Through their collaboration with O’Brien, My Morning Jacket experienced many breakthroughs that strengthened their ability to directly channel the ineffable spirit of unfettered expression—including, most significantly, their ingenious use of the many recordings James had created on his own. “In the past I’ve had a tendency to fall in love with the demo version of a song and then feel so frustrated that we could never recreate that exact feeling for the record, but now I’ve built my own studio and started recording in a more legitimate way,” he says. “With Brendan, we took a lot of the recordings I’d already put my heart and soul into and used that as the framework for the song, then played live or recorded new things on top of that. It allowed us to retain the magic of when the song first came to be, and then meld that with what we’d created together as a band.”
In a prime example of that elegant merging of worlds, is begins with “Out in the Open”: a sublime and sprawling epic centered on a brightly fluttering riff James spontaneously composed on ukulele deep in the pandemic. “I’d made a demo of that riff and recorded it well, so instead of trying to replicate it we just used that initial piece that I fell in love with,” he says. In keeping with My Morning Jacket’s affinity for lyrics with an existential bent, “Out in the Open” soon evolved into an exultant meditation on the beauty and terror of being truly known. “The lyrics came from thinking about how it can be such a relief to be out in the open with all your truths, but also how it’s scary to have nothing to hide behind, nothing to protect you,” says James. “It’s about trying to be open and truthful, and focusing on what will lead you to a place of warmth and light.”
Another track with charmed origins, the album’s ravishing lead single “Time Waited” emerged from a sample of a spellbinding piano part lifted from pedal-steel virtuoso Buddy Emmons’ lost classic album Emmons Guitar Inc. “I made a loop of that piano intro and listened as I went for a walk, and all these melodies started coming to me,” James recalls. “For a long time I didn’t have lyrics, but then I had a dream where I was in a café and a song was playing, and the lyrics to that song became the lyrics to ‘Time Waited’—the melodies just fit perfectly.” Graced with a cascade of lush and lovely guitar work from James and Broemel (on both electric and 12-string acoustic), “Time Waited” ultimately arrives as a love song for the ages, imbued with equal parts wide-eyed romanticism and wistful recognition of love’s intrinsic fragility.
