Top 70 Jim James Quotes

‘It Still Moves’ is really the only record in our catalog that I’ve always felt I wanted to remix. Part of the fun of that record was that we recorded it all to tape, and it was all super-duper organic.

I’ll only pick up my guitar if something is knocking on the door. Once the melodies have sort of been bothering me for a time, then I pick up my guitar and try to find them. But only if they want to be found.

Anyone who knows music knows that Neil is about as real as it can get, and this along with seeing him perform ‘Harvest Moon’ on ‘SNL’ was my first experience knowing what real music really felt like.

It’s a joy, the process itself, even instrumentally, playing and constructing music. It’s just so beautiful to me.

I was talking to my publisher, Jamie Ceretta, who’s one of my closest confidants and allies when I’m working on new music. I feel like I can always count on his judgement because he’ll tell me if he doesn’t like something. It’s sometimes hard to get people to tell you if they don’t like something.

One thing I’ve learned is that the best thing a producer can do is help you be you.

The gospel funk soul era, that’s what I’m obsessed with – pretty much all the ’70s through early ’80s.

I feel like the ‘Supernova’ record, those songs are very me. It’s a more honest representation of me than any record I have made prior to that.

I’ve got a studio at home, and I’m always recording.

I always think of albums as the format. I think it’s perfect. I don’t think you can tamper with that. It’s not just sound, the analog, which is so much richer. It’s the format. You’re constrained by just 45 minutes, and it’s perfect to me. I don’t want to listen to any more than, and I live and breathe music.

Fleet Foxes are a really talented band. They make beautiful music.

Big religion was started with one goal in mind: to make money. And I’m not knocking anyone’s faith, because I think there are a lot of good values to be found in any faith. But when any faith starts to get in the way of love, that’s where you can tell that greed and fear have stepped in and that those things come from man.

After I wake up, I always meditate.

It’s hard to say what an album is about – because each one is usually about a lot of things to me, but then I hope it also can mean a lot of different things to someone else. That’s the beautiful thing about music.

I feel like the sky in my mind is bigger when I meditate. It helps you fight the classic battles we’re all fighting: trying to find love, trying to find satisfaction in your career.

Preservation Hall is the sound of joy. When they start playing, people start moving.

Ever since I got back surgery, everything in my life has been about reduction. I’ve got the lightest backpack I can carry and the lightest MacBook.

You spend all day getting the song goo,d and you’re listening to it late at night, and you’re happy with it. But you should sleep on it and come back in the morning and make sure.

Our first two records are a lot quieter and more studio-based. We kind of had this feeling like we wanted to make a more quote-unquote ‘rock’ record. Then Patrick joined and really brought a new Herculean power to the band.

For me, it’s more powerful to hear people sing about God than love in most circumstances because I’ve been hearing people sing about love for most of my life.

Moving and motion tends to make things pop up. But things pop up for me, really, at just odd intervals or at random times that aren’t really convenient, so I’m a big fan of the voice memo recorder on my phone. That’s the only way I can remember things.

I’ve just had this idea pop in my head of trying to learn a new song every da, and try and play it that night. That’s been fun for me because it’s a little bit of a scary adventure, playing a song for the first time in front of people and letting it just be what it is.

All the Southerners think we’re Yanks, and all the Yanks think we’re Southerners, and all the Midwesterners think we’re East. Everybody’s always wrong about Louisville. That’s kind of why I love it so much.

I feel like the world gets so consumed and gobbled up by action, and the pace of life is so frantic, and people feel like, in order to move somebody, you have to do something shocking or violent or something insane and fast.

Somebody brought up the idea of reissuing ‘Tribute To 1’ because it was out of print on vinyl.

There’s so much chaos and trouble in the world right now, and we need to broadcast as much peace and love, too.

I guess people have a hard time dealing with humour in music. But sometimes life is depressing, and sometimes life is fun, is about just laughing with your friends, and I wanted to express that as well as the darker stuff.

