My Morning Jacket is a band that needs no introduction. If you live in or are from Louisville, you know exactly who they are. Hell, you probably know them personally, (everyone here seems to, or at least has a good story about running into a band member somewhere around town). In the words of former Mayor Jerry Abramson, spoken onstage before My Morning Jacket’s sold-out August 2008 show at Waterfront Park; “We’re going to have guys on this stage from Male High School, St. X High School, Oldham County High School – these are Louisville folks!” While not entirely true for the My Morning Jacket lineup that’s been together since 2004, (guitarist Carl Broemel and keyboardist Bo Koster were both born and raised outside of KY), band founders Jim James (vocals, guitar), and Tom Blankenship (bass), as well as drummer Patrick Hallahan, (who joined the band in 2002), are indeed Louisville folk, (hence the three high schools Abramson name-checked).
Since forming in 1998, the three-time GRAMMY Award-nominated band has released ten studio albums, ten EPs, three compilation albums, eleven live albums, and has gone from playing the likes of Twice Told Coffeehouse, Rudyard Kipling, and yes, even Toy Tiger, to sold-out headlining world tours with shows at some of the world’s most famous venues, (Red Rocks, Madison Square Garden, The Greek Theatre), and top-billing at several major music festivals, (including 2024’s Bourbon and Beyond). Even going as far in 2014 as creating and playing their own annual destination music festival called One Big Holiday, (named after the song of the same title from their 2003 album It Still Moves). The next of which takes place April 3-5, 2025 in Miramar Beach, Florida, (more details can be found here).
On the heels of releasing their latest single, “Aren’t We One?” – the first single released from their upcoming eleventh as-of-yet untitled full-length studio album – LEO was given the opportunity to chat with My Morning Jacket drummer Patrick Hallahan over Zoom from his home right here in Louisville. Here’s what he had to say.
LEO: So what can you tell me about the next album?
Patrick Hallahan: It’s recorded, it’s mixed, it’s mastered, and it’s ready. We’re going to release it sometime next year, first quarter, probably March, just to give us some time to release it properly, to get the vinyl pressed, and get a proper record campaign built up around. We’re really excited about it. We ended up recording it at Henson Studios in Los Angeles – the old A&M Records plant. It’s the first time in a long time that we’ve worked with a producer – Brendan O’Brien, whose resume speaks for itself – and it was just a really positive experience. We’re big fans of the records that he’s done throughout the years and thought that he would be a great fit for the group, so we took a chance and it was better than we would have ever imagined. It was the exact ingredient that we needed in our process. We needed a coach. We have enough creative input to last seven lifetimes, and we needed somebody to reel us in when we needed to be reeled in and push us when we needed to be pushed. It was just a really great team and I can’t say enough about working with him and the recording process in general. It was just super enjoyable.
You all never have the same set list twice, and there is no way for the fans to predict what songs you all will play from night to night. How does the setlist get created each night?
Well, we try to do a different set every night because we have this group of fans that I can’t begin to express my gratitude for their dedication. They come to every show, and we think about their experience coming to multiple shows, and we think about the people who are seeing us for the first time, and we try to come up with a set list every night that’s interesting to the people that see us every night and the people that are only seeing us in that town. Our keyboardist, Bo Koster, he’s a gamer by trade, he’s a great poker player and loves word games, so he started looking at the setlist and coming up with strategies of how to mix things up. I mean, we’ve always tried to mix things up, but we were definitely doing more repeat in previous years. And Jim’s been open to it a lot more recently as well. Like, I don’t think you’d want to have to publicly recite poetry that you wrote in your freshman year of high school, you know? [laughs]. That kind of stuff weighs on a person after a while, and he’s let a lot of that go, which has taken a lot of songs out of the doghouse and made it possible to mix it up. So really, no rules apply and there’s nothing off-limits anymore for any of the band members, and we’ve had a great time not playing the same way every night. Like, if somebody wants to take a guitar solo, they can do it. If I feel like there’s a drum solo that’s going to happen in the middle of a breakdown, I can take that. We’re in our mid-40s and we’ve found immense freedom, and it has just kind of trickled into every detail of our organization, and it’s really liberating. It’s my favorite era to date. I hope it only gets better, but it’s never been more fun being in this band.
Do you all have a list of all the songs you know, or do you all have to go back and relearn a lot of songs?
So on our normal headlining tour, we reserve 90 minutes a day for sound check. So we’ll play a 90-minute show before a show usually, and that’s to go back through old material and become reacquainted with it. What can we do new with it? How do we blend parts of songs that we don’t want to play all the way through, and what songs when we do? It’s just a lot of thought put into it, but we do have lists we keep. We have nights where we’ll make a note of, like, OK, we really like this setlist and how this feels for this night. We won’t do that exact same thing again, but we’ll store it and we’ll just say things like this beginning is really good. This ending is great. This is good for a Saturday night. This is good for a Monday night. This is good for a quieter night. This one’s good if there’s still sun out and we’re blending into the light show. We just have all these different lists that we pull from and then we customize it to each night. We like to think about that stuff ahead of time, and then we’re not scrambling at the end to do it. Bo usually takes that on. He gets it all started and then brings it to us and we put the finishing tweaks on it.
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Have you all ever considered starting your own festival here in Louisville, separate from One Big Holiday? Or maybe even bringing One Big Holiday here?
