Well before My Morning Jacket turned the corner from underground darling into a mainstream adjacent band that your mom saw perform on the Jimmy Fallon show (she enjoyed it), they were a group of reverb-lovin’ good ole boys from Lousville, Kentucky that loved to get out there and crank out 8-minute meandering folk rock rock songs which took you on a hazy journeys through the fog and the woods of the Black Mountains. It was rock and roll bliss, vignettes of delay and echo that matriculated into epic crescendos before floating back down to Earth, and stuffed full with shreddy guitar riffs that cemented MMJ as the contemporary successor to iconic jam bands Phish and Grateful Dead.
It Still Moves is a terrific album, one that I first found in the dormitories of Francisco Torres during my freshman year of college at UCSB, and one that has stuck with me ever since. MMJ has played a very large role in my musical vernacular for a variety of reasons– the focus on guitar-driven rock, their folk rock DNA, their propensity to write epic ballads while still staying tethered via gravitational pull to conventional pop music structures– but perhaps the most important is that they effectively served as the inspiration for the sound of my close friends’ band Givers & Takers in college, and therefore were constantly on the speakers during my entire college career. Much like Local Natives, MMJ is a band that I will forever associate with those formative years and has become an indelible part of my soul.
Standout Songs: “Mahgeetah”, “Dancefloors”, “Golden”, “One Big Holiday”, “I Will Sing You Songs”, “Easy Morning Rebel”, “Run Thru”
