Jim James Talks New My Morning Jacket Album, Solo Effort & Trump In New Interview

Later this month My Morning Jacket front man Jim James returns to the road in support of his recently released solo effort Eternally Even. James talked about how the album came together, his fear of a Trump presidency and the state of My Morning Jacket’s follow-up to The Waterfall in a new interview with Rolling Stone.

James revealed that he’s on “a completely different path” for the next MMJ album from when he told Rolling Stone he planned to write more songs to augment extra material from The Waterfall:

I pretty much have it written, but we just need to record it, which we’re gonna do in the spring. A lot of the stuff we did at the same time as The Waterfall – there’s still stuff I want to work on, but for some reason, my mind has shifted.

After all the terrible shootings and stuff that happened, I wrote this song called “Magic Bullet,” which was something we did during The Waterfall that we released a few months back as this kind of violence-awareness, “stop the violence” song. There’s a song called “The First Time” that we recorded – I ended up working with that for the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe’s show Roadies. A couple of those things have seen the light of day. There’s so much music these days, and it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks. For the next album, we just have to get down to actually doing it, which we’ll do in March or April. I think we’ll probably do it in L.A., but I’m trying to figure all those things out.

Eternally Even features songs that have socially conscious themes. “Things are getting really, really fucked up: The world is being destroyed by climate change, and the notion of somebody like Trump becoming president is such a scary thing,” James said. “A lot of people, myself included, have maybe been dealing with our own metaphysical dilemmas, loneliness. But now we don’t really have the option to not speak out anymore.”

James talked about how the music on Eternally Even was a “happy accident” as he was hired to score filmed with composer Brian Reitzell, but after the pair were fired because the music was too weird he decided to use some of the music as the basis for Eternally Even. “I was walking and listening to music on my iPhone on shuffle, and one of these pieces came on that we’d done. I really got into it, and all these lyrics and vocal melodies starting coming out, so I started chopping these film pieces up into songs: recording vocals over them, bass, strings, drums. It was really cool. It kind of all popped out of this strange place where it wasn’t really intended. Most of the record was born from that stuff,” Jim said.

Head to Rolling Stone for the complete interview.