something that had become impossible in Louisville.

He lighted up with excitement when recounting the postperformance hooting and backslapping at Saturday Night Live. But despite the group’s hopes for Evil Urges James said he has all but dismissed the possibility of becoming a rock star. The very idea, he said, has been killed by the instant accessibility of the Internet. “The grunge era was the last era of the comic-book size, superhero rock star,” he said. “All you had was that record cover to look at and the videos on MTV, so they were still mysterious, legendary figures.”

By contrast, he said, My Morning Jacket is content to follow a human-size life line. “We’re not unknown,” he said. “We’re not wildly popular. We fit in the middle .... .”


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