What is there left to say about My Morning Jacket as a live act? Lore and eyewitness accounts confirm that they’ve always been mighty, whether overshadowing Ben Kweller and Guided by Voices as a barnstorming opener in their early days or creating their own Mount Olympus with a career-defining set at Bonnaroo in 2008. Hell, last night’s kickoff of their three-show Brooklyn Paramount run wasn’t even the first time they had played 2005’s Z front to back in NYC.
As a (somehow) first-time eyewitness to their live show myself, I could run down the standard audiovisual reportage: Jim James toggling between wavy frontman choreography (opener “Wordless Chorus”) and elephantine shredding (“Anytime”); utility wunderkind turned elder statesman Carl Broemel calmly slipping into sax mode for an extended album finale (“Dondante”); Patrick Hallahan’s hair-raising snare hits; the backlighting of old-school LED grids that, through simple triangulation, mutated a smiley face into a constellation of the under-the-knife owl beak that graces Z’s cover art.
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But if you’re a fan or even just someone who’s casually caught one of MMJ’s concerts in the past, you’ve already seen the band’s craftsmanship and volcanic energy on display. You don’t need someone to extoll their in-the-flesh greatness, unparalleled as it may be and probably has been since their inception. This morning, head still blissfully buzzing from last night