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Check Out the Year's First Great Record: My Morning Jacket Frontman Jim James's Solo Album


Jim James, the frontman for the ethereal, reverby southern-rock band of bros My Morning Jacket, has become famous in music quarters for recording vocals in abandoned silos and harnessing his beard to deep cosmic forces. "This might sound weird, but I don't like my personal appearance to look crafted by human hands," James says. "So if I don't cut my hair and I don't cut my beard, that's just the universe naturally growing out of me." It definitely sounds weird—but it's also exactly the sort of thing you expect from Jim James. What you don't expect from him is Regions of Light and Sound of God, a solo bedroom record full of drum loops and horn samples that could almost be described as sexy. Yes, it's a concept album based on a 1929 graphic novel by Lynd Ward that uses a series of woodcuts to tell the wordless parable of a painter who escapes a dark path to find his soulmate and raise goats in a field of heather—sexy!—but Regions of Light is also a product of James's listening to a ton of Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder. "I grew up in the grunge era with the myth that if you're going to make anything of any value, you've gotta be a miserable fuck," he says. "But I just got turned on to this new feeling that life and art doesn't have to be a fucking bummer. You can have a happy life and write music about it."