Tuesday, April 12, 2011

more jj/yy


From Rolling Stone:
"As My Morning Jacket prepared to record "Holdin' on to Black Metal," the wildest track on their new album, Circuital (out this spring), frontman Jim James set the scene for his bandmates: "'I want it to sound like we're Cuban or Cambodian kids, and we're wearing berets and we're walking through an alley and we stumble upon this band, and it explodes into this crazy sing-along,'" keyboardist Bo Koster recalls with a laugh. The rest of the band had no idea what James was talking about but launched into the song anyway — the loose, funky first take is on the album. "This is the most live record we've ever done," says James.
Some of the first songs written for the disc, including "Wonderful" and the power-poppy "Out of My System," were originally intended to be played by Muppets: An exec recruited My Morning Jacket to record music for a new version of the Electric Mayhem band (the one with Animal on drums), promising a Gorillaz-style tour where MMJ would play behind a curtain while Muppet holograms bashed away onstage. The psyched band began writing and demo'ing, but the exec got fired and the project disappeared. (In any case, the lyrics of "Out of My System" — "They told me not to smoke drugs, but I didn't listen" — probably wouldn't have worked out.)
James also got a call to write a couple of songs for Jason Segel's new Muppet movie, but they didn't use those either. "So now, twice, Muppet glory has been within my grasp," says James. "It's pretty heartbreaking, but it did propel us just to kick into high gear and finish our own record."

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