Vocalist and guitarist Jim James (a.k.a. Yim Yames), lead singer of My Morning Jacket, is always looking for new musical adventures. He talks with host Paul Cavalconte about experiencing the world of The Great American Songbook from a rock star's point of view.
The following transcript has been edited.
Paul Cavalconte: 93.9 FM WNYC in New York, newstandards.org Paul Cavalconte here. I'm amazed to be sitting across from Jim James, lead singer of My Morning Jacket, collaborator in a very new musical initiative that takes him out of, I don't want to say the comfort zone of a stadium filling rock band, because that has its own challenges as it is. But you've really put yourself in a kind of a musical hot seat in front of an orchestra, singing songs from out of your musical wheelhouse in many cases. So, tell me about this amazing initiative with The Louisville Orchestra.
Jim James: It's been so beautiful. I just love all types of music. So, music to me is always just a new adventure, you know? That's part of the fun of it. That's why I wanted to do it in the first place. I've always loved the orchestra and my great aunt played upright bass in the orchestra for many years, so the orchestra has always been a part of my consciousness. One thing Teddy (Abrams) and I talked about when we started talking about this project was how fun it would be for me to just sing with an orchestra with no, quote unquote, "band instruments" involved. So, it's just been such a thrill to work with Teddy and it's so moving to feel the power of an orchestra behind you.
Paul: So just quickly fill us in about your new best musical pal Teddy (Abrams), how you connected with him and a little background on him.
Jim: Yeah, Teddy came to Louisville about five years ago, and when he came, the orchestra was forgotten. It was just, creatively had really gone downhill and financially was struggling too.
Paul: Symphony orchestras struggle with this all across the country.
Jim: Yeah, yeah.
Paul: It is a shame. It's a dying part of our endemic culture in America.
Jim: Well, the coolest thing about it is that Teddy brought it back to life and he made it relevant again, and he showed us that the orchestra was a vital part of the city, and that if you get creative with it, it becomes this massive, unbelievable thing that's capable of anything. So, we met and hit it off and we talked about doing a piece here or there together, and we just decided to go for it.
Paul: We'll talk more about a particular Leonard Bernstein composition that you use as a bit of a showcase in this. But the first upfront question for a guy who fronts an amazing rock band that has played venues from Madison Square Garden to Bonnaroo, out on a stage in front of a sprawling, massive people, and you have a way of projecting as a performer in that context. What you need to summon to be in a concert hall setting in front of essentially a concert band or orchestra must be of a radically different order. We hear the difference in listening to the recording cause you've never sounded cleaner and more centered in things. There's no crazy reverb or distortion on the voice. So, tell me about how you arched over into that world.
Jim: It's so cool cause it's like you have to find a different source of satisfaction. At least I do. Because with the rock concerts, you get this kind of instant gratification of people cheering and screaming and dancing. You know, it's a very visceral, wild experience. But with the orchestra performances, it's hard to tell cause people are so restrained, you know, even if they love it, they're sitting in their seat with without a smile on their face. You know? No applause. And I think a lot of people don't realize this. What you see when you look at the crowd is a sea of dissatisfied faces.
[laughter]
That's what it looks like.
Paul: That's what it looks like. But maybe they're really quiet because you're really good tonight.
Jim: Well, that's what you have to realize, is that you can't judge the crowd by the expression on their face. So I've learned really, I mean, I sing a lot with my eyes closed anyway cause I'm trying to get to that place, spiritually in my mind. But yeah, it's like you have to forget they're there.
Paul: Words and music by Leonard Bernstein, the song Who Am I was in Peter Pan, it was a Broadway show about 1950. It was, as I recall, the teaming of Jean Arthur and Boris Karloff. These are all very un-Jim James, My Morning Jacket-like people. But maybe you grew up with Peter Pan, or you grew up with Nina Simone's record of this song. How did you get drawn to perform this as a showcase?
Jim: Definitely the Nina Simone version. When we were looking it up, we'd discovered who the songwriter was, but the Nina Simone and Piano album was a new treasure for me because I've been a Nina Simone fan for years and years. But this record, I feel like it's just in a category all its own.
Paul: From a songwriter's point of view, Bernstein has mainly collaborated with Comden and Green, with Stephen Sondheim, but here he wrote the words and they're beautiful words, and they are words of yearning and reaching. So tell me about how you relate to the lyrics in this song.
Jim: The lyrics are so cute and playful, yet so deep and so powerful when people pass away. The way it affects children is also really intense because kids don't fully understand yet. Where did she go? What happened? And that song brought me a lot of comfort cause it's like - Who am I? You know, will I ever live again as a mountain lion, or a rooster, or a wren?
Paul: Well, mountain lion, yes. You know, little things in a pond somewhere, maybe not, but you 'takes' your chances.
Jim: Yeah.
Paul: The spiritual aspect of that is very true. And the way that children live in the moment, it just doesn't add up logically because everything is in the moment.
[music]
Paul: As a solo performer, you've done an unusual thing. You made a record, and then you put out another record, which were the scratch versions in the demos of that record. So there's a songwriter on being a songwriter pretty much in that package. Tell us about those two albums.
Jim: Yes, so I made a record called Uniform Distortion, which is dealing with the distortion of our media right now, and the distortion of the truth. Also applying that, literally like making the record very distorted. So, we wanted to make a counterpoint to that record called Uniform Clarity, just completely stripped down just me and a guitar as if I was a person in the early 1900's coming to play into the horn. You know, where you just play the song and that was it. You didn't do a thousand versions of it. You didn't do tweaks and all this stuff. So, just the concept of a song as a seed, cause I really love the thought that you could take any song anybody's ever written and do any kind of version of it. It's infinite.
Paul: My intuition tells me that you're going to get drawn deeper and deeper into the songbook world, because I think that there are riches in the mid-century to be found for someone who does what you do, which is to just look at the bones of the architecture of a song -
Jim: Definitely.
Paul: And forget about all the ornamentation. So, who knows? The, the whole musical universe is your canvas and you're free to put anything in the middle of that with your thumbprint on it.
Jim: Well, that's one thing about the songbook and about lyrics that I really have been thinking about because when I first started writing, I thought of music and lyrics often in a very abstract way where the lyrics were sometimes just word puzzles or collages that I would put together, that really didn't mean anything other than maybe what you thought they meant. But then as I went on and on, I've had that realization of like, if you're not saying anything, you're kind of wasting this opportunity to change the world or make the world a better place. And that's just kind of comes into what I do as well.
Paul: The greatest challenge to you as an artist is: Do we go for the abstract or do we go for the concrete and be very direct about it? It's harder today with all the media being splintered the way it is.
Jim: Nowadays there's plenty of great music out there, but it's all computer based. Cause you think about The Beatles or The Stones or Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young or whatever. They were just bands. They were people in a room playing instruments. The top of the charts. You know, people of course still love bands and bands still exist, but they don't get to the top of the charts anymore.
Paul: Well, as a guy who fronts a band, you are moving deeper and deeper into... You know, returning to the egg, the Genesis of this thing by singing in front of an orchestra, by interpreting the songs of others as part of an ongoing self-discovery and also writing new things. So may we have more of the same, keep it coming. Jim James, thanks for visiting.
Jim: Thanks.