Zitat des Tages von Jim James:
I got really hooked on this riff in the middle of this song called 'Minor Miracles' by my friend Eric Johnson from Fruit Bats. I got the tracks for that from him, and that turned into 'Here in Spirit.'
Preservation Hall is the sound of joy. When they start playing, people start moving.
Big religion was started with one goal in mind: to make money. And I'm not knocking anyone's faith, because I think there are a lot of good values to be found in any faith. But when any faith starts to get in the way of love, that's where you can tell that greed and fear have stepped in and that those things come from man.
I really believe in not compromising your art. I feel like I've never compromised my art.
Pilates is amazing. It makes you conscious of how you have been doing something incorrectly for so long, even something as simple as just standing there.
I was always kind of against streaming, but I've been traveling so much, and I usually carry a huge hard drive of digital music with me, but I haven't had time to deal with it, so I've been doing streaming. And I had this incredible breakthrough of weightlessness where I've really been loving streaming music.
When people are recording, and they're like, 'I want to get the drum sound of the Beatles,' I hate that.
I just think meditation is so important because it gives you a chance to see what's going on in your brain.
The gospel funk soul era, that's what I'm obsessed with - pretty much all the '70s through early '80s.
If you're reissuing something, it's important to have demos and everything else from that time that wasn't used.
I've got a studio at home, and I'm always recording.
Once all the power goes out, there will still be human beings standing together around a campfire, playing acoustic guitars.
'What's Going On' is one of the greatest albums ever made. I definitely wasn't aiming to make my 'What's Going On,' you know what I mean? That album is definitely deep in my DNA. I've probably listened to that more than maybe any other album ever in my entire life.
The band can't exist without the crowd, and the crowd wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the band, and it really is something magical that people need.
Lou Reed's spirit and the way he did things was so important. Him and his music mean so much to me as the years go by.
It's really important to be free and be open and honest about the things you want to do. Just 'cause you want to make a solo record or another record with another band, it doesn't have to be an insult or a slight to the band you've been with for a long time.
You spend all day getting the song goo,d and you're listening to it late at night, and you're happy with it. But you should sleep on it and come back in the morning and make sure.
I always think of albums as the format. I think it's perfect. I don't think you can tamper with that. It's not just sound, the analog, which is so much richer. It's the format. You're constrained by just 45 minutes, and it's perfect to me. I don't want to listen to any more than, and I live and breathe music.
I was talking to my publisher, Jamie Ceretta, who's one of my closest confidants and allies when I'm working on new music. I feel like I can always count on his judgement because he'll tell me if he doesn't like something. It's sometimes hard to get people to tell you if they don't like something.
Sometimes, I want to make a record that's so schizophrenic and so all over the place, and then other times, I want to make a record that's very coherent and very short and together.
The thing I take great comfort in and what I think is cool about the process is that I know in my heart that I gave it everything I had back then. That helps me sleep at night. I still feel proud and happy.
'It Still Moves' is really the only record in our catalog that I've always felt I wanted to remix. Part of the fun of that record was that we recorded it all to tape, and it was all super-duper organic.
I think reading is one of the greatest forms of magic available to us on the planet. Reading is so important.
I went to college for, like, a year and a half with the intention of doing some kind of art therapy or some kind of teaching of art, because I feel like art is a more free area in school than music is. I feel like music is too mathematic for me. Music school's so hard. It's math.
I really believe what people have said before, that God is love. For me, it's music. For you, it might be writing, or for somebody else, it might be soccer or whatever.
The songs always tell you something, but always for different reasons.
It's a joy, the process itself, even instrumentally, playing and constructing music. It's just so beautiful to me.
Moving and motion tends to make things pop up. But things pop up for me, really, at just odd intervals or at random times that aren't really convenient, so I'm a big fan of the voice memo recorder on my phone. That's the only way I can remember things.
We wanted 'At Dawn' to be what it was: kinda spaced-out.
That's the bulk of my lyrical output - being confused and trying to find answers to my confusion.
Youth is wasted on the young. And it doesn't even matter if you sit a young person down and tell them, 'You're so healthy, take advantage of it before it's gone!' They still can't hear it.
'The Muppet Show' was huge. I watched it all the time as a kid, and I really loved the way they used music on that. I also remember hearing the radio in the car as a kid, like Stevie Wonder and Simon and Garfunkel.
'Circuital' was just so much about us as a band. We captured every song live, including the main vocal. That is probably my favorite My Morning Jacket record because it's really the essence of us being us. The solo record is just a completely different essence of just me trying to figure out stuff.
For a lot of people, life's been pretty good. There hasn't been true terror right in your face.
I love the thrill of putting on a record and feeling like you got the wrong one from the factory.
I feel like I've paid a really heavy cost, a really heavy physical health cost, for the years of touring and how physical I've been onstage.
