My Morning Jacket: Southern Ghost Voices

That seems like a good mental space to be in.

JJ: And it was really old school, because we were doing it all to tape. No Internet, no lap tops, no computer in the control room. It was like we were marooned on a fantastic desert island, with this gymnasium full of equipment.

PH: This whole session has been a lot of fun. We didn’t choose the easiest path. We literally had to go into a space that wasn’t made for recording and build forts and build tents around my drum kit, and move around the room and put acoustic absorbent material down on the floor until we got it right. We had to build it from scratch and tear it down, build it back up and tear it down again – we got our hands dirty, like Carl was saying.

CB: You could hear it in the tracks, you could hear the humidity in the air. It’s weird. That’s the other thing – we were all trying to play, all five of us together, as much as possible almost one hundred percent of the time, with vocals too. But we were getting full-on live takes, especially in July.

What did you use for equipment?

JJ: We just took a lot of different old mics and a Studer tape machine. We monitored on a shitty mix console. There was a lot of great gear in there. The hard part of it was solving problems when gear broke – ‘cause a lot of stuff broke and there’s no studio tech or anybody to fix it other than us, so we had some pretty interesting adventures trying to fix stuff on our own. But we got through it; we figured it all out.

I feel like that’s always been our path, with just the way we started out in Shelbyville at my cousin’s studio. It’s always just us out in Shelbyville, Kentucky, with nobody around and if something broke you had to figure out a creative way to fix it. Or else, if you couldn’t, you were f**ked. [Laughs.] You just had to stop. We ran into that a few times. I think the spirits lead us to some kind of cool things that made it right for us. We found a cool piano that brought into the session a lot of magic.

CB: We did some recording with the doors open, and there’s no isolation really. On the day we recorded the song where the piano’s really prominent, you can hear the cars driving by in the rain. We didn’t intend to do it, but there was no way to not do it. A window that’s eighty years old doesn’t really shield you from the elements. You’re kind of exposed.

JJ: This is also the first record we ever made in Louisville, which was cool for us. We made our first three records in Shelbyville, and made our fourth record in upstate New York and our fifth record in New York City.

You also did some work at Blackbird Studio, in Nashville.

JJ: After being in so non-conventional an environment for recording, we wanted to take it all into a – I don’t want to say conventional, because Blackbird has a lot of great gear – but into a real studio. To really listen to all the sounds, to really focus on the mix, make sure that the sounds we got were right.

PH: It’s kinda like building your own fort in the jungle and living there for months at a time and then going back into society – it’s almost like a resort where everything is set up for you. We loaded in our gear and had all our sounds up in five hours, where as when we were doing that in Louisville, we were halfway through setting up gear and running lines. Yeah, it’s interesting. Definitely a dichotomy.

BK: It’s also the first time we’ve split up the tracking in different parts of the year at three different tracking sessions.

PH: I haven’t really felt the pressure on this album – that’s the beauty of splitting it up into three sessions. You’re not just saying, “We’re gonna record in this amount of time.” It’s been beautifully gradual.

CB: The other thing that’s been cool about this record is that Jim has his own studio now at his house for vocals. Back then he did The Tennessee Fire and At Dawn by himself. With this record, because we didn’t have time, because we were at the studio, Jim went back and did a ton of vocal stuff at home.

JJ: I got to spend a lot of time on each cut with effects and stuff at my house by myself. Which was something. It was nice to take all the time in the world and just focus, lock in. On the last two records, when we weren’t in our own studio, we got it done eventually, but it was always more rushed, and more nerve wracking.