“Live music is proof that there’s some things the Internet can’t kill. In our lifetime, we’re going to see more and more things start to disappear and get gobbled up by the Internet, but live music won’t be one of them.”
― Jim James
“If you do something, you should do it because you love it, and you should follow your heart and make it how your heart wants it to be made. But it’s a difficult world, especially for musicians.”
― Jim James
“I feel like everybody’s got their health issues and their battles, and yeah, mine go up and down. It’s never really over.”
― Jim James
“I think anyone who knows the audio process knows what mixing and mastering is.”
― Jim James
“Live music is incredible because you get to be with people, and you get to have this tactile, real-world experience, but at the end of the day, if your eyes are closed and you’re getting swept away, it’s like… I don’t know.”
― Jim James
“Once all the power goes out, there will still be human beings standing together around a campfire, playing acoustic guitars.”
― Jim James
“There’s so much chaos and trouble in the world right now, and we need to broadcast as much peace and love, too.”
― Jim James
“I just think bad vibes and hate and Trump are getting so much airtime, we need to speak out loud for peace and equality and fairness and make sure we all know that there are a lot of us out here in the world that just want love.”
― Jim James
“I think maybe the vehicle for me was ‘Sam Cooke’s Greatest Hits.’ It has a song called, ‘Touch the Hem of His Garment.’ Do you know that song? I kind of got obsessed with that song and started exploring and getting more of his old recordings with the Soul Stirrers and really getting into that super, super deeply.”
― Jim James
“I feel like modern country is deliberately dumbing down the human race. They’re deliberately making people take glory in being uneducated and racist, and it’s just sad. I think it’s absolute mind control.”
― Jim James
“I just think meditation is so important because it gives you a chance to see what’s going on in your brain.”
― Jim James
“All the Southerners think we’re Yanks, and all the Yanks think we’re Southerners, and all the Midwesterners think we’re East. Everybody’s always wrong about Louisville. That’s kind of why I love it so much.”
― Jim James
“When I was maybe three years old, I was obsessed with this song ‘Leader of the Band’ by Dan Fogelberg. My mom took me to the mall and bought me a 45 of it. We would listen to that song all the time.”
― Jim James
“When you think about climate change, that means that we won’t have an Earth to be lonely on.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“I tried to score a few films with this composer Brian Reitzell here in L.A. We made a bunch of music we really loved, but we got fired from the film for being too weird.”
― 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.’”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“Anyone who knows music knows that Neil is about as real as it can get, and this along with seeing him perform ‘Harvest Moon’ on ‘SNL’ was my first experience knowing what real music really felt like.”
― Jim James
“I just love being in the studio, and that’s kind of what I do when I’m not on the road. I’m just in the studio messing with stuff, and I love playing all the instruments.”
― Jim James
“Somebody brought up the idea of reissuing ‘Tribute To 1’ because it was out of print on vinyl.”
― Jim James
“I heard the Abbey Lincoln song ‘The World is Falling Down,’ and it just resonated with me so deeply.”
― Jim James
“I’ve got a studio at home, and I’m always recording.”
― Jim James
“I’ve gotten into doing electronic books and audiobooks, so I have an iPad. I still love reading a real book, but when you travel, it’s better than carrying around a bunch of books.”
― Jim James
“Ever since I got back surgery, everything in my life has been about reduction. I’ve got the lightest backpack I can carry and the lightest MacBook.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“’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.”
― Jim James
“My aunt played upright bass in the Louisville Orchestra, and I was always really impressed by her musical ability. I found it really fascinating as a kid that one could play music for a living.”
― Jim James
“’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.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“I’m grateful to be successful, and I’m grateful that we can make a living, and I hope we can maintain our integrity forever. That’s really my only dream. The notion of bigness or smallness, I feel like that comes and goes in such waves that are kind of out of my control.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“I exercise all the time, every morning, and then I do music in the afternoon. I walk two to three miles a day and do Pilates twice a week.”
― Jim James
“After I wake up, I always meditate.”
― Jim James
“I feel like the sky in my mind is bigger when I meditate. It helps you fight the classic battles we’re all fighting: trying to find love, trying to find satisfaction in your career.”
― Jim James
“I grew up on, and kind of came of age, during the grunge movement and was introduced to Neil Young and Bob Dylan and grew up on that path.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“There’s these things we do that take us into the zone – and we go in that place that I feel like is the place of love that you reach when you’re in love or making love, or you’re having a good conversation. I feel like that is God.”
― Jim James
“The first two My Morning Jacket records were basically demos.”
― Jim James
“I like to be productive – it’s very hard for me to go on vacation because I just feel like I’m losing time.”
― Jim James
“I don’t think about taking risks anymore because there aren’t any risks to take.”
― Jim James
“Almost every time I go to the ocean, I think about throwing my phone right into it. Sometimes, you pull that thing out of your pocket, you look at it, and you’re like, ‘What was I just going to do with this? Was I going to take a note? Was I going to check my email? Was I going to take a picture?’”
― Jim James
“It’s hard to say what an album is about – because each one is usually about a lot of things to me, but then I hope it also can mean a lot of different things to someone else. That’s the beautiful thing about music.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“Love is love. Let’s take it any way we can get it.”
― Jim James
“Fleet Foxes are a really talented band. They make beautiful music.”
― Jim James
“For me, ‘Evil Urges’ was like a video game. If you play ‘Super Mario Brothers,’ there’s a level where it’s like a snowscape, and then there’s a level where it’s a desert and a level that’s like a jungle.”
