Barikada
- World Of Music - Svastara - 2007 |
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MY MORNING JACKET
P o r t r a i t
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My Morning Jacket
(USA)
P o r t r a i t |
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In a perfect world, bios would be unnecessary. Instead of
those often peculiar, occasionally vaguely helpful written pieces purporting
to tell a band's story, a clear sense of the way things actually happened,
which often doesn't fit into neat story-size chunks, might emerge.
My Morning
Jacket, for example, lost in their line-up a while back their life-long friends
Johnny Quaid and Danny Cash. The two original members just decided
they didn't want to spend their time working in a band heavily on the road.
The remaining members - singer-guitarist and songwriter Jim James, bassist
Two-Tone Tommy, and drummer Patrick Hallahan - didn't really know which direction
to proceed: to go on as a three-piece, to look for new members, or to stop
altogether... but some force kept urging them on, so they started looking around
for new members. They found keyboardist Bo Koster, and guitarist Carl Broemel.
My Morning Jacket talked to some other people, but the band kept coming back
to Koster and Broemel, the first two musicians they met with. Things really
flowed there. "We loved them immediately," says James. "It was
like the band was its own force, wanting itself to go on, even down to finding
these two people."
For the new My Morning Jacket line-up, dreaming and
changing up their music proved tonic; they worked, in a collaboration that
turned out to be wholly
positive, with the veteran English producer John Leckie. "We wanted
to make a record that grooved and swung," James says, "but wasn't
trying to imitate classic soul. We wanted to keep an aspect of what we'd
always done, but also make something you could dance to or listen to while
driving home. Hip-hop and soul music are unifying people right now. I wanted
to incorporate that into our music; to make this really sad, mysterious kind
of dance music, something that really got into your butt, but also really
got into your head and made you think."
My Morning Jacket hail from
the city of Louisville, Kentucky, an odd metro-suburban mix of stark industry
and fine thoroughbreds and rock and roll fevers. "It's
a place with no labels," James says. "It's not the South, it's not
Chicago, and you don't think of it as you think of New York or LA. It has some
Southern romanticism to it, but also a Northern progressivism, this weird urban
island in the middle of the state of Kentucky that has always provided a fertile,
often dark, bed. For us, Louisville and the surrounding areas are the center
of massive creativity and massive weirdness. The place has its flaws: You move
away, but you're always going to come back."
For their 'Z' sessions, My
Morning Jacket did indeed, for the first time, move away. Instead of making
music as was their custom in the country outside Louisville,
they traveled to upstate New York's Allaire Studios. "We find our bearings
more in a rural, removed setting," Hallahan says. "Allaire was the
perfect answer to that, being isolated on a Catskills mountain." And so
everything started to click with regard to the unique Louisville soul music
that began to flow through the band. "Before, we had some unexpressed
anger and frustration," says Two-Tone Tommy. "Now we had figured
out it doesn't always have to be that way. Now we could celebrate that things
were changing."
'Z' is a 10-song collection that encompasses carefully
wrought ballads such as "Wordless Chorus" and "Knot Comes Loose," multi-genre
jams such as "Off the Record", silvery country-soul such as "Lay
Low", and high-energy rockers such as "Anytime" and "What
a Wonderful Man". Deliberately, emotionally, majestically, the
collection concludes with "Dondante", a seven-minute piece
that weaves together several singular Louisville-like blends of creativity
and engagement,
blues
and elations. "Most of the songs", Broemel says, "are
based on the sound of Jim's voice." Uncommonly passionate and blooming,
it's the sound of someone who, in Leckie's words, "is always singing a
duet with his reverb, which is the sixth member of the band." Broemel
continues: "But
I think we were also looking more rhythmically for ideas as the core of the
songs, and maybe not having huge guitars on every song."
For James, the music on 'Z' continues My Morning Jacket's
earliest goals.
"I've always wanted the music - the rhythms, the strings,
the guitar solos, everything - to be just as important as the words. I've
never wanted
one thing to be the most important ingredient. I like to think of the band
as something that's not really about any one person or any one thing. It's
just this weird cloud that is all-encompassing in terms of what we all do
to it."
The deep mysteries of this music - of sadness and happiness,
of despondency and uplift, of Louisville, of reverb - extend far into the
past, Leckie
thinks. "It's only in the last 100 years that we've had recorded music," he
says. "Before that, the only time you experienced music was when it
was a cloud, when it was in the present. Once it was finished being played,
the music was gone, like a cloud. My Morning Jacket retains some of that
pre-recorded vibe. 'What a Wonderful Man' is like an explosion; 'Into the
Woods' is like a mist; 'Anytime' is like a fast-moving cloud; 'Gideon'
is a cloud that builds up. 'Dondante' is like a series of clouds above
a requiem." And 'Z' is, of course, for My Morning Jacket, not the end of the story.
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