On September 9, 2003, both high temperatures and humidity throughout the southern United States were in the low 80s. New York was feeling pretty stuffy, it was raining in Seattle, and even Los Angeles had overcast skies. And so, My Morning Jacket couldn’t have picked a better day to debut It Still Moves: Their third LP felt like a truly atmospheric recording, summoning a slow-moving post-summer day in their native Louisville, sweltering with hovering clouds flecked by sparks of heat lightning.
Jim James and the rest of My Morning Jacket have a different take on the uniquely muggy ambience of It Still Moves. “It’s our inside joke, we call it our ‘wet blanket album,’” the frontman quips over the phone. Not in the sense that It Still Moves is a bummer. But to James’ ears, It Still Moves makes his speakers sound like they’re covered in damp rags.
With the assistance of legendary engineer Bob Ludwig—whose credits include probably at least half of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—as of today, MMJ has finally removed the wet blanket on a remixed and remastered It Still Moves, which also includes three previously unreleased songs and a clutch of demos. It’s hard to stand out amid the perpetually shameless cottage industry of reissues, but It Still Moves is perhaps the first major-label album from the 21st century to undergo such a drastic refurbishing without some kind of anniversary prompt.
“I think anyone who knows the audio process knows what mixing and mastering is,” James notes, acknowledging that for many, the terms are interchangeable. Most often, a reissue means a remaster, where the proverbial dark arts are applied most often to make older records sound louder and more compressed (i.e. more like new music released today). But James is confident that even laypeople “will notice a difference because we remastered and remixed” the album, resulting in an It Still Moves that “rocks more than it ever did, and the softer moments come through more dynamically.”
Admittedly, I’m no audiophile, and most of my own formative listens to It Still Moves were during mid-September day drinking sessions in Athens, Georgia. But the differences are immediately noticeable and beneficial, even if some of the initial mystery is lost. As it turns out, I never really heardthe bass on “Mahgeetah” until now, and I’m not sure anyone could’ve. And keep your ear trained to the right speaker after the first verse; that guitar solo sure sounds like a new overdub even though it’s been there all along. After completion of the reissue, Ludwig told James that the new version “made the original sound like demos.” Fortunately, the grain silo reverb on James’ vocals has been mostly retained, establishing It Still Moves as a closure of My Morning Jacket’s first phase, before 2005’s exploratory Zbrought significant changes in the band’s lineup, production values, and sonic range. (As for the next phase of MMJ, James says to expect the follow-up to last year’s The Waterfallin 2017.)
The full-scale overhaul of It Still Moves comes at a time when the albumas a medium might be evolving into something seen as an ongoing project rather than a finished product. James acknowledges thatMy Morning Jacket’s intense touring regimen allows them to tweak and reconstruct their songs at will. While James isn’t familiar with the infamous, real-time (and possibly still-continuous) editing given to Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, he recognizes the temptation that comes with revisiting your older work with a new perspective. “Time eventually answers that question [of whether albums are works in progress], because eventually, the record will end, whether it's 50 years from now or two weeks from now,” James says. “Cliched as it sounds, there are no rules at all. People should follow what they feel like doing.”
What inspired you to remix and remaster My Morning Jacket’s first major-label album, as opposed to the more lo-fi ones on Darla?
This was recorded at the same farm [down in Shelbyville, Kentucky] where we did [Darla releases] At Dawn and The Tennessee Fire. We bought some better gear and a better tape machine. But we got crushed into this window of time because we had a bunch of tour dates coming up. We had finished the record and were mixing, and we tried doing it in Kentucky. And it didn't sound how we wanted to. We flew out to Capitol to mix it there, and we only had a week or two before we had to get back on tour. It's not like we were unhappy with it at the time. It came down to us being so green that it would've been smarter to cancel the tour dates and just finish the fucking record.
When most bands say they wish they had more time to work on a record, they usually refer to the writing process. How does it differ when the post-recording is rushed?
A lot of [It Still Moves] was written over the years we were touring At Dawn. I'd write songs like “One Big Holiday” and we'd play it and say, “It's too heavy for At Dawn, let's save it for the next one.” We had more time for that, but when you mix a song, the general rule of thumb for us is a song a day or usually a day and a half. You spend all day getting the song good and you're listening to it late at night and you're happy with it. But you should sleep on it and come back in the morning and make sure. In this case, we were trying to do two or three songs a day and just trying to get 'em all in. We just didn't have the time to really know 100% we were happy before we moved on.
How do you test a song to know if the mix is really on point?
We do all the tests—the “is the car moving or is it still?” test, headphones, shitty speakers, great speakers, super loud, super quiet. And then you start losing your mind but by the end of it. The ultimate test is going to Bob Ludwig's. You can go there and take comfort in knowing whether you put too much bass or treble in the mix, he's gonna find it and make it sit in a good place.
You said in a recent interview that you’ve rekindled your relationship with “scorching rock ‘n’ roll” after four albums that moved My Morning Jacket far beyond its early incarnation. Was this inspired by going back to It Still Moves?
The next one will be different from this style—that's the beautiful thing about rock'n'roll, it's a limitless palette. I was joking the other day with someone who asked me [about it], the record always controls itself: By the time we finally make it, it'll be really sad and really slow. You always think it's going to be one thing and it ends up being the other.
While making such a radical change to the sound of the record, did you feel like it maybe gave you license to change lyrics or riffs that you don’t like?
There was tons of temptation! That's just life, it changes you and you're a different person now than you were then. The thing I take great comfort in and what I think is cool about the process is that I know in my heart that I gave it everything I had back then. That helps me sleep at night. I still feel proud and happy.