An Evening With My Morning Jacket
June 20, 2008 at Radio City Music Hall
June 20, 2008 Set List:
- Evil Urges
- Off The Record
- I'm Amazed
- Highly Suspicious
- What a Wonderful Man
- Touch Me Part 1
- Sec Walkin
- Golden
- Thank You Too
- The Way That He Sings
- Two Halves
- Phone Went West
- Aluminum Park
- Steam Engine
- Smokin From Shootin
- Touch Me Part 2
Encore:
- Bermuda Highway
- Librarian
- Wordless Chorus
- It Beats 4 U
- Dondante
- The Bear
- Lay Low
- Run Thru
- Anytime
- One Big Holiday
In a perfect world, bios would be unnecessary. Instead of those often peculiar, occasionally vaguely helpful written pieces purporting to tell a band's story, a clear sense of the way things actually happened, which often doesn't fit into neat story-size chunks, might emerge.
My Morning Jacket, for example, lost in their line-up a while back: their life-long friends Johnny Quaid and Danny Cash. The two original members just decided they didn't want to spend their time working in a band heavily on the road. The remaining members -- singer-guitarist and songwriter Jim James, bassist Two-Tone Tommy, and drummer Patrick Hallahan -- didn't really know which direction to proceed: to go on as a three-piece, to look for new members, or to stop altogether...but some force kept urging them on, so they started looking around for new members. They found keyboardist Bo Koster, and guitarist Carl Broemel. My Morning Jacket talked to some other people, but the band kept coming back to Koster and Broemel, the first two musicians they met with. Things really flowed there. "We loved them immediately," says James. "It was like the band was its own force, wanting itself to go on, even down to finding these two people."
For the new My Morning Jacket line-up, dreaming and changing up their music proved tonic; they worked, in a collaboration that turned out to be wholly positive, with the veteran English producer John Leckie. "We wanted to make a record that grooved and swung," James says, "but wasn't trying to imitate classic soul. We wanted to keep an aspect of what we'd always done, but also make something you could dance to or listen to while driving home. Hip-hop and soul music are unifying people right now. I wanted to incorporate that into our music; to make this really sad, mysterious kind of dance music, something that really got into your butt, but also really got into your head and made you think."
