In recent years, Jim James was shopping at a flea market in Louisville, KY, when a vintage counterculture publication called "The Last Whole Earth Catalog" caught his eye. Curious about the words contained within — and also struck by a photo included with it, "Illuminated Man" by Duane Michals, which features the visage of a man glowing with brilliant white light — the My Morning Jacket frontman picked it up to read later.
The impulse buy paid off. "It kind of blew my mind," James told Salon. "It was like the internet before the internet, you know? It was like this really beautiful way of spreading information and then all this information was positive. It was like so many different ways to improve your life and learn things."
From a philosophical standpoint, "The Last Whole Earth Catalog" also informed James' new solo album, "Uniform Distortion." He dialed back his internet consumption and usage, and bashed out an album without laboring over the process or sound. The resulting music comprises rock 'n' roll songs freckled with distortion and fuzz — see the soulful swagger of "You Get To Rome" and the needling power-pop gem "Just A Fool" — and introspective twang-folk. Standout "No Secrets" is moody alt-country with a barnstorming edge, while the reverbed-out desperation of "Throwback" resembles My Morning Jacket. It's not hyperbole to call "Uniform Distortion" easily James' best solo album yet.
Although this full-length was just released, James is keeping busy working on more new solo material — he says he's "started on a couple of other solo records that I'm just trying to figure out what they're going to be, and sorting through songs" — while a piece he did with the Louisville Orchestra will be coming out at a future point.
James talked to Salon about the genesis of "Uniform Distortion," technological encroachment, how he's OK that his music will never please everybody — and why he wrote a letter to Michals asking him for permission to use his "Illuminated Man" art.
The photo on the album's cover, the "Illuminated Man," is so striking — it's such an interesting piece of work in terms of how it's lit. What do you like about it?
We asked [Duane Michals] for permission to use my scan of it. I took my "Last Whole Earth Catalog" and scanned it at home and cropped it like I wanted it and sent it to him. And they rejected that at first because if you look at his original image, it's very clear and really just a beautiful image. I was like, "I love your image, but I want this really dirty, distorted version." Then I wrote that letter kind of explaining why I wanted the distorted version. Luckily, he got it and let me use it.
It was just one of those things where . . . I don't know, it's just so cool. That's one of the coolest things about life to me, is this thing we all have called intuition, or our gut. We get all these feelings and these signals that things are right or wrong. And we don't always understand them, but if you follow them, they usually end up leading you to the right place. So I try to think about that and just follow things and not let anybody talk me into or out of something that I feel strongly about.
What role did intuition play for you in terms of making this new record?
A big part of my intuition for this record was that I wanted it to be really nasty and really flawed and just really human. I wanted it to be the sound of some people playing music in a room that hopefully felt fun. You don't hear that sound very much anymore. I feel like nowadays you hear the sound of people being edited to death on computers. [Laughs.] It's like the computers, I feel like, are eating us alive. I feel like computers are such great tools, and they're so useful, and they're so helpful, but it's like, you just get sucked into the computer and you start trying to make everything perfect. And then it starts to suck a lot of the life out of music.
And it's true for any kind of music being made nowadays, whether it's an acoustic record or a metal record or a classical record or a hip-hop record or whatever. It is so messed with in the computer. And sometimes it's great, but sometimes it's not. I feel like for rock 'n' roll it's really not great. So I wanted to try and make a record that was more intuition and gut, and less brain and thought, if that makes sense.
Speaking of the way computers are eating us alive, in the letter you wrote, you mentioned you've been trying to kind of dial back using social media, computers and phones. Were there any significant ways that influenced your creative process this time around?
I feel like there's a real value for all of us in trying to enjoy a moment, or just enjoy a day. And I feel like a lot of times the social media or the phone usage or the computer usage or whatever will creep in so much that you forget to just sit there and enjoy sitting on the bench or whatever.
With music, I find the more that I can distance myself from social media or computers — I mean, you have to use the computer while you're working. But the more you can distance yourself from checking your email or looking at your social media, or reading The New York Times or whatever it is you do, the more you can step away from that while you're creating, I feel like you can really feel the vibrations more and feel what you're trying to do more because your mind isn't as pulled in a thousand directions.
I mean, you get more focus and you're more present in terms of thinking . . .
Even if you go to meet your friends for lunch and you get there early, you've got two options: You can sit there and just kind of be there, or you can get into your phone and start looking at your social media and start checking your email. Then your friend shows up and sits down, and on your mind you have 20 or 30 different things. You know what I mean? You just saw a post that made you feel happy, or you just saw a post that made you feel sad or you realized you got this email that you've got to do.
But if you didn't do that, and you were just sitting there waiting for your friend, when they sit down you're way more present because you've just been sitting there just feeling the restaurant or feeling the way you feel in your body. So it's not like you've got 20 subject lines going through your head; you've just got one or two. And then you're ready to meet your friend.
It's the same with music. If everybody's f**king checking their phones all day long and the engineer on ProTools is also swiping over to The New York Times while it's recording . . . you know, there's all this distraction. I feel like you can really hear that in most music that's made nowadays. There's so much distraction, and the music's so polished and everything feels kind of sterile, almost like an afterthought. And there's also just a wave of so much information, but when you start getting buried in this wave of information — and most of it feels like that the people who made it didn't even give a shit anyway — it starts to feel like you're drowning. I feel like we're all drowning in information.
How did the lyrics come together for you, and when did they come together? Is there a specific timeframe?
