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The five hairy dudes known as My Morning Jacket sit in silence in a sun-splashed Nashville restaurant, making crayon drawings on a paper tablecloth. Jim James, the twenty-seven-year-old frontman, sketches a green Muppet-like creature and writes the word "hungry" across its chest. For good measure, he adds a thought balloon: It also says "hungry." It's early afternoon on the third day of the band's tour behind its sprawling, ambitious new album, Z, and after a night divided between tour-bus bunks and motel rooms, the musicians are awaiting the day's first meal.
As a waitress ignores them, bassist and comic-book fan "Two-Tone" Tommy finishes his picture: a pig smiling as a wolf gnaws on its intestines. No one is saying much, even though they're here for an interview. "We should just talk about these drawings instead of about how we're 'Southern-fried' and all that shit," says James. With his thick blond beard, cherubic cheeks, lamb's-wool curls and flaring green eyes, he could pass for the leader of a cult.
James is, in fact, the unquestioned ruler of My Morning Jacket, who have just released one of the year's best rock albums -- and are challenging Wilco's title as America's most innovative rock act. The band's ecstatic, spacey records and improv-heavy live shows are as popular with Bonnaroo hippies as they are with New York hipsters. "We love that," James says. "Looking in the audience and seeing frat boys, indie rockers and maybe some sixty-year-old women." James, who founded the band in his native Louisville, Kentucky, speaks with no discernible accent, and the Southern-rock influence can be hard to find in the group's music -- although the band does have a cameo in Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, covering "Free Bird."
After three albums of spooky, sepia-toned roots rock, Z feels like it's in kaleidoscopic color: With interplanetary keyboards, Brit-pop choruses, spliffed-out grooves and arena-shaking crescendos, it's My Morning Jacket's Achtung Baby or their Kid A, simultaneously building on and breaking from their past.
After lunch, we drive a few blocks to the warehouse turned club City Hall. Before sound check, the five band members all cram into a dressing room for a second try at an interview. Toying with a toothpick as he sits in a brown leather armchair, James says that he started writing music early on, even as he struggled to learn R.E.M. and Red Hot Chili Peppers tunes on guitar: "I wrote really shitty songs about pain and confusion, being in eighth grade, girls not liking me."
"Not much has changed," cracks Patrick Hallahan, the band's burly John Bonham-worshipping drummer, who's been James' best friend since fourth grade. They formed their first band together in junior high. "I think in rhythms," Hallahan says, beating out syncopated eighth-notes on his ankle. "When I worked at a coffee shop, I could time the cappuccino by tapping my foot."
James attended the University of Kentucky for a year and a half before dropping out in 1998. Around then, he began to outgrow his metal-influenced band, Month of Sundays. "After a long night of partying, the sun would be coming up and I would put on Neil Young's Harvest," he says. "It sounded so fucking amazingly magical. I wanted to make something that was more like that."
My Morning Jacket -- named after a discarded coat James saw with the letters "MMJ" on it -- began as James' solo project but soon became a real band. They recorded their two indie albums, 1999's The Tennessee Fire and 2001's At Dawn, and their major-label debut, 2003's It Still Moves, at a farm owned by original guitarist Johnny Quaid's grandparents.
The group lost two drummers before James finally asked his pal Hallahan to come on board in 2002. And it all nearly fell apart the next year, when the relentlessvan touring that built their grass-roots fan base also caused Quaid and keyboardist Danny Cash to snap. "We were talking about the touring that was coming," says Hallahan, "and Johnny's eyes started tearing up. He was like, 'Guys, I gotta tell you something...' And then Danny was like, 'Fuck it. I quit too.' "
James admits, in his understated way, that he was "kind of scared" at losing nearly half his band. Through friends, they found a new keyboardist, Berklee College of Music-trained Bo Koster, and a new guitarist, Carl Broemel (the only non-bearded member); both had blown MMJ away by learning almost their entire catalog before their first auditions. The lineup soon got to work on what would become Z, with British veteran John Leckie, who produced Radiohead's The Bends. "I thought I was going to be producing some kind of country record in a barn," Leckie says from his home in England. "But they were making music no one's heard before."
"I had a vision of how I wanted the record to be," says James, sinking deeper into his chair. "I wanted it to be more rhythm-based, a little more futuristic-sounding, not as guitar-rocky. . . I've always loved hip-hop and soul, and I guess I'm just trying to incorporate that." On the band's previous albums, James' Jerry Garcia-meets-Kermit the Frog vocals swam in reverb, a sonic signature that's less evident on Z. The effect was, in part, a way to remain hidden. "It turns me into a thing," he says. "I'm no longer necessarily human -- I'm an instrument or a force. I like that about it."
Later that night, the band members step onto a stage decorated with stuffed owls and live up to their growing rep as a fire-breathing live act. Bassist Two-Tone Tommy's shyness vanishes as he headbangs like one of his early idols, Metallica's Cliff Burton; Hallahan blindfolds himself for the first few songs and hits his kick drum alarmingly hard for someone who insists on playing barefoot; and James morphs from a sarcastic, Big Lebowski-loving slacker into a falsetto-howling rock god who knows that fans will grasp at him every time he leans into the crowd.
"When we have a good show, time doesn't exist," James says, making more eye contact than he has all day. Sound check is beginning, and someone triggers a sample of James' celestial vocals from "Worldless Chorus." "I'm constantly trying to get into that moment," he says, "that connection with whatever God there is. That's what it's all about."