tracked in a grain silo.) Man, James thought, is it time for this to just be done? Is it over?

Goaded by management, the band reluctantly set up open auditions in an L.A. rehearsal space. The first two players to walk in were Broemel and Koster. They knew every song.

“When they came in, we were so fucking burnt,” remembers James, “but they were like kids in a candy store, and their excitement just lifted us.”

Within weeks of that January ’04 audition, the reconstituted My Morning Jacket were back on the road—with a difference. A band known for its endurance and ecstatic energy lost none of either but, with the addition of Broemel (classically trained and a veteran of alternapoppers Silvercrush) and Koster (a Berklee brat whose tastes run from Kind of Blue to Physical Graffiti), became startlingly tight and versatile, too.

It’s no coincidence that the next set of songs penned by James, for 2005’s Z, fearlessly crossed into new stylistic territory. Produced by Radiohead and XTC mentor John Leckie and recorded in woodsy isolation in upstate New York, the album crackled with invention and joyfully leapfrogged from Who-inflected rave-ups and bleating synth pop to dub reggae and churning rock’n’roll.

What had looked to be a breakthrough story with an old-school twist—band pays dues and reaches mass audience with bold fourth album—met a very modern end. Against the group’s wishes, Sony BMG, which distributed Z, encoded the CD with copy-protection spyware that made consumers who slipped it into their computers vulnerable to hackers. Although the same technology corroded other Sony BMG releases, the corporate callousness was particularly appalling to MMJ’s rootsy fan base. Out of their own pockets, the band financed a disc-replacement program. But the damage was done: MMJ’s best-selling album to date, Z has barely passed the 200,000 mark. “Just another example of major-label stupidity,” says James now. “They shot themselves in the foot; they shot us in the foot.”

THAT ALMOST-FAMOUS AURA DOGS James in Louisville—and, it seems, everywhere else. Over a noontime breakfast the following day, a waitress—blonde, lithe, a few eggs short of a dozen—can’t seem to leave him alone. “Hey, do I know

you? How old are you?” she asks on her first unsolicited visit to our table for two.

“Twenty-nine,” he tells her softly. James had a tiny role in the recent Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There (his gorgeous version of “Goin’ to Acapulco” is on the soundtrack), and in his quieter moments, he bears a subtle resemblance— both physical and temperamental—to the film’s late star Heath Ledger.

Ten minutes pass. It’s her again. “Um, can I see your tattoo?”

James warmly obliges. “It’s sort of my guardian angel,”

he says, pulling up his sleeve to fully expose the crude line drawing of what he calls a “stick angel” on the inside of his left forearm.

Five minutes later. “Uh,” she says, leaning over James’ Mediterranean omelet, “why are you guys recording your conversation?”

James resists the urge to be evil and instead talks to me about the new album, whose title hints at the risk-taking on the record. For starters, it’s the most emotionally and sonically direct record MMJ have ever made. Then there are the strings— arranged by Beck’s father, David Campbell. And the falsetto synth funk and disco-lite romps. James’ publisher thinks the songwriter has finally come up with his “wedding song,” and there it is: a tender thing called “Thank You Too.”

It’s a deeply personal collection that alternately broods on and leavens James’ world-weariness with blasts of power and sonorous, philosophic beauty, and will likely disorient the MMJ faithful right out of the gate.

“This record is weird,” James says. “I wrote a lot of the songs when I’d just met someone and was falling in love….But then the relationship disintegrated, and by the time that happened, it was time to make the record. So some songs that started out in a really positive space now seem desperate to me.”

Producer Chiccarelli was himself taken aback by the record’s adventurousness. “To be honest, I was nervous,” he says. “I thought your basic MMJ fan, who really wants them to be an American rock band, would be put off by the first ten or 12 minutes of the record. Like, ‘ What are these guys doing?’”

As idiosyncratic and openhearted as the album is—and as mature as James’ writing has grown—it can be hard to locate the singer inside the song. James’ keening

“THIS RECORD IS WEIRD. SOME SONGS THAT STARTED OUT IN A REALLY POSITIVE SPACE NOW SEEM DESPERATE TO ME.” —JIM JAMES