My Morning Jacket

My Morning Jacket’s 10th studio album and first full-length new collection in more than three years, is arrives via ATO Records on Friday, March 21. Produced by 3x GRAMMY® Award-winner Brendan O’Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam), the album is heralded by the ravishing lead single, “Time Waited,” available everywhere now. An official music video, directed by famed photographer/filmmaker Danny Clinch and featuring new performance footage interspersed with archival photos from throughout the band’s history, is streaming now on YouTube.

For more than 25 years, My Morning Jacket have achieved an incredibly rare feat in the world of rock ‘n’ roll – upholding a long-established cultural legacy while sustaining all the curiosity and creative hunger of their very earliest days. In a monumental step for the Louisville, KY-bred five-piece – vocalist/guitarist Jim James, bassist Tom Blankenship, guitarist Carl Broemel, drummer Patrick Hallahan, keyboardist Bo Koster – is once again expands the limits of their sound and elevates their artistry to unprecedented heights. The result is perhaps the most masterfully realized work yet from a band fully committed to their belief in music as a conduit for revelation of all kinds.

“I like how the word “is” indicates a sense of presence in the now – there’s no logic or rationale behind this record; it just is,” says James. “All these songs came into existence out of an attempt to connect with something beyond the human experiment, which for me is the whole purpose of music – that connection with something larger than us, yet something we are all equally a part of.”

is – which arrives as My Morning Jacket celebrates the 20th anniversary of their 2005’s landmark Z, a lavishly acclaimed collection named by Rolling Stone among “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” – represents another milestone in the band’s ever-evolving body of work, as well as an opportunity to breathe new energy into their historically stunning and hard-driving live performances. James points to the “undeniable force of loving” as the most essential factor in the band’s longevity and unending enchantment with the process of musical creation.
As James reveals, the decision to unearth The Waterfall II was sparked from a bit of serendipity in the early days of self-quarantine. While out on a walk, he placed his music library on shuffle and soon stumbled upon “Spinning My Wheels,” a tender rumination on the struggle for presence, its lyrics confessing to feeling “hypnotized from doing the same old thing.” Struck by the song’s enduring relevance, James revisited the other tracks reserved from the Panoramic House sessions and found that they invited a welcome moment of self-reflection—an outcome perhaps even more perfectly suited to the chaos of the current day than the circumstances of their recording.

Like its predecessor, The Waterfall II mines its mood of dreamy contemplation from certain heartbreak James had recently experienced, including the demise of a monumental relationship. Unfolding in a loosely threaded narrative of loss and recovery, the album conjures an indelible pain but never drifts into despair, gracefully conveying James’s message that “there is hope beyond the pain and loss, if you learn to flow with life like water.”

Opening with the profound reverie of “Spinning My Wheels,” The Waterfall II endlessly illuminates My Morning Jacket’s eclectic sensibilities, encompassing everything from lilting sunshine-pop to fantastically ramshackle rock and roll. While the album slips into heavenly psychedelia on tracks like “Feel You” (a mesmerizing epic James developed deep in the Muir Woods), a more ominous tone permeates “Magic Bullet” and its rattled response to gun violence. An intimate documenting of keeping an open heart in the face of devastation, The Waterfall II embodies a wistful longing on “Run It” (a song about “the desire to disappear and turn back into water,” according to James) and later gives way to overwhelming gratitude on “Welcome Home” (a portrait of “coming home from tour feeling so sad and defeated and lonely, but realizing how much love I was lucky to have in my friends and family”). And on “The First Time,” My Morning Jacket close out the album with a sweetly rambling meditation on the possibility of finding love again, channeling both ineffable sorrow and wide-eyed hope to incredibly glorious effect.

Even in its most heavy-hearted moments, The Waterfall II radiates an undeniable sense of wonder, a testament to the wild-mindedness that’s long imbued the music of My Morning Jacket.

With their unabashed curiosity infinitely stirred by their time at Stinson Beach, the band hopes that the album might lead others to look beyond what’s human-made in the search for solace and renewal. “As so many of us feel out of tune and long for the world to be a better place, we have to look to nature and the animals and learn from them: learn to love, accept, move on, and respect each other,” says James. “We gotta work for it and change our ways before it’s too late, and get in harmony with love and equality for all of humanity and for nature too.”