Today we turn back the clock to 2003 with the First Relix feature on My Morning Jacket. The group will return to the stage next week in Nashville. It’s also worthy to note that William Bowers, whose story on the group is mentioned in this piece, contributed a follow-up as part of our Relix cover story in June.

I met My Morning Jacket at 11am and we walked a couple of blocks to Chez Le Chef, a unique culinary outpost in the cultural wasteland of the mid-twenties on the east side of Manhattan. The restaurant, much like the band, is an anomaly run by a man with a tireless imagination and a penchant for making art out of the ordinary. During the meal, the waiter offered a basket of bread to lead singer, guitarist and composer Jim James, stating only, “Ra.” James, confused, graciously accepted the offering and then, joined by his bandmates, laughed about the prospect of a baby Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun, appearing beneath the folded white napkin, beams of sunlight binding us.

With My Morning Jacket, expect the unexpected. If the band had its wish, you wouldn’t know what they look like, looks being entirely irrelevant to their mission of connecting with people through music. This might explain why on stage they appear, with one clean-cut exception (keyboardist Danny Cash), as shaggy, hair-obscured enigmas shooting from one corner to another, uniting in a thrashing, circular bond in the middle and bouncing away – manic Muppets awash in a mess of focused, head-banging bliss, cranking out heartbreaking melodies.

Their debut album, Tennessee Fire, was released on Darla Records in 1999 and the band – all of whom hail from Louisville, Kentucky and its surrounding areas – began a three-year odyssey of underground attention and acclaim, which included the replacing of members and the addition of new ones. The release of their second album, At Dawn, took them around the world, won over more fans and ultimately landed them at ATO records and their new major-label debut, It Still Moves. Not radically different than their two previous albums, ISM is perhaps the band’s best work to date – a moving manifesto detailing the roads we choose to go down and the roads that choose us. “We do intend each album as a journey and each album as a different journey,” says James. “That’s why they are usually so long and there’s so much going on. I just think the world I so fast-paced right now; it is so cut and dry and so much of music, there’s no mystery or weirdness behind it.”

Self-producing with James at the helm, My Morning Jacket has been free to insert its own mystery and weirdness they see fit, retaining complete and total creative control, even when its major-label release. The band has always done things on their own terms – allowing their music and notoriety to organically build under the radar from its place of origin on guitarist Johnny Quaid’s grandparent’s family farm in Shelbyville, KY. Serving as the band’s studio, rehearsal space, headquarters and sonic playground, the building is a three-car and a living space of about the same size above; it has been the breeding ground for the band’s now infamous experimentations in reverb. “One thing we like too pride ourselves on is reverb in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Variety,” says James. “We’ve got digital reverbs. We use the garage as a huge reverb chamber. We’ve got a giant plate reverb. We use silos.” Their technique of creating reverb has become synonymous with the band, with some going as far to say that it is the sixth member of the group. Along with reverb, the band is composed of James (vocals and guitar), Cash (keyboards) and Quaid (guitar), joined by Patrick Hallahn (drums) and Two-Tone Tommy (bass). “We’re finally a solid band a opposed to just being kind of a band or half of a band,” says James, addressing the sonic sound synchronicity apparent on their new album. “It is the first time that it felt like, this is the band; this is the lineup,” says Tommy.

Into The Mystery

The music of My Morning Jacket has a way of wrapping you up in its sizable emotional breadth, the sheer beauty of radiating from all angles but mainly from an otherworldly locale that is separated by miles and miles of reverb. In no hurry to end, MMJ’s songs unravel in a way that is nearly extinct in music today. Building and retracting, they are intricately crafted excursions that refuse to let go of the listener – the antithesis of background music. Of the process of composition, James says, “We believe in making records and not just songs. The whole record is like one giant song to me; it’s like a big experience and all off the songs need each other to be whole.”

In his obsessive, scholarly piece about My Morning Jacket, William Bowers, a contributing editor to Oxford American magazine, perfectly captured the MMJ experience. In no uncertain terms, Bowers blamed the band for a failed relationship stating, “James’ nonchalantly gorgeous songs, once so reinforcing, now conjured an affectionate atmosphere that we failed to emulate. The songs were mafia thugs, putting pressure on us to live up to their drama.” Upon first listen to My Morning Jacket, the drama that engulfed Bowers is viscerally tangible and spiritual in its presentation. Most of the time cathartic, MMJ’s music is really about who you wan o be and what you could have been, but it is also a detailed map to explain how you arrived at where you are – with cocaine and murder thrown in for good measure. “We are not trying to make folk rock, or indie rock. We are not trying to do anything. We are not trying to dress up; we are not trying to put on a fashion show or a puppet show,” says James. “We are just trying to be five guys playing music.”