You know, we’ve talked about doing that kind of stuff a lot. Honestly, the One Big Holiday model was always based around an all-inclusive resort, which made it kind of like escaping from places like the Midwestern and Southeastern United States in the winter to go someplace warm. So we haven’t done anything like that yet because we didn’t want to mess with that model too much. Well, now we’re doing one in Florida because there were a bunch of festivals that couldn’t happen on the site that we normally do One Big Holiday, so we had to pivot to Florida this year. But of course we’ve talked about doing it in Louisville. Actually, we had a two-day kind of like festival there [in 2022] at Iroquois and then Waterfront, but then Jim got COVID, and that all went away very quickly. So it’s been a plan for a long time, it just hasn’t been properly executed yet. It’s a tricky play because a lot of people look at Louisville now as a great place to throw a festival, and we’re one of them. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to do it and where to do it. How do we do it and not mess with the radius clauses of Bourbon and Beyond? We were dealing with the Forecastle Festival and not wanting to crossover on that too much. We’re up for all of the effort and everything to do it. We love it and we’ve been longtime partners with Production Simple and this kind of stuff, and we’ve talked about it at great length, it’s just a matter of doing it right. We had a great thing lined up before the COVID cancellation. That one was like taking eight sucker punches to the stomach, [laughs]. Actually, we drove by it the day we were supposed to play. The Louisville Leopard Percussionists were going to open that day, and my daughter plays in the Leopards. We had visited the site the day before and she was just looking at it, and we were both saying that we get to share this moment together on a stage in this beautiful Great Lawn and just having a little father-daughter moment about the whole thing. And for her to get that news; I had to deliver that to her, and then she wanted to drive by the site. She was like, “Well, I want to go see it,” and it was one of the saddest moments I’ve had in a while driving by that fully functioning festival site that was just being taken down, oh my God, [laughs]. So yeah, to say that we were overdue for that and wanting to figure out how to make that happen is an understatement for sure.
Any chance you’ll ever bring back your cooking show “In The Kitchen with Patrick Hallahan” or something like it?
Yes, that’s the goal, I’m just trying to figure out how. I’ve had several opportunities to work on show models for that, I’m just trying to find something a little more interesting than just me standing there cooking because you can watch a real chef do that. I have a few show models lined up, I’m just trying to figure out who’s going to do it and how to pull it off. But yes, I’m very much actively pursuing that because that was so much fun and it is definitely an equal love of mine. When it comes to music and food, they go hand in hand. That was a fun thing to do during the pandemic and it kind of lit a fire to figure out how to do it in more of a permanent way instead of just a subscription-based thing. But yeah, there will definitely be more of that type of thing to come.
I saw where you said you’d been three years sober now, congratulations! How is that going and how did it come about?
That came about after 2020. I just decided I was going to clear my head, get focused, and get physically and mentally healthy. I went on a strict diet, started working out a lot, and took a break from drinking, and I quickly found out that my life was just better without it. I didn’t really have a moment where I needed to stop; it was more like I just realized that my life was infinitely better without it. My relationships were better, my work ethic was better, and I wasn’t planning my week around feeling like crap. I was getting really bad hangovers and I just made a decision to take a break from it and I’ve never gone back. I don’t have any judgment on people who do drink. A lot of my friends and family are in the alcohol business. It was just a personal choice. I just felt better, slept better, and I felt like a better human being without it. So I haven’t gone back, and it hasn’t been hard. If anybody was ever thinking about doing it, all the lies you tell yourself about people not wanting to hang out with you or you not being fun, it’s all in your head. I couldn’t quite conceive a life without booze, just being in the food and music industries. Louisville is a drinking town; it’s just part of how we grow up and what we do. It was hard for me to conceive not having that outlet or going to a social gathering and not drinking, and it’s been so easy. It really has been. And nowadays it’s even more accepted. I highly recommend it. If anybody has ever questioned if that might be the right move for them, I would say try it out because it certainly was extremely illuminating to me how better my life was without alcohol. And what’s made it super easy on the road is we don’t even have alcohol on the rider anymore. We haven’t for three years, and it’s been a beautiful thing for our band for sure.
It seems like you all have progressed quite a bit as a band and as people. I know at one point you all were ready to split up.
Yeah, that’s true, and that all came from just being in a long relationship. Friendships change. It’s literally like being married to four other people. And it doesn’t matter how good of a relationship you have, it’s going to be tested and tried. People are going to have different feelings at different times and yeah, it got close for us. It really did. And I’m really happy that we were able to pull it around and see how lucky we were. That’s really what it came down to – the gratitude of the level of relationship that the five of us have together and how special it is. You don’t get that everywhere and with everyone, and so here we are.
Hopefully you all never get back to that point again.
I don’t see that happening. You know, honestly, it’s the best it’s ever been. I know it’s easy to go into hyperbole, but I truly mean that. It feels like the healthiest the band has ever been. The term ‘youth is wasted on the young’ is certainly applicable to us at times because – and I can speak for the rest of the guys too – I don’t think we’ve ever felt younger or more alive than we do now. And not feeling like we’re chained to anything, it’s truly liberating!
My Morning Jacket’s latest single “Aren’t We One?” is available now on all streaming platforms. Their live album, MMJ Live Vol. 4: Terminal 5 – NYC – The Tennessee Fire 10/18/10, will be released on November 22, 2024. For more information, visit mymorningjacket.com.
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This article appears in Nov 4-19, 2024.