That's tough, because they're all different. They're all different emotions or different things triggered them. There's no easy way to sum it all up. There's such a different process between each record. Like all of these songs bizarrely kind of all came out pretty quickly, easily. It's the weirdest thing . . . I don't even know how to explain it. Some things you can change and some things you can't.
And with this record it's like, I don't know . . . I really believe in a changeable destiny. I really believe things are supposed to happen for a reason but that we can also alter the course of our destiny. Certain songs come out how they come out, and then you can change them. But other songs come out how they come out, and as many times as you try to change them, you cannot change them. [Laughs.] It's just so funny. All these songs came out, and some of them were just how I wanted them to be — and other ones I was like, "Ah, man, I really like this, but I wish I could change this."
Like there's a song called "No Secrets" on the record. Part of me was like, "Man, I really wish I could write some more verses for this." And I tried and tried and tried and tried, and just couldn't. So I was like, "Okay, you know what, f**k it. Let's just let the song be what it wants to be. Let's let it be this meditation on this theme, and I don't have tons of words about it and that's OK. Maybe I'll express it in the guitar solo. Maybe I'll express it in the music." There's that kind of thing that happens a lot.
Where sometimes more and more words do pop out. You know, like on "Just A Fool" or "Over and Over," there were tons of words. Even more than ended up there. Words were spilling out everywhere. And you're just like, "Man, I want more words for 'No Secrets.' Why can't more words spill out for that song?" It's a weird process. You can't control it.
And I think that goes back to intuition and knowing when not to futz with a song. Because you could spend a year in the studio and try to pick at things and perfect things. And there are artists that do that. But just knowing, "All right, you know what, I'm just going to get it out there, record it and it's be what it'll be" — that's also an evolution, and a skill too.
Yeah, I guess so. It's like knowing when to stop. For some reason, that song is a good example where it just told me to stop. But other songs will sit around for five or six years, or ten years — and then one day, ten years later, for some reason you'll write the third verse. And then that song is done. It won't give you the go-ahead. I've had the opposite thing, where you've got a song, you wish you had more, but it won't give you permission to record it. [Laughs.]
Are there any other significant ways that this record was particularly different from previous albums you've made, either solo or with My Morning Jacket?
I try to make every record really different. This record just really felt like we were kids again. I just wanted to get the feeling of being in the garage and not really stressing about it and just having fun. We didn't rehearse; we didn't plan; and we didn't really overthink it.
It's the Zen beginner's mind thing that I try to think of time and time again, no matter what you're doing. They say it about marriages: You've got to keep finding something about your marriage that's new to you and fresh to you. Or your music or your band or whatever. You have to keep finding that beginner's mind so you're excited about it again. It's so easy to get burned out on things. So I just try to look at music that way and say, "What about this album is fun and new and I haven't done before?" Or, "I'm obsessed with this new instrument, or I'm obsessed with this new keyboard, or I'm obsessed with this new theme."
For this record, I was obsessed with not overthinking it. I was obsessed with like, "Okay, it goes like this, bam, bam, bam. Okay let's play it three times, okay, we're done, let's go to the next song." And not let anybody go, "Well, but I missed my drum part." It's like trying to let that go as much as possible.
And having that curiosity and that desire to make everything fresh — that's so easy to lose. So many people lose that.
Oh my God, well, it's so easy. Yeah, we all feel that way. We all have areas of our life that we get really f**king burnt out on, but for whatever reason we feel like we have to keep slogging along through the mud.
Usually you can find something that can jumpstart your brain again, that will then get you back into whatever [it] was you were tired of. You learn to play tennis, and you've never played tennis before, and you get all excited about tennis, you'll probably come home and be feeling excited and write a great song. But if you're just doing the same thing over and over again, and you're all burned out and bored and beating your head against the wall, it's not helping anybody.
Now that the record is done, do you have any perspective on it yet?
Gosh, I don't know. I'm really proud of it, I'm really excited about it.
It's such a relief when you finally release a record and it goes into the world. Usually it takes so long to release a record that you're already on to the next record, you know what I mean? I'm already working on two other records right now that I'm so excited about. This one, I'm so f**king stoked for it to finally come out into the world.
You know that somebody out there is going to hate the record, and somebody out there hopefully is going to love it. And that's it. [Laughs.] After a while that becomes a screening thing because you just really know exactly what you're going to get every time you release a record.
No matter what you do — if you make the same exact record every time, somebody will be stoked. "Oh, I just love their sound." And somebody will be like, "These assholes never change it up. They're so f**king boring." And if you change your sound every time, somebody's bummed, they're like, "I liked their last record." And somebody's stoked. Or if I put out a record of complete silence, or frog noises, or something, somebody's like, "That is so cool, that he's just put out frog noises." And somebody else will be pissed. [Laughs.]
It's the same thing every time. Somebody will hate this record because it's too rock 'n' roll, it's too messy. And somebody will love it because it's messy. That's something I've really learned to just love. That is the one good thing about the internet: Everybody thinks their opinion matters, but it has become the great neutralizer. It neutralizes everything.
It's 100 percent true. And at a certain point you're just like, "I can't even comprehend this. I'm just going to log off." Because you're right — everyone's an expert, everyone's got an opinion. It's like, "OK, sure."
Yeah! I just keep trying to say, "Turn off your phone and open your heart." Just feel life; feel the music. Let it resonate with you, if it does. And if it doesn't, then move on to the next thing.
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