For more than 25 years, My Morning Jacket have achieved an incredibly rare feat in the world of rock & 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-bred five-piece—vocalist/guitarist Jim James, bassist Tom Blankenship, guitarist Carl Broemel, drummer Patrick Hallahan, keyboardist Bo Koster—their tenth studio album finds the band deviating from their typically self-produced approach and teaming up with multi-GRAMMY® Award-winner Brendan O’Brien (one of the most esteemed producers in rock music, known for his extensive work with Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam). Arriving as My Morning Jacket celebrates the 20^th anniversary of their landmark album Z (a lavishly acclaimed LP that landed on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), is once again expands the limits of their sound and elevates their artistry to unprecedented heights. The result: the most masterfully realized work yet from a band fully committed to their belief in music as a conduit for revelation of all kinds.

Mostly created at Henson Recording Studios in Los Angeles, is serves as the follow-up to their 2021 self-titled full-length—an album praised by the likes of MOJO, who noted that “the magic of this group has always been their ability to translate the elemental into the transcendental…a miracle they pull off frequently on My Morning Jacket.” For James—who’s produced or co-produced all of the band’s studio albums since their 1999 debut Tennessee Fire—the decision to work with O’Brien stemmed from a newfound willingness to open up their process and involve an outside creative force in shaping the latest iteration of My Morning Jacket’s restlessly inventive yet nuanced form of psych-rock. “Up until now I’ve never been able to let go and allow someone else to steer the ship,” he says. “It almost felt like an out-of-body experience to step back and give control over to someone who’s far more accomplished and made so many more records than us, but in the end I was able to enjoy the process maybe more than I ever have before.”

Prior to joining O’Brien in the studio, My Morning Jacket got together for two separate and highly exploratory writing and recording sessions, eventually amassing over a hundred demos of potential tracks for the album. “What’s amazing is that we came in with so many ideas, but working with Brendan inspired me so much that I wrote a bunch of completely new songs, which ended up making up about half the record,” says James. “We were trying things we’d never done before and letting Brendan guide us toward what he thought worked best, and because of that all our expectations went right out the window.” When it came time to name the album, the band chose a title that speaks to the infinitely unpredictable nature of music-making. “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.”

Through their collaboration with O’Brien, My Morning Jacket experienced many breakthroughs that strengthened their ability to directly channel the ineffable spirit of unfettered expression—including, most significantly, their ingenious use of the many recordings James had created on his own. “In the past I’ve had a tendency to fall in love with the demo version of a song and then feel so frustrated that we could never recreate that exact feeling for the record, but now I’ve built my own studio and started recording in a more legitimate way,” he says. “With Brendan, we took a lot of the recordings I’d already put my heart and soul into and used that as the framework for the song, then played live or recorded new things on top of that. It allowed us to retain the magic of when the song first came to be, and then meld that with what we’d created together as a band.”

In a prime example of that elegant merging of worlds, is begins with “Out in the Open”: a sublime and sprawling epic centered on a brightly fluttering riff James spontaneously composed on ukulele deep in the pandemic. “I’d made a demo of that riff and recorded it well, so instead of trying to replicate it we just used that initial piece that I fell in love with,” he says. In keeping with My Morning Jacket’s affinity for lyrics with an existential bent, “Out in the Open” soon evolved into an exultant meditation on the beauty and terror of being truly known. “The lyrics came from thinking about how it can be such a relief to be out in the open with all your truths, but also how it’s scary to have nothing to hide behind, nothing to protect you,” says James. “It’s about trying to be open and truthful, and focusing on what will lead you to a place of warmth and light.”

Another track with charmed origins, the album’s ravishing lead single “Time Waited” emerged from a sample of a spellbinding piano part lifted from pedal-steel virtuoso Buddy Emmons’ lost classic album Emmons Guitar Inc. “I made a loop of that piano intro and listened as I went for a walk, and all these melodies started coming to me,” James recalls. “For a long time I didn’t have lyrics, but then I had a dream where I was in a café and a song was playing, and the lyrics to that song became the lyrics to ‘Time Waited’—the melodies just fit perfectly.” Graced with a cascade of lush and lovely guitar work from James and Broemel (on both electric and 12-string acoustic), “Time Waited” ultimately arrives as a love song for the ages, imbued with equal parts wide-eyed romanticism and wistful recognition of love’s intrinsic fragility.

Over the course of its ten eclectic songs, is reveals a band whose voracious creative appetite is wholly matched by a deft command of their visionary musicality. To that end, “Half a Lifetime” finds My Morning Jacket reimagining a demo unearthed from the Z sessions, transforming the stripped-back slow-burner into a larger-than-life anthem lit up in wildly frenzied guitar riffs. “It’s about doing whatever it takes to get where you need to go, instead of bailing when things get hard—which is funny considering that it literally took a half a lifetime to finish,” says James. On “Everyday Magic,” the band presents a joyful piece of power-pop that slips into a dance-ready free-for-all at the bridge, with Koster’s shimmering melodies magnifying its euphoric mood. “I tend to be addicted to craziness and explosive ups and downs, but ‘Everyday Magic’ came from meeting someone who taught me to see the magic in the simple things we often take for granted,” James says. Next, on “I Can Hear Your Love,” is maintains that blissed-out tone as My Morning Jacket’s playful harmonies and breezy rhythms capture the unequivocal sweetness of mutual infatuation. And on “Squid Ink,” the band lean into their love for ’70s psychedelic-funk and deliver a delightfully warped track powered by Blankenship and Hallahan’s massively heavy grooves and a bit of shapeshifting vocal work from James. “The idea behind ‘Squid Ink’ is that certain people carry a negativity that fills the room like a squid shooting ink into the water,” says James, noting that the song arose from a basement jam with Hallahan. “It’s about trying to get out of those murky waters by believing in yourself, and when Patrick and I were jamming I got the idea to sing part of the chorus really low—almost like putting a beard on the face of the vocal.”

For My Morning Jacket, one of the greatest thrills in creating such an adventurous body of work lies in the chance to breathe new energy into their historically stunning and hard-driving live show—an element that’s repeatedly found them ranked among the greatest live acts in music today, in addition to earning top billing at some of the world’s biggest festivals. “Whenever we do multiple nights in one city we make sure to do completely different setlists each night, so that we never repeat any of the songs,” says James. “It’s really exciting to have a whole new album of songs to add to the set, especially songs that we all can’t wait to play and that will end up giving us all these different ways of connecting with the people who come out to see us.”

In reflecting on My Morning Jacket’s crossing of the ten-album milestone, 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. “One of the cool things about being around this long is that we’re not afraid to scrap something if we don’t absolutely love it,” he says. “It feels really great to have a collection of songs we all love this much, and to know that we worked as hard as we possibly could on them. Hopefully those songs will be helpful to people and give them some kind of peace as they try to deal with the insanity of the world—because that’s what music does for me, and doing the same for others is always my greatest dream come true.”