When you think about climate change, that means that we won’t have an Earth to be lonely on.

I’m grateful to be successful, and I’m grateful that we can make a living, and I hope we can maintain our integrity forever. That’s really my only dream. The notion of bigness or smallness, I feel like that comes and goes in such waves that are kind of out of my control.

The songs always tell you something, but always for different reasons.

Live music is proof that there’s some things the Internet can’t kill. In our lifetime, we’re going to see more and more things start to disappear and get gobbled up by the Internet, but live music won’t be one of them.

I’ve always loved that, on all the Dylan and Springsteen and Marley and Neil Young reissues that they’ve done: It’s so cool to hear alternate versions and how the song started in their mind.

I love the thrill of putting on a record and feeling like you got the wrong one from the factory.

Sometimes, I want to make a record that’s so schizophrenic and so all over the place, and then other times, I want to make a record that’s very coherent and very short and together.

‘What’s Going On’ is one of the greatest albums ever made. I definitely wasn’t aiming to make my ‘What’s Going On,’ you know what I mean? That album is definitely deep in my DNA. I’ve probably listened to that more than maybe any other album ever in my entire life.

Youth is wasted on the young. And it doesn’t even matter if you sit a young person down and tell them, ‘You’re so healthy, take advantage of it before it’s gone!’ They still can’t hear it.

I just think meditation is so important because it gives you a chance to see what’s going on in your brain.

I’d write songs like ‘One Big Holiday,’ and we’d play it and say, ‘It’s too heavy for ‘At Dawn.’ Let’s save it for the next one.’ We had more time for that, but when you mix a song, the general rule of thumb for us is a song a day or usually a day and a half.

It’s really important to be free and be open and honest about the things you want to do. Just ’cause you want to make a solo record or another record with another band, it doesn’t have to be an insult or a slight to the band you’ve been with for a long time.

I really believe in not compromising your art. I feel like I’ve never compromised my art.

I really have a lot of respect for music, the art form of music. It’s my whole life. I don’t care about any of that other stuff. And I have always felt that way. I’ll build a career on my own merits, my own hard work and nothing else.

I exercise all the time, every morning, and then I do music in the afternoon. I walk two to three miles a day and do Pilates twice a week.

I love playing music with people, but I also just love the art and meditation of being alone and working on stuff.

Love is love. Let’s take it any way we can get it.

I love hearing old Bob Marley recordings that he did before he made the versions everybody knows.

I feel like modern country is deliberately dumbing down the human race. They’re deliberately making people take glory in being uneducated and racist, and it’s just sad. I think it’s absolute mind control.

I think probably the first time I recorded anything was mid-2010.

There’s these things we do that take us into the zone – and we go in that place that I feel like is the place of love that you reach when you’re in love or making love, or you’re having a good conversation. I feel like that is God.

I’ve never stared out at the ocean while I’ve made a record before – that enhances things in a strange way.

I think we’re going to look back on the Internet in 50 to 100 years as a big mistake.

I heard the Abbey Lincoln song ‘The World is Falling Down,’ and it just resonated with me so deeply.

For me, ‘Evil Urges’ was like a video game. If you play ‘Super Mario Brothers,’ there’s a level where it’s like a snowscape, and then there’s a level where it’s a desert and a level that’s like a jungle.

I was always kind of against streaming, but I’ve been traveling so much, and I usually carry a huge hard drive of digital music with me, but I haven’t had time to deal with it, so I’ve been doing streaming. And I had this incredible breakthrough of weightlessness where I’ve really been loving streaming music.

I think anyone who knows the audio process knows what mixing and mastering is.

If you do something, you should do it because you love it, and you should follow your heart and make it how your heart wants it to be made. But it’s a difficult world, especially for musicians.

‘Circuital’ was just so much about us as a band. We captured every song live, including the main vocal. That is probably my favorite My Morning Jacket record because it’s really the essence of us being us. The solo record is just a completely different essence of just me trying to figure out stuff.