Click here to download All Birds Say/Carried Away from Daytrotter.
My Morning Jacket are bona fide rock stars with massive sales and important hair. I only know their music in a sketchy, playing-in-the-next-room kind of way. It's not that I dislike the band, it's just that I honestly haven't paid attention.
My only direct experience with one of their records came in 2001. I was working as a fry cook at the Dog and Duck Pub, playing in a band and plagiarizing my way toward a bachelor's degree at UT. The back door of the kitchen opened onto the dishpit, which is where I was, arms-deep in a stainless steel sink, dunking red plastic baskets in suds-y water, when a co-worker walked into the kitchen and put a My Morning Jacket CD into the gunk-covered Sony boombox that hung by a chain over the mop sink.
I couldn't really make much out over all the kitchen noise. There was was singing, there was some inoffensive guitar-ing, there was a lot of reverb: it was background music. The Damned and Paul Ray's Twine Time made much better music to fry fish and flip burgers to, and that was that.
Carl Broemel plays lead guitar and pedal steel in MMJ, but he was promoting his solo record, All Birds Say, when he came into my world in the spring of 2011.
On the day of his taping at Big Orange, Broemel set up a huge spread of effects pedals and a pedal steel rig. Carl sang into a looping pedal which he used to create shimmering, layered harmonies with himself, on the fly. I know a few guitarists who can actually pull this off, but generally I think guitarists' use of looping pedals is self-indulgent and obvious. But Carl employed the effect musically, and in a way that was integrated into the structure of the songs. He was accompanied on the session by his MMJ bandmates Bo Koster and Two-Tone Tommy Blankenship, on piano and bass respectively.
With a group of spoiled stadium rockers who all live in different cities you might expect drippy, sloppy, or undisciplined playing. Not so. Carl's guitar playing was expressive and efficient, and the unspoken musical sympathy between Broemel, Koster, and Blankenship was immediately apparent. Broemel is a tenor, which meant Koster had to sing the accompaniments with him in an assured falsetto, which is tough. I was really impressed.
The song itself has a simple, wistful charm: "Don't get carried away/In the past it's not there." The weird, Clare de Lune-esque chord voicings in the intro from 00:44 to 0:144 morph strangely into one another and the time signature is unpredictable, and Koster knew the song well enough having played it with Broemel at a show the night before, I don't think that Blankenship had ever heard it before.
It's a nice song with enough unscripted moments to reward repeated listens, but there were plenty of those. So as far as the reason it's included here: Out of all the songs I recorded last year, this one was just a song I found I could return to again and again, even if it was just to have playing in the next room.
Click here to download All Birds Say/Carried Away from Daytrotter.
--January 10, 2012
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