Rock singer and songwriter Jim James, best known for fronting My Morning Jacket, also shaped indie rock’s early-21st-century landscape through guest appearances on releases by Bright Eyes, M. Ward, America, and Bobby Bare, Jr., all while developing an independent solo catalog whose stylistic range keeps shifting from project to project. His first outing under his own name, the compact 2009 set Tribute To, consisted of quietly rendered George Harrison covers cut soon after the guitarist’s 2001 passing.
Thereafter, his own songwriting has embraced an almost limitless spectrum of sonic palettes, so that successive albums often sound as though they were made by entirely separate musicians. The 2013 album Regions of Light and Sound of God presented an exuberant, almost euphoric meditation on spirituality built from a vast array of genres and instruments, whereas its 2016 successor, Eternally Even, explored spacious, psychedelic, jazz-inflected 21st-century soul and shadowy late-night funk tinged with indie-pop sensibility.
James has likewise taken part in distinctive collaborative ventures, among them the New Basement Tapes, the ensemble assembled by T-Bone Burnett to complete and record a group of previously unheard Bob Dylan lyrics under the title Lost on the River; fellow participants included Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford, Taylor Goldsmith, and Rhiannon Giddens. After that endeavor he returned to My Morning Jacket for the well-received 2015 album The Waterfall and the accompanying tour. In September 2016 he revealed that Eternally Even, recorded with co-producer Blake Mills of Alabama Shakes, would appear the following November, just days before the presidential election; the resulting nine-track collection was both raw and unsettled.
Two months later he issued Tribute to 2, another covers album whose chosen material—songs associated with the Beach Boys, Abbey Lincoln, Sonny and Cher, Diane Izzo, Ray Noble and Al Bowlly, Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer—was deliberately assembled to convey optimism while dissolving conventional boundaries of era and style.
Half a year afterward came Uniform Distortion, a set of original songs sparked by The Last Whole Earth Catalog, the influential 1970s compendium devoted to ecology, self-sufficiency, and do-it-yourself practices. James was particularly moved by Duane Michals’s photograph “Illuminated Man,” which prompted reflections on society’s dependence on technology and its consumption of both accurate and misleading information. After writing to Michals for permission to use the image on his cover and receiving an initial refusal, he composed a second, impassioned letter that ultimately persuaded the photographer to grant approval.
James and Kevin Ratterman co-produced the record at Louisville’s La La Land Studio; bassist Seth Kauffman of Floating Action and longtime touring drummer Dave Givan formed the core rhythm section, while additional vocals were supplied by Leslie Stevens, Jamie Drake, and Kathleen Grace. In October 2018 James released Uniform Clarity, an alternate edition that recast most of the same songs in stripped-down acoustic form.
He next joined forces with Teddy Abrams, composer and music director of the Louisville Orchestra, on the ambitious orchestral song cycle The Order of Nature, which contemplates the interplay of hatred and compassion within the natural world. The work received its premiere in April 2018 with James, Abrams, and the Louisville Orchestra; performances were documented, and material from the second night appeared as an album in October 2019.
