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.”
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.
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