{"id":3579,"date":"2011-08-22T00:31:11","date_gmt":"2011-08-22T07:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=3579"},"modified":"2011-08-22T00:31:11","modified_gmt":"2011-08-22T07:31:11","slug":"my-morning-jacket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2011\/08\/my-morning-jacket\/","title":{"rendered":"MY MORNING JACKET"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h1>\n

MY MORNING JACKET<\/h1>\n

One of rock\u2019s leading bands hits the gym to reset its circuits<\/strong><\/h2>\n

My Morning Jacket bassist Tom \u201cTwo-Tone Tommy\u201d Blankenship is out of breath, and there are a few possible reasons. Most likely that he just completed a morning workout at his Louisville, Ky., home. But it\u2019s also possible he\u2019s still collecting himself after his band\u2019s electrifying set from days earlier at this year\u2019s Bonnaroo Music Festival. Or he may just be reeling from the excitement of seeing My Morning Jacket\u2019s latest effort, Circuital<\/em>, become the group\u2019s first Top 5 debut. \u201cThat was a fun week,\u201d\u00a0Blankenship acknowledges.<\/p>\n

Mind you, selling records hasn\u2019t been an issue since the band\u2019s third album, 2003\u2019s It Still Moves<\/em>, catapulted the experimental Southern rockers well beyond their devoted fan base. Formed in 1998 by singer, guitarist and primary songwriter Jim James (Blankenship is the only other remaining original member), the group embraces sounds ranging from acoustic balladry to Who-style rock on Circuital<\/em>, recorded live last summer in a Louisville church gymnasium with producer Tucker Martine. Blankenship attributes the newfound\u00a0sense of confidence in part to a five-night stand at New York City\u2019s Terminal 5 last October when James, guitarist Carl Broemel, keyboardist Bo Koster and drummer Patrick Hallahan and he played the band\u2019s first five albums in their entirety. We caught up with Blankenship on a rare trip back\u00a0home to Kentucky.<\/p>\n

How has your relationship with Jim evolved over the years?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was talking to a friend about this over the weekend, and he asked, \u201cHow old were you when you joined the band?\u201d And I said it was right before my 21st birthday. We were laughing about how funny it is that the entirety of my adult life has been spent in this band. It\u2019s pretty wild that Jim and I have experienced all of the normal things that you go through from when you\u2019re 20 till when you\u2019re 33 together. I think it\u2019s remarkable that we\u2019ve been doing this for this long, and if anything our friendship is stronger and musically we\u2019re stronger.<\/p>\n

How does Jim bring in songs?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes they come fully formed, other times there\u2019s just the sketch of a song. \u201cCircuital\u201d was like that, with just a few parts intact. The five of us hammered it out from there. His process is all over the map. It can be completed songs or sketches or just a riff. If there are 12 to 20 new song ideas, we\u2019ll listen to them on our own for\u00a0a few months, then get together and discuss which ones we\u2019re really excited about\u00a0and go from there.<\/p>\n

How was recording in the gym?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019d always intended to make a record live like this, and had talked about it forever. We\u2019d already done some of it to a large extent with rhythm tracks in the past\u2014drums, bass and maybe Jim\u2019s guitar as well. But we\u2019ve always wanted to record everything<\/em> live\u2014with maybe just some guitar overdubs and background vocals here and there\u2014to have that spirit all the records we grew up listening to had. We wanted to capture that feeling of everybody playing at the same time and recording that moment. In a way it was one of the easiest records for us to make, because it was<\/em> just us playing. We\u2019d literally say, \u201cHey, let\u2019s work on \u2018Circuital,\u2019\u201d run through the song twice to get a rough idea of where we were going, then press record. That\u2019s pretty much how the whole record went.<\/p>\n

Was that enjoyable? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh yeah. It was a kind of magic that came from us not concentrating solely on our own parts and actually listening to each other, knowing nothing has to be perfect and capturing the spirit of how exciting and new the song was. Not someone going after 30 takes, \u201cWell, that one part\u2019s still not working.\u201d And a lot of that came from the Terminal 5 run we did, where we learned about 99 songs over five days. We became a tighter unit through that process, and learned to trust each other to a degree that we hadn\u2019t been forced to before.<\/p>\n

How did you approach this album differently from the last?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I won\u2019t say that it all came easy, but I put less pressure on myself with this album. On the last one [2008\u2019s Evil Urges<\/em>] I did a lot of self-editing. I would come back to the control room and listen and say, \u201cWell, I just don\u2019t like what I\u2019m playing.\u201d So with this record I purposely dumbed down my stuff, out of fear of being too much in my head. I had a lot of things going on in my personal life at the time, so I didn\u2019t have the emotional real estate to pressure myself to deliver the most amazing bass track ever. That gave me some freedom, in a strange kind of way. But \u201cThe Day Is Coming\u201d was the toughest for Patrick and me, because there\u2019s so much space in the song. It\u2019s mostly drums, bass and vocal, and it was the only song\u00a0that took multiple days.<\/p>\n

What basses did you use?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was all Fender Precision bass, except for \u201cWonderful,\u201d where I used an upright. I used three different P-basses, but they were all pretty much identical.<\/p>\n

What was your experience working with Tucker Martine? <\/strong><\/p>\n

The way he works is so effortless. It was immediate, literally as soon as he came into the room. We\u2019d been at the gymnasium for one or two days setting up stuff and going over a few tunes, but there wasn\u2019t this weird adjustment period you sometimes have with people, even with someone you ultimately end up liking and working well with. I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve ever had that instant connection with someone from outside. His ears are wonderful. More than anything else, he was as excited as we were to have this strange opportunity to try and make a space work that isn\u2019t normally used for recording bands. He saw that as a challenge instead of a limitation to the process. So it was really like seven people at a Boy Scout camp or a lock-in where you\u2019re just there to kick back.<\/p>\n

What surprised you about the results of the whole process?<\/strong><\/p>\n

While it wasn\u2019t evident when we were sequencing the album, I found that the journey, the musical story arc played out in the songs, was one that I desperately needed at the time. The songs began to\u00a0take a different shape and meaning. I no longer experienced them, lyrically, as an outsider. Surprisingly, I found myself\u00a0speaking through them about grief, pain\u00a0and ultimately relief\u2014things I wasn\u2019t sure I\u00a0had words for yet.<\/p>\n

Do you have an ultimate goal? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to lie on the hood of my car, sipping a milkshake in a dairy-bar parking lot, watching the sunset. Seriously.<\/p>\n

\u2013Jesse Thompson<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MY MORNING JACKET One of rock\u2019s leading bands hits the gym to reset its circuits My Morning Jacket bassist Tom \u201cTwo-Tone Tommy\u201d Blankenship is out of breath, and there are a few possible reasons. Most likely that he just completed a morning workout at his Louisville, Ky., home. But it\u2019s also possible he\u2019s still collecting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[2472,2471,1636,2470,970,2474,2473],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3581,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579\/revisions\/3581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}