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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