In the current issue of Relix, longtime My Morning Jacket scribe William Bowers (whose essay on the group was featured in Da Capo’s Best Music Writing 2004) waxes poetic on My Morning Jacket’s new album Circuital_. The band members also offer their thoughts in a companion piece. While an excerpt appears here be sure to pick up the June issue of Relix for much more from My Morning Jacket.

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This past October, the band played five shows at New York City’s Terminal 5 (T5), devoting the first set of each night to playing one of its albums – in sequential order – followed by a second set of rarities and covers from the designated album’s time period.

Tom “Two-Tone” Blankenship (bass): We got together at Jim’s house a week or two before those shows and then spent four or five days going through all of it together. I’d say we were already doing half of it on the road. I think it ended up being 99 songs.

Jim James (vocals/guitar): I look back on our albums and there are several that have one or two tracks I’d take off if I was making the record now. But that was the me back then and, for some reason, he thought the song should be on there – so part of me has to respect that. I feel comfortable about it because I know – with every record we make – we are always pouring everything we have into it until we feel it is completely done.

Tom: I remember thinking about the certain song orders that we did [for the albums]. I remember when we got done playing the main set of At Dawn and Jim made the comment, “Why did we end the record with ‘Strangulation?’” It’s such an odd way to end the record. I think having different emotions attached to songs [was a surprise, too].

Patrick Hallahan (drums): We had a lot of unexpected things happen – just how emotional everybody got about reliving those moments. I wasn’t in the band for the first two albums but I was a friend, a fan and on the periphery of everything because I was roommates with the guys. It was triggering memories of old friends that have passed, ex-girlfriends. There were just all these nascent effects from going through all these songs. It was like looking through a family album.

Jim: It was like we were talking to holograms of ourselves from the past and they were telling us how we were – some of it we didn’t like and it was strange to look back on, but most of it we felt happy and proud of.

Tom: Playing songs off those first two records at Terminal 5 really felt like stepping back in time. It felt like I was in some little, tiny, smoky club in Holland and it was 10 or 11 years before.

Jim: It was surprising to live by the rules we had set for ourselves so long ago. The way you make a record when you are 21 years old is far different from the way you make one when you are 32 and so on.

Patrick: It ended up teaching me a lot about the band I had forgotten and helped me to understand who I am, who we are, what our roles are [in the band].

Tom: The journey seems to happen a lot quicker than it really did happen. In that moment [onstage at T5], I realized, “Holy shit, it’s been a long time.” It really has been a journey and a long, long process to get from there to where we are now.

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During the course of five albums and now Circuital, My Morning Jacket has become progressively more popular. Whereas it played small ballrooms during At Dawn and It Still Moves, following Z and Evil Urges it headlined Madison Square Garden on New Year’s Eve 2009, sold-out Radio City Music Hall in 2010 and now, this summer, is headlining many festivals. With such success comes a potential pressure to create music with greater commercial appeal or accessibility.

Tom: It’s not something that we’ve ever talked about or that I’ve ever really been conscious of – not in the recording or writing process. For us, we’re so weirdly quiet – we just don’t communicate that way about songs. We might say, “OK, this is feeling really good.” We don’t really talk about what feels good or what other people might think. Sometimes after the fact – like with “Holdin’ on to Black Metal” – we might say, “People are going to freak out about this.”

Jim: Commercial success is a strange thing I have never really understood. I can only write the songs that I write and we can only play them the way we play them. I am open to certain things even though I might not like them – like trying out radio edits for longer songs since people are so worried about time on the radio and videos.

Tom: I think, first and foremost, if we can be happy with the way the song is feeling, you hope that translates to the audience as well. I think we’ve taken chances and done really whacky things musically and people are still here to take that weird journey with us over and over again.

Patrick: It’s nice to have to such a diverse audience because that’s exactly what we want. We live that way everyday, we’ve never been in one particular clique growing up we’ve never been one particular genre. I find that it’s a blessing that there’s not one particular type of fan that comes to the shows.

Jim: At the end of the day, we are just trying to be faithful and respectful to the spirits in our heads when we work on these songs. We don’t really want to try and twist them in any way in hopes of them being “commercially” successful.

The length of My Morning Jacket’s records has varied greatly. Some seem to adhere to the age of vinyl – clocking in at less than 50 minutes – while others make use of a compact disc’s increased length. As with any band, the decision of choosing what songs make up a specific album is a process.

Jim: We all have to like each song that goes on a record and feel that it fits a purpose for one reason or another – that it contributes to an overall “arc” or journey that an album should take you on. Often times, you don’t really know if you got it right till years later.

Patrick: It’s probably the only real time we have distinct differences. I think all of us I feel that the songs [that are] selected and the sequence in which they are arranged are some of the most important steps in making an album. They’re the final presentation of all the work you’ve been doing.

Tom: It’s definitely a democratic process. It first starts with Jim. He has this vision of what he wants the album to be and then we whittle it down from there and go back and forth. Halfway through the process, we knew [ Circuital ] was going to be shorter than the last album – that there would be fewer songs. It may have been a response to Evil Urges in consciously wanting it to be a different experience.

Patrick: I will say is that the length of this album is purely intentional. The songs that made the album were up to the songs themselves. We had more to choose from, but [songs] find their own spot and let you know if they’re going to work together or not.

Tom: It depends on the album. At Dawn, for example, was one where we fit as much music as we could on there because we felt if someone is going to pay for our music than they should get the maximum amount of music possible. The same is true for It Still Moves though that probably had more to do with the length of the songs than anything else.