― Jim James
“I guess people have a hard time dealing with humour in music. But sometimes life is depressing, and sometimes life is fun, is about just laughing with your friends, and I wanted to express that as well as the darker stuff.”
― Jim James
“I think probably the first time I recorded anything was mid-2010.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“The songs always tell you something, but always for different reasons.”
― Jim James
“When I make a record with My Morning Jacket, I love what those guys do, so I don’t have a need to play bass or drums or anything, because we’re doing that as a unit.”
― Jim James
“’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.”
― Jim James
“Our first two records are a lot quieter and more studio-based. We kind of had this feeling like we wanted to make a more quote-unquote ‘rock’ record. Then Patrick joined and really brought a new Herculean power to the band.”
― Jim James
“While I’m working on something, every single part of me is in it. But then, once it’s done, I leave that place behind. I usually don’t like to revisit it. So it’s almost like listening to a different person.”
― Jim James
“I listened to ‘En la Ceremony’ and had always wished it had some flamenco guitar.”
― Jim James
“I love playing music with people, but I also just love the art and meditation of being alone and working on stuff.”
― Jim James
“Whenever we come back from another project, we’re always so stoked to see each other and play with each other again. I really feel like that’s been the key to why we’re still together as a band. I remember a period five or six years ago feeling a little burnt out and wasn’t sure whether I wanted to keep doing it.”
― Jim James
“That’s the bulk of my lyrical output – being confused and trying to find answers to my confusion.”
― Jim James
“When people are recording, and they’re like, ‘I want to get the drum sound of the Beatles,’ I hate that.”
― Jim James
“The gospel funk soul era, that’s what I’m obsessed with – pretty much all the ’70s through early ’80s.”
― Jim James
“For me, it’s more powerful to hear people sing about God than love in most circumstances because I’ve been hearing people sing about love for most of my life.”
― Jim James
“I’ll only pick up my guitar if something is knocking on the door. Once the melodies have sort of been bothering me for a time, then I pick up my guitar and try to find them. But only if they want to be found.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“I feel like the ‘Supernova’ record, those songs are very me. It’s a more honest representation of me than any record I have made prior to that.”
― Jim James
“I really have a lot of respect for music, the art form of music. It’s my whole life. I don’t care about any of that other stuff. And I have always felt that way. I’ll build a career on my own merits, my own hard work and nothing else.”
― Jim James
“You want to make a record that stands the test of time and that people enjoy.”
― Jim James
“I feel like the world gets so consumed and gobbled up by action, and the pace of life is so frantic, and people feel like, in order to move somebody, you have to do something shocking or violent or something insane and fast.”
― Jim James
“There were lots of songs that were on ‘It Still Moves’ that I had written, and we had played – rehearsed, but also played live a couple of times – that could’ve gone on ‘At Dawn’, but we always knew we wanted to make a record that was more quote-unquote ‘rock n’ roll.’”
― Jim James
“We wanted ‘At Dawn’ to be what it was: kinda spaced-out.”
― Jim James
“I love hearing old Bob Marley recordings that he did before he made the versions everybody knows.”
― Jim James
“If you’re reissuing something, it’s important to have demos and everything else from that time that wasn’t used.”
― Jim James
“I’ve always loved that, on all the Dylan and Springsteen and Marley and Neil Young reissues that they’ve done: It’s so cool to hear alternate versions and how the song started in their mind.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“I love the thrill of putting on a record and feeling like you got the wrong one from the factory.”
― Jim James
“The whole Jacket thing is so much about us playing together and creating this circle of power.”
― Jim James
“I love making each record sound different.”
― Jim James
“That’s why you put out records: hoping that people will connect with them. I mean, I play music for myself, for sure, and I would still play music even if people didn’t like it. But it means a lot when it connects to people and they enjoy it. But it’s funny: you get criticism as much as you get praise. It kind of evens out after awhile.”
― Jim James
“I think reading is one of the greatest forms of magic available to us on the planet. Reading is so important.”
― Jim James
“I really believe in not compromising your art. I feel like I’ve never compromised my art.”
― Jim James
“One thing I’ve learned is that the best thing a producer can do is help you be you.”
― Jim James
“Preservation Hall is the sound of joy. When they start playing, people start moving.”
― Jim James
“I think we’re going to look back on the Internet in 50 to 100 years as a big mistake.”
― Jim James
“We should always be trying to tear down the walls and say, ‘I’m no different than you.’”
― Jim James
“I’d write songs like ‘One Big Holiday,’ and we’d play it and say, ‘It’s too heavy for ‘At Dawn.’ Let’s save it for the next one.’ We had more time for that, but when you mix a song, the general rule of thumb for us is a song a day or usually a day and a half.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
“’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.”
― Jim James
“It’s a joy, the process itself, even instrumentally, playing and constructing music. It’s just so beautiful to me.”
― Jim James
“For a lot of people, life’s been pretty good. There hasn’t been true terror right in your face.”
― Jim James
“I’ve just had this idea pop in my head of trying to learn a new song every da, and try and play it that night. That’s been fun for me because it’s a little bit of a scary adventure, playing a song for the first time in front of people and letting it just be what it is.”
― Jim James
“We don’t have universal health care. Education is so expensive. We have these massive problems, you know? So it makes me really happy to think that somebody could have all the music in the world for free. But at the same time, if you have enough money to pay for it, you should pay for it.”
― Jim James
“I’ve never stared out at the ocean while I’ve made a record before – that enhances things in a strange way.”
― Jim James
“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.”
― Jim James
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