Q&A: Patrick Hallahan of My Morning Jacket

“We seem to bring the rain to every outdoor venue we play,” My Morning Jacket drummer Patrick Hallahan says jokingly from his home in Louisville, Kentucky. Hallahan and MMJ are currently in the middle of a short summer tour, which has seen them play rain-soaked headlining shows on both coasts along with a few shows opening for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. According to Hallahan, the band has begun recording the follow-up to Evil Urges and has already completed five songs. Before the tour re-commences in October, FILTER caught up with Hallahan to talk about the weather, the forthcoming MMJ album and what’s going to make the band’s New York shows at Terminal 5 different than any other the band has done so far.


How’s everything shaping up for the tour? Are you guys ready after a year-long hiatus?

Patrick Hallahan: Everything is coming together really nicely. We’re all anxious to get back at it.

Seeing how you guys have been touring for a number of years, mixing up the set each night makes each show interesting. Do you have any special method for deciding each night's setlist?

We usually flush that out when we rehearse right before the tour and we key it to the venue, whether it’s indoors or outdoors and the type of crowd that’s going to be there. It’s different if it is a festival versus one of our own shows. We’ve been playing together a lot lately because we’ve been getting ready to record a new album, but haven’t worked on the tour yet. We’ll have a couple of days of rehearsal and have nothing set in stone with what we are going to play, but I’m sure it will work itself out.

I read that each of the five New York shows will feature the band performing a different album in its entirety each respective night. Who came up with this concept and why are these performances intended only for the Big Apple?

Well, we didn’t know that New York was going to get treated to this concept. We never really talked about doing this before. [The promoters] came to us wanting to do a five-show run and we’ve never done that anywhere else before. Our manager had the idea of making it an album a night and it sounded like a great idea. So it became a comprehensive concert series of our entire catalog, which in theory sounded great, but there’s a lot of stuff there we haven’t played, so we should start practicing that soon [Laughs].

When we play five nights in a row, we like to throw something different at the crowd each night. After a few nights, without doing a ton of covers it becomes a little difficult. To have a theme for each night has been very helpful and makes it interesting, at least for us and hopefully for other people too.

You mentioned briefly that there is a new album in the works? Can you elaborate on that?

We’re starting to work on it now. We started off doing a couple of songs here and there since we took the last year off. I called the other guys last summer to remind ourselves why we’re doing this and a couple of cool little songs came out of that. From then on we decided we were going to work on a new album. Jim [James] had some good ideas pilling up and we just booked a couple of weeks in Louisville to start laying stuff down and it’s been nothing but a blast.

Has this recording process been different than in albums past?

We’ve never done anything like this before where every song is recorded live; there wasn’t a computer in the building, just a pre-amp and a reel of two-inch tape. If somebody messes up, we have to stop and go back and record it again. We try to keep overdubbing to a minimum and keep it real and performance-driven like Motown and Stax, so it’s been both a challenge and a lot of fun. We’re gonna keep recording till we make an album we are happy with. Fortunately, there is no timeframe or boundaries, which will give us plenty of time to make the album.

Has the band found the process to be challenging?

Yeah, in a sense because you don’t have the option of compiling a song together. You play the song until you get it right. Hopefully it sticks and if not, you go back and do it again. Even the vocals are live, you don’t get much more real than that. It’s been a new process and a lot of fun. It’s challenging, yet enjoyable at the same time if that makes sense. F