My Morning Jacket Welcomes Dave Simonett & Debuts Carpenters Covers At Capitol Groove

The inaugural The Capitol Groove music festival was held at Bushnell Park in downtown Hartford, Connecticut this past weekend. My Morning Jacket headlined the festivities on Saturday and brought out Dave Simonett of Trampled by Turtles during a set that also included premieres of two The Carpenters covers.

My Morning Jacket’s Capitol Groove set followed performances by The Revivalists, Shakey Graves, Trampled by Turtles, Say She She and The Cap Groove All-Stars. The new festival made it through a pause due to severe weather to get most sets in on Sunday including Dispatch, The Head and the Heart, Guster and Trevor Hall.

The 15-song Jacket performance featured selections from each of the band’s seven most recent album dating back to It Still Moves. “Mahgeetah” off the 2003 LP opened with the album’s “Steam Engine” leading into The Carpenters covers late in the set. Frontman Jim James followed a show-starting run of “Mahgeetah,” “Compound Fracture,” “Gideon” and “Wordless Chorus” by talking about how beautiful and special both Bushnell and Hartford is as well as the beautiful weather.

James then welcomed Dave Simonett to the stage for a duet on “Wonderful (The Way I Feel)” from 2011’s Circuital. Simonett has made several appearances with MMJ including at the 2022 One Big Holiday destination event in Mexico.

Dave Simonett and Jim James swapped verses and joined voices on the choruses. Watch fan-shot video of the duet from The Capitol Groove below:

After rolling through such favorites as “Run It,” “I’m Amazed,” “Anytime” and the aforementioned “Steam Engine,” Jim James started singing “Superstar” with the rest of the band falling in behind him. Co-written by Bonnie Bramlett and Leon Russell, The Carpenters scored a hit with their version of the song in 1971.

The complete take on “Superstar” was followed by a partial rendition of “(They Long To Be) Close To You.” Jim James performed the minute-long “Close To You” debut on electric guitar without accompaniment from the rest of the group. The original version of the song is the title track to The Carpenters’ 1970 LP and was co-authored by Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

My Morning Jacket romped through “Spring (Among The Living)” from 2015’s The Waterfall next featuring multiple shout outs to Hartford before closing out their set with both parts of Evil Urges’ (2008) “Touch Me I’m Going To Scream.” Check out MMJ’s “Superstar” and “”(They Long To Be) Close To You” cover debuts via audience-captured video below:

Audience Recording (Taped by opsopcopolis)