My Morning Jacket's Quest For Connection

PT. 1
TOUCH ME
I’M GOING TO SCREAM IF YOU DON’T
INSIDE I KNOW WE HAVE
THE FEELING THAT YOU WANT
I KNOW IT SOUNDS CONFUSING
BUT IT MAKES A LOT OF SENSE
ROW A BOAT ACROSS THE OCEAN
DIG A HOLE UNDER THE FENCE

I’m eating nachos in the middle of the musical vortex known as the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Texas, when a 20-year-old with a bleached faux-hawk asks to share my table. I oblige and we strike up a conversation. He rattles off a list of bands he’s anxious to see. I haven’t heard of any of them. He turns his nose up at my ignorance. When I mention Lou Reed, R.E.M. and Yo La Tengo, the kid just stares blankly at me. But when the name My Morning Jacket rolls off my tongue, Faux Hawk’s eyes light up. “Love those guys, they rock,” he says. Indeed, grasshopper. Indeed. We live in fractured times. Never before in our history have we shared fewer unifying commonalities. Niche is king, and being friends on Facebook or texting each other—sometimes from opposite ends of a room—passes for human interaction. Some of us find ourselves aching for connection, perhaps to even share some generally accepted cultural touchstones. From the earliest primitive drum circles and fireside chants to The Beatles and Gnarls Barkley, music has been a vehicle for this connection. But as music becomes a more solitary endeavor, experienced on computers in our cubicles, on headphones and in cars, something is lost. And as the aging icons of ’60s and ’70s rock fade into the past, somebody needs to replace them. Rock ’n’ roll needs a torchbearer. To paraphrase legendary producer Bruce Dickinson, the culture of music has got a fever—and the only prescription is more My Morning Jacket. With a decade under their belts and a raging work ethic driving their career, the adventurous and constantly evolving Louisville, Ky., rockers have matured sonically, becoming a kind of superconnector, shattering barriers and putting listeners back in touch with their humanity. The band’s power is particularly transformative on stage, where they deliver full-blown, tongue-wagging, fist-pumping Flying V cock-rock. With My Morning Jacket there is no sarcasm or irony—simply iron. “I tell ya, it’s really magical to be playing with these guys,” drummer Patrick Hallahan says. “Something about the energy—we don’t mean to create it, and I don’t know what the hell it is, but it’s so human you can feel it.”

Touch me I’m going to scream if you don’t
Inside I know we have the feeling that you want
I need a human right by my side, untied, untied

If you examine My Morning Jacket’s career—its four studio albums, a live album/DVD, numerous EPs and singles, and, of course, countless gigs—the band’s artistic passion is obvious. Last November, after I witnessed them perform a ripping cover of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” during the concert celebration for Todd Haynes’ Dylan film I’m Not There at New York’s Beacon Theatre, the band chose to bag the swanky, hipster-and-celebrity-filled after-party, instead absconding to some blue-collar Irish pub to sing along with the jukebox.

It’s difficult to file My Morning Jacket neatly into the current musical landscape. “I feel sorry for anyone who has to conjure up a way to label this band from now on,” says keyboardist Bo Koster, smiling. He’s actually quite sincere, especially when he surmises that most people uniformly resort to using existing templates and older bands as reference points when discussing music. Taking this as a direct challenge, I try in vain to accurately and fully capture the band’s essence without falling into the trap of, “Take a cup of band X, add two cups of band Y, throw in a teaspoon of band Z and you have My Morning Jacket,” or “My Morning Jacket is the bastard love child of artist A and artist B after ingesting large quantities of drug D and playing genre E.” Everything that materialized seemed dated, clichéd and blatantly contradictory.

Koster laughs and tells me to wait until I hear the spanking-new album, and then take a crack at it. Four months later, a copy with a hand-scrawled track list lands in my office and—after my first uninterrupted listen—I swear I can hear his nefarious giggling through the speakers.

Touch me I’m going to scream if you don’t
Inside I know we have the feeling that you want
I can tell by the way you’re smiling
I’m smiling too
I see myself in you
I can tell by the sounds you make when you are pleased
You see yourself in me

My Morning Jacket’s fifth album, Evil Urges, is a sonic gut-punch. It doesn’t merely ignore expectations—it atomizes them, reconfigures them and then rams them down the gullet. After the first listen, I stared at my speakers, trying to come to grips with what had happened over the last 55 minutes. I pushed play again, and then again. Each time, the experience was more visceral and unnerving. As the album’s title suggests, Jim James’ lyrics explore the eternal battle of id and ego. The dichotomy is perversely comforting in a delusional, high-fever kind of way. Still, the band’s albums are merely postcards from their celebrated evolution. Attempting to capture primordial reactions to Evil Urges without seeing My Morning Jacket live is futile.