What’s there left to say about My Morning Jacket as a dwell act? Lore and eyewitness accounts verify that they’ve at all times been mighty, whether or not overshadowing Ben Kweller and Guided by Voices as a barnstorming opener of their early days or creating their very own Mount Olympus with a career-defining set at Bonnaroo in 2008. Hell, final night time’s kickoff of their three-show Brooklyn Paramount run wasn’t even the primary time they’d played 2005’s Z front to back in NYC.
As a (by some means) first-time eyewitness to their dwell present myself, I might run down the usual audiovisual reportage: Jim James toggling between wavy frontman choreography (opener “Wordless Refrain”) and elephantine shredding (“Anytime”); utility wunderkind turned elder statesman Carl Broemel calmly slipping into sax mode for an prolonged album finale (“Dondante”); Patrick Hallahan’s hair-raising snare hits; the backlighting of old-school LED grids that, by easy triangulation, mutated a smiley face right into a constellation of the under-the-knife owl beak that graces Z’s cowl artwork.
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However in case you’re a fan and even simply somebody who’s casually caught certainly one of MMJ’s concert events previously, you’ve already seen the band’s craftsmanship and volcanic power on show. You don’t want somebody to extoll their in-the-flesh greatness, unparalleled as it might be and doubtless has been since their inception. This morning, head nonetheless blissfully buzzing from final night time, I discover myself serious about what Z meant when it was launched 20 years in the past and what it means by the lens of dwell efficiency in 2025.
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It could appear quaint now in a post-social media age when style boundaries have all however disappeared for music followers, however Z felt like the toughest of pivots within the early aughts. It was an evolution from three albums of rootsy jamming (most notably, 2003’s It Nonetheless Strikes) to spacey synthesizers, shorter music lengths, and lyrics that skewed extra surrealistic (or possibly religious, relying by yourself spiritual convictions), all of which earned MMJ the now-tired superlative of “the American Radiohead” from a number of publications.
The psychedelic detour proved to be prophetic not just for the band themselves (subsequent releases Evil Urges and Circuital would each be seen as equally and even controversially metamorphic), however a number of later acts who would fall underneath the loosely outlined umbrella of “alt nation” — at the very least sooner or later throughout their rise. Sturgill Simpson, Large Thief, and even Kings of Leon would all come out of the gate saddled with the Americana label, solely to go slightly extra cosmic just a few albums in. And whereas MMJ definitely wasn’t the primary country-adjacent act to drastically weirden their sound, Z (together with Wilco’s Yankee Lodge Foxtrot) appears like the trendy template for doing so.
The place the band’s transformation in 2005 felt purely aesthetic, nevertheless, listening to the report’s morphing sounds in a dwell setting 20 years later felt contextual and thematic — a response to the chaos of contemporary historical past within the making. When James lastly addressed the gang on the album’s midway level — between an additional dubbed-out “Off the Report” and extra-carnivalized “Into the Woods” — he spoke briefly concerning the album’s significance of their profession and its relationship to New York (the band relocated from their native Louisville to the Catskills for recording). He then went on to proclaim that everybody within the ornate Brooklyn Paramount ballroom was on a brand new airplane of consciousness collectively to have a good time peace and love.
Now, I understand how these phrases look on paper — imprecise, shamanistic, maybe even cultish. And being invited to let free and revel in one’s self in an surroundings of rising authoritarianism isn’t precisely revelatory. However it’s more and more important amidst the concern, violence, and turbulence of 2025 and past, and James has at all times come throughout as honest in his requires concord. The brevity of his banter additionally prevented it from being condescending or sermonizing.
With all of that in thoughts, the expansiveness of Z out of the blue felt heavier, a reminder of the significance of staying versatile — artistically, socially, societally — so we are able to maintain onto some happiness in a world that none of us can predict. And by the beginning of a second, non-Z set, it turned clear that each one the varied shards of MMJ’s prismatic id have been nonetheless there and at all times had been — previous, current, and future. Encore nearer “Magheeta” took on slightly little bit of the cybernetic freakiness of Z (the LEDs helped), the dwell debut of oddity “The Satan’s Peanut Butter” off the Z 20th anniversary edition was a right away fusion of the pre- and post-Z eras, and are available to think about it, had “Off the Report” even been that dubbed out, or have been the riffs extra-muscular and mountained up? In all probability each. Even the three cuts from this 12 months’s is have been already seeing their accessibility give solution to amorphism.
It’s additionally value mentioning the enormous stuffed bears which have been an onstage mainstay virtually so long as My Morning Jacket have been a band. They’ve at all times been considerably totemic, with certainly one of them famously gracing the duvet of It Nonetheless Strikes as a type of image of significant steering. However the ursine imagery was particularly palpable final night time, a specter of a previous that had by no means actually disappeared within the first place. For a legendary dwell act, owl and bear are in the identical menagerie, creative pivots finally come full circle to blur the strains of a number of genres, and elasticity turns into a method of achievement — and thus a method of survival — for band and viewers alike.
Get tickets to the My Morning Jacket’s upcoming tour dates — together with extra full Z performances — here. See a full photograph gallery and setlist from the band’s Brooklyn Paramount live performance beneath.
My Morning Jacket Setlist:
Z:
Wordless Refrain
It Beats 4 U
Gideon
What a Great Man
Off the Report
Into the Woods
Anytime
Lay Low
Knot Comes Unfastened
Dondante
Chills
The place to Start
Half a Lifetime
The Satan’s Peanut Butter
Squid Ink
Wasted / En La Ceremony / Wasted
Encore:
Tropics (Erase Traces)
Smokin’ From Shootin’
Die For It
Mahgeetah
