how I think of a mixing board. Look at a mixing board and you’re like: ‘man this mixing board is so fucking complicated. What the hell?’ All you really have to do is learn one channel and then you look at the rest of it and go: ‘ok, it’s not that intimidating.’ So I try to break it into small bits and learn. I by no means consider myself a great steel guitar player. I think it’s something that will take a lifetime. I utilise a lot of pedals. If you just turn it on and put a bunch of delay on the pedal steel it sounds awesome. I’m trying to use it more and more. I’ll try it on most songs to see if it would work. There’s so much potential in that thing.” Bassist Tom Blankenship – co-founder of the band with Jim – explains how he feels this record, which features songs the equal of anything they’ve ever done, has benefited from their kinship now. “I definitely feel like this group of guys are stronger. It’s just a different
band from what it was 10 to 12 years ago, but I feel like the five of us are
closer...closer than I’ve ever been with a group of people. In a way it’s like having a second family, for sure. It kind of gets to the point where you accept each other for who you are, you rely on each other’s strength both musically and as people and it’s like having five best friends,” he says. “I don’t think that a record like this one could have been made had we not been the people we are now and have the relationship we have with each other because so much of it was done live. We’d play through a song maybe a handful of times, two or three times at most, and then we’d hit record. It kept everybody on their toes and it’s just that level of trust we have now.”
“I by no means consider myself a great steel guitar player but if you just turn it on and put a bunch of delay on the pedal steel it sounds awesome. There’s so much potential in that thing.”
Tom himself was going through an extremely tough time with a family member having been seriously ill for the whole of last year. “Being in the recording studio was a break from what was going on in the real world, if you will,” he says. “I felt like a ghost that was running throughout who would become tangible for however long it took to work through a song or talk through something and then I would be like a vapour in the room. But on the other side of it I have the clarity to see it
really...the whole experience helped save me from totally being consumed with what was going on. I couldn’t have had a better support group.” So the claims of My Morning Jacket, as they are now, being stronger than ever ring even truer once Tom’s side of the story is taken into account. Not only that but Circuital represents a band at the peak of their powers. What once might’ve been deemed as experimental now feels part of them. Victory Dance begins with a Ennio Morricone western style fanfare that reoccurs later, though at this point it’s become a spacious piece with sparse guitar and bass, a metronomic drum part and Jim’s restrained vocals. As it builds with guitar chords and Jim intoning the words “setting son” in a trio of ascending pitches, joined by falsetto backing, there’s the giant crescendo at the end when the guitars spasm uncontrollably and crash into a wall of echo that fades into the lead track. This sounds nothing like they’ve ever tried before, but it isn’t strange or unfamiliar somehow. From the cheeky truths of Outta My System to the swirling and ebbing piano and strings of The Day Is Coming, the album encompasses both the shimmering, slow-release balladry and the fluid, piercing and flourishing dynamics of their harder side. “How do you get to that place? Not by talking about it,” says Carl at the
end of the interview. In context, he’s musing on how they could get such amazing results from spontaneity. But it could apply to where My Morning Jacket have found themselves. They have spoken through friendship, talent, hard work and simply connecting with each other when playing together. There was no doubt plenty of words in between all of this, but they find themselves here not because they arranged conferences on how to get here, but by going out and just doing it. It’s an experiment which has definitely paid off. PM
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