“The goal is to get lost,” My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James said in a recent interview. “The goal is to be gone.” James was not talking about disappearing from public view or walking away from performing or breaking up My Morning Jacket, which looked like a strong possibility not long ago. He was talking about the transporting effects of music, the ability of both performers and fans to lose themselves in the power and euphoria of concerts. Fans of My Morning Jacket indeed swear by the healing properties of attending one of the Kentucky quintet’s supersensible shows, and Tuesday nights’s soaring stop at the Stifel was no different.
It’s true though that members of the Jacket did indeed consider disbanding not long ago, but they emerged from the pandemic with a relaxed reconstitution album in 2021, appropriately self-titled, and are back to touring at full-strength. And, yes, virtually everyone in the audience — primarily male, college-educated, pot-smoking, jam-minded progressives raised on classic rock and alt-country — counts My Morning Jacket as their favorite band.
These fans don’t headbang along to MMJ rockers; they torso-bang, some with frightening gusto, like the tall Jacket Junkie down in the front row who made quite the spectacle of himself with thorax rocking violent enough to be a health hazard to himself and others. Some portal had opened for that guy, and many in the crowd likewise stepped through it, howling as though united on a plane they had no words for, so they tried to match James’ pre-lingual falsetto when they weren’t drinking their beers, the standard spiritual ritual for Jacket shows.
Two years removed from their last album, the band gave it no special attention, getting to just two of those songs, the sunny bounce of “Never in the Real World,” played early, and “Lucky to Be Alive,” played later to affirmational ardor in the crowd. Instead, the show felt like a career overview of classics, fan favorites and deep cuts, with the band taking stock of their history in line with the nostalgic victory laps earlier this year when they played 2003’s It Still Moves in its entirety for the album’s 20-year anniversary.
So with a sweeping survey of tracks evenly plucked from the band’s discography, fans got the best of the band’s anthemic seduction, a blend of Southern rock, arena psychedelia and Jesus Christ Superstar. James’ morning-after hair is at four-fifths his standard growth, you’ll be glad to know. Moving between meditative gestures and full-throttle rockitude, he looked like a split between your psychic-fair-loving aunt and Captain Caveman.
The frontman has never been better. He’s a rock marvel as a guitarist and singer, and his feloniously high falsetto remains clean, strong and above the range of deer whistles. Plus, he has developed an increased fondness for interacting with crowds. On Tuesday, he was not much for banter beyond thanking the audience, but when he ditched the guitar, it was Yimmy at his most theatrical, as on “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 1,” during which he worked the stage, making eye contact and touching index fingers with fans and executed mystical breaststrokes in the air with his arms.
When he’s playing guitar, James forms one of rock’s great tandem six-string teams alongside Carl Broemel, both on fire at Stifel. Much of the night, Broemel stuck with his black Les Paul, equipped with a Bigsby vibrato tailpiece, and he put that oversized whammy bar to great effect, conjuring up peals of golden polyphonic sounds all night. Broemel plays with subtlety, adding the textures and colors that makes Jacket songs shimmy, but when he cuts loose with solos, as on the swinging rock charge “Holdin On to Black Metal,” he’s a powerhouse. James also executed plenty of guitar heroics, throwing in some EVH-esque finger tapping on his Flying V during “War Begun,” a track from the band’s 1999 debut The Tennessee Fire, or simultaneously playing dance-with-the-devil solos with Broemel at the end of “In Its Infancy (The Waterfall).”
My Morning Jacket often gets hung with the jam band label, but it’s never been much for interminable noodling. At Stifel, each song, in time-honored MMJ tradition, built to an extended instrumental rock-out at the end, but these jams felt controlled and intentional, threaded to the song’s central hook. Plus, if one were to get bored as the band headed into its 20th spin through the chord progression, one could always bask in the light show, an MMJ hallmark, as during “Evil Urges” when the beams threw multicolored spermatozoa onto the theater’s circular ceiling.
Then there was “Steam Engine,” another slow builder that Broemel first laced with slide-guitar accents before picking up the saxophone, a live arrangement that, with the swirling blue lights and song’s romantic sway, gave the room a trippy school-dance vibe, ike “Enchantment Under the THC.”
With differing, unpredictable setlists every night, band members pride themselves on offering fans a sense that each show is unique to that moment. Tuesday’s big surprise was James’ solo-acoustic version of “St. Louis Blues,” and each time he sang that title line, which was a lot, the crowd roared. It wasn’t clear if James knew that the Blues were playing in the Enterprise Center next door at that very moment or if he thought we just really loved hearing the name of our town.
“Wonderful (The Way I Feel),” also played on the acoustic, segued into the heat-mirage anthem “Believe (Nobody Knows),” one of James' best songs but one played just once on this tour until St. Louis. Later, the band played another relative rarity, the kaleidoscopic “X-Mas Curtain,” which was an old one (from 2001’s At Dawn), not a song from the upcoming Christmas album, Happy Holiday!, set for release on Black Friday. It was apparently still too early for any of those tunes to make the cut at the Stifel.
Jacket fans debate the use of pre-recorded tracks used during the band’s shows, most noticeable at Stifel at the beginning of “Lay Low,” a staple of its shows, that started with a digital drum track before hard-hitting drummer Patrick Hallahan took over. Elsewhere, backing vocal tracks — on “Holdin On to Black Metal,” for one — were used. Unlike many other rock bands, however, these enhancements are no exercises in deception; the band makes no attempt to hide them. Instead, MMJ has made it clear that they love sound manipulation and sonic embellishments and often bring those studio tricks on the road with them. James, of course, is a reverb fetishist, going back to the old haunted-silo days and including the vocal-effects doohickey he often hangs around his neck, which he messed with, thankfully, just briefly and to scantly noticeably effect at Stifel.
Other highlights included “Only Memories Remain,” a duet with opening act Devon Gilfillian, containing a gorgeous call-and-response falsetto battle between Gilfillian and James. And the night hit an emotional crescendo with “Wordless Chorus,” the stage showered in a disco ball’s crystalline light shards. The crowd was so eager to vocalize along that one could scarcely make out James’ skyscraping yelps at the end.
The encore came with heavy hitters — “Circuital,” “Gideon,” “Mahgeetah” — familiar MMJ classics that set up a satisfying finale for a band that sounds rejuvenated and thrilled to be on stage. And after playing two-hours-plus of transcendent rock ‘n’ roll at the peak of the band’s powers, My Morning Jacket helped the crowd get real gone.
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