vocals have, through the years, paid homage to an array of heroes: Neil Young, of course, but also Brian Wilson, Levon Helm, Roger Daltrey, Kermit the Frog (James performed “The Rainbow Connection” at 2007’s Lollapalooza). On Evil Urges, he channels Prince, George Harrison, and Dylan, too. It makes for thrilling listening, but it’s curious that a writer of such distinction remains so elusive as a voice.
Chiccarelli doesn’t see it as mimicry, or even homage. “To Jim, everything is color, an emotion, a feeling,” he says. “And just as a guitar player would ask, ‘I want it to be silky here, so do I go with a Strat with not a lot of distortion or a Les Paul with not much top end?’ Jim makes his [vocal] choices based on color or a brushstroke.”
Because James, early in his career, notoriously drenched his voice in reverb and stumped even his most literate fans with bluntly cryptic lyrics, it’s tempting to assume that, in some ways, he’s still in hiding. The whole line of thinking vexes him. “Obviously, there are some lyrics that are interpretive or strange,” he says, laughing, “but it was never a conscious decision on my part. Like, ‘I’m gonna fuck you up and make you work for it!’”
He’s more reflective about the vocals and the range of styles he now writes in: “I don’t know. I have friends who’ve been listening to nothing but Zeppelin since eighth grade. And a lot of musicians are like that, too. ‘I’m a rock musician, dude.’ That’s cool. But at the end of the day, my tastes are very all over the map. I don’t see the boundaries in music, so if I’m excited by an OutKast song or some Sam Cooke gospel record, I want to bring that into my world.”
To the point of singing like them? It’s not a choice that, say, Neil Young or Jeff Tweedy would make.
“Totally!” he says in agreement. “I don’t know, most of the time I feel like a very confused person anyway. And I feel like maybe those people have a more concrete identity of who they are. I don’t know where I’m living, I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t have a relationship. I’m not crying or bitching about it, but I’m saying, most of the time it’s not like I have a solid, core sense of who I am.
“To me, music is like theater,” he continues. “There’s always a bit of performance and craft to it. [With each song] it’s like I’m creating a little world at a time.”
He’s even got a stage name born out of exasperation at open mics in Louisville, when MCs routinely turned his given name—Jim Olliges—into a guttural mess. “It’s weird, man,” he says. “When people call me Jim James, I don’t even think of myself as that. But I like it, ’cause I feel like I can be this fictional character sometimes.”
Jim Olliges, on the other hand, is longing for nonfiction.
We jump into his black Honda SUV and head toward the Ohio River. Despite its reputation as a sour-mashed mecca of the South, Louisville is as centrally located a city as there is in America, tucked into the nexus of three states. Parked facing the big bend of the Ohio that caps Louisville’s north end, we are just a rowboat away from Indiana, visible today through a dusting of snowfall.
It’s a beautiful picture, but one that may no longer have a hold on the heart and soul of My Morning Jacket. James’ bandmates—all in their late 20s and early 30s—are settled, for the most part. Hallahan, Blankenship, and Broemel are married; Koster has a girlfriend in Austin. But that kind of steadying relationship has eluded the guy whose yearning and self-searching is so obvious in, to quote one of his song titles, the way that he sings.
“I don’t necessarily feel like I’ve outgrown Louisville,” James says, looking out across the river. “We’re all about family, so when I’m [on the road], I do miss the community, and I really miss my parents and friends. But right now it’s tough to meet new people and be free of baggage. Part of it is the whole Jim James thing. I want to have a wall between it and my personal life, because I don’t want someone to just like me because I’m that rock’n’roll dude. But, inevitably, you get that.”
Touring continues to be an exhilarating escape—and a life upender. Shortly after the band recorded two November ’05 shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco for their Okonokos live album and DVD, James was hospitalized with a devastating case of pneumonia. He spent months recovering.
But playing rock’n’roll is what they do. “None of us have gotten to the point where we’re set, where we’re, like, loaded financially,” James says. “To support ourselves, we have to keep going on the road.”
Since he gave up his $600-a-month Louisville apartment a few years ago, he has largely been living in hotels. New York tops his list of the cities he’d like to explore as a place to settle. But with so much of his life spent grinding it out with My Morning Jacket, he can’t—for the time being, at least—rationalize laying out the inevitable two- or three-grand-a-month rent. So limbo remains the state in which he’ll live.
The band members have a ruff afternoon.
HE COULDN’T DO BETTER FOR COMPANIONS, though. It’s clear that the members of My Morning Jacket are, in Hallahan’s slightly cornball parlance, “brothers.”
“Just a bunch of dudes” is how James puts it.
If so, the dudes abide. (At their Spin photo shoot a week later, just outside of Nashville, the five of them will band together—ankle deep in muck and ten hands pressed to the grill of a Chevy Suburban—to help free two half-ton vehicles from a swampy field. “Man, that was awesome,” James will say. “We went muddin’!”) Regardless of record sales, they’ve earned their rep as America’s Radiohead—or, at least, as contemporaries of their compatriots in artistic independence, Wilco and the Flaming Lips. Through years of balls-out performances, they’ve ascended to star status at Coachella, Lollapalooza, and particularly, Bonnaroo, where their three-hour-plus midnight sets have walloped hordes of 40,000. They’ll be back at Bonnaroo in June, the centerpiece of a modest spring and summer itinerary that will pick up momentum in the fall.
For most bands, the road promises infighting and drama. It’s different, Bo Koster insists, with My Morning Jacket.
“Being in a band can be weird,” he says by phone from L.A. a few days after missing out on the Bourbons Bistro gathering. “People have trouble getting along. It’s probably the nature of who goes into bands. They’re not necessarily grounded, egoless people….But the closest we’ve come to an argument in four-plus years is, like [affects a meek voice], ‘Really? Okay.’ That’s it. Those are our complications.”
That, and the check. They may be big in Belgium (true), but My Morning Jacket still go dutch. Hallahan and James stare at the tab, drowning in numbers.
“I had the skate,” says James, reaching for his cash.
“The steak was mine,” adds Hallahan, “so I owe more.” Blankenship had the “chunky new potato and asparagus tart.”
Broemel? He’s in a postmeal stupor.
It’s the same one cramping Jim James’s brain. “Fuck it,” he says, pulling the band’s corporate card from his wallet. “Charge it to da game.”
MORE AT SPIN.COM For exclusive footage from this month’s cover shoot and from the band’s recent night at a karaoke bar, log on to spin.com/mmj-video
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