Photo courtesy of My Morning Jacket.
Take an hour-long drive up the California coast from San Francisco and you’ll arrive at Stinson Beach. It’s a popular destination for both day-tripping Bay Area residents and muse-seeking musicians; the picturesque beach, which boasts an area of less than one-and-a-half square miles, has served as home to artists such as Steve Miller, Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.
For members of My Morning Jacket, who spent 18 months living there while recording their latest album, The Waterfall, Stinson Beach possesses a poetic, almost supernatural, mystique.
“It’s so remote that it’s almost lost in time,” says Tom Blankenship, My Morning Jacket’s bassist. “If the age of smartphones were like a locust invasion, Stinson seems untouched by such a technology plague.”
My Morning Jacket formed in 1998, nearly a decade before Apple unleashed the iPhone. The band’s sound hearkens even further back, melding soul and gospel influences from the 1960s and ’70s with contemporary indie rock. (There’s also a healthy amount of psychedelic and jam band influences in the group’s melting pot as well.) Before traveling to the coast for The Waterfall, the band, led by guitarist and vocalist Jim James, had released six well-received studio albums, including 2003’s It Still Moves and 2011’s Circuital.
After finishing the two-year tour for Circuital, My Morning Jacket rented several houses on Stinson Beach in October 2013. It was a 45-minute walk along the beach to the recording studio, and with barely working cellphones and the constant roar of the neighboring Pacific, the group began to feel “really secluded and on our own,” Blankenship says. That insularity defined the sound of what would eventually become The Waterfall.
“We do always make an effort to treat studio time like a lock-in, and the area absolutely lent itself to that tradition,” Blankenship says. “[It was] just us and nature and this crazy old half-house, half-castle that we were tracking in. Personally, that freedom gave me the confidence that anything was possible.”
Though the band had been known for changing their sound from album to album — 2008’s Evil Urges, for instance, received criticism for its violent shift into the realm of R&B — Blankenship says that the group had no ultimate plan for the direction The Waterfall would take. “Jim has a rough idea, for sure, of where the album is headed, but the record is a little monster or creature all its own, and it’ll make its true shape known in its own time,” Blankenship says. “Each record is approached openly. There’s never been a real, literal discussion of direction and sound.”
The resulting album is a reverb-drenched collection of arena-ready psychedelic rock, complete with bubbling synthesizers and soaring choruses, with a sound that sounds not quite beholden to any specific era of music.
“We record all live tracks directly to tape and them dump that down digitally,” Blankenship says. “It’s the best of both worlds: the warmth of analog tape and some editing ease with the digital.”
That cross-pollination of old and new recording methods affected the album’s songwriting as well. “A tune like ‘Spring (Among the Living)’ would not have been possible without this new digital age,” Blankenship says. “Jim asked us to play all the sections separately, took the pieces home with him and then assembled them in his lab.” (As though he’s afraid that his references to “this new digital age,” will paint the band as luddites, Blankenship quips, “It’s an amazing new world here in the ’90s!”)
The album deals with lyrical themes ranging from a celebration of benign spirituality — the title of the band’s set opener, “Believe (Nobody Knows),” sums up the song’s message well — to heartsick ballads inspired by a breakup James was going through at the time. It’s arguably the band’s best record since their 2005 breakthrough Z, though that victory didn’t come easily.
On January 1, 2014, James was moving an amplifier in the studio when he discovered a shooting pain in his back — a herniated disc, he later discovered, that would require surgery and two months of recovery. The injury threatened to bring the recording of The Waterfall to a complete halt, but it didn’t.
“To Jim’s credit, he really didn’t take a day off,” says Blankenship. “His accident was on New Year’s Day and we started our second tracking window at Stinson a few days later. It’s a real testament to his work ethic because unless he had a doctor’s appointment in the city, he was there tracking and working every day. A lot of that time he would need to lay down on the couch in the control room to play guitar and sing, but he made it happen.”
James used his recovery period to write even more songs for the recording sessions, resulting in over 24 completed songs, only 10 of which made it onto The Waterfall. The remaining 12 songs are being considered for a follow-up that is expected in 2016 — although Blankenship says that the album will require work other than sequencing remainders.
“There are some songs that didn’t fit with the ones on The Waterfall, but they’re certainly not leftovers at all,” he says. “And maybe only a few will make it onto the next one. Again, no telling what the next record will be once it shows itself deep into the recording process. But I will say that a couple of my favorite tunes from the same sessions as The Waterfall are still in the vault waiting to be finished up.”
In the meantime, the band are continuing an theater tour that will bring them to the BJCC Concert Hall on Aug. 10 before sending them throughout Europe and much of America through the end of November.
The group are also using the tour as an opportunity to raise money for the Waterfall Project, an environmental campaign the band started along with Revolutions Per Minute, a nonprofit that connects artists with organizations “dedicated to activism and positive change,” says Blankenship. The project will donate portions of ticket and merchandise sales from the tour to three nonprofit groups: Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Gulf Restoration Network and Climate Justice Alliance. “We all have a responsibility to one another, and to our planet, as fellow humans,” Blankenship adds.
It’s a fitting way for the band to acknowledge the natural beauty that inspired The Waterfall. “Look at the sunset inside the gatefold of the album,” says Blankenship, referring to a photo taken during the band’s 18-month stay at Stinson Beach. “I saw [that sunset] as a challenge to try and create something just as beautiful every day we went into the studio.”
My Morning Jacket will perform at the BJCC Concert Hall on Monday, Aug. 10. Mini Mansions will open. The show begins at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $35 to $45. For more information on the show, visit bjcc.org. For more information on My Morning Jacket’s Waterfall Project, visit mymorningjacket.com/waterfallproject.
