My Morning Jacket: Put Us In, Coach (Part 2 of 2)

Continued from Part One…

Jim James says that when he’s engaged in the multitask endeavor of producing and being the artist, he sometimes “gets super-crazy about engineering and mic placement.” Working with O’Brien freed him and his band mates to concentrate on making the songs the best they could be. “I could step back and focus on my singing, my guitar playing, whatever,” he says, “as opposed to worrying about what mic he’s putting on the snare drum.”

The vibe in the studio was convivial; at its center, is is the sound of My Morning Jacket being relaxed and having fun making an album. “Brendan congealed us all in this interesting way,” James says. He likens the experience of making the new album to what he imagines it’s like to play for a professional sports team. “Everybody played better, because they knew that ‘Coach’ was watching,” he says.

James believes that the new working methods even affected his songwriting. Describing O’Brien as “brutally honest” but in a good way, James says that he “kept firing new demos” at the producer. “Half the time he wouldn’t even respond,” he laughs. In those cases, James understood that a given song hand’t passed muster. “But then I’d send another one, and he’d say, ‘Oh, man, this is better than anything we’ve got! What [song] are we gonna lose for this one?’”

Even though the final set of songs for the new album is the result of careful vetting, James doesn’t find a thread running through that links them together tonally. Instead, he suggests, “It’s the universe speaking.” He says that some of the album’s best material arrived “at the last minute. It almost felt like the universe knew that [work on the album] was coming to a close, and that it only had so long to shoot these songs into the pipeline.” In his view, “the act of creation inspires more creation.”

Some artists create “songwriter’s demos,” basic takes – sometimes only voice and a lone guitar – as references for eventual recording. James does that, too, but it’s not the only way he works. “I’ve got a home studio,” he explains. “I love engineering, and I’m always recording.” He says that some pieces of his original home demos ended up forming the basis – or adornments – of the finished tracks on is. “That’s something we’d never really done before,” he says.

“If there was a part we liked – a drum programming thing or a sample – we might use it on the album,” he says. James mentions that a ukulele riff that he recorded at home ended up finding its way into one of the songs. “That [approach] helped retain some of the fun ‘beginner’s magic’ that I had already put into the song,” he says. “We just built on it and expanded it. And by the end of the day, we’d all be in the control room, fuckin’ rocking to what we had done.”

One quality that makes is even better than it would have already been is sequencing. James acknowledges that a great deal of care and thought went into determining the song order. While it’s not a concept album, the record develops and unfolds in a deliberate fashion. There’s a gentle, acoustic-leaning flavor the songs on its first half; around “Beginning from the Ending,” the music gets heavier and more expansive, and builds on in rocking manner from there. The overall effect is almost cinematic.

“I thought about sequencing a lot,” James says. Once the tracks were completed, he put together a mix. “I took walks with it, I drove with it, trying to imagine the journey.” He would bounce ideas off O’Brien and make changes in the song order. “The guys [in the band] had some good notes, too,” James says. “I’d get to a place and then ask them to ‘take the journey.’ And they’d be like, ‘Oh, good, but how about this?’ It was a collaborative effort.”

The act of letting go is a theme that runs through James’ understanding of the process that yielded My Morning Jacket’s 10th studio album. “It’s a funny thing in life, something you hear so often that’s really true,” he observes. “If you can hit that 50% mark of letting go, then the universe can speak. And then it’s about showing up to do the work; that’s when the magic happens.”

James pauses, and then he reiterates the other ingredient that has helped make is such a creatively satisfying record. “Brendan,” he says. “He’s such a good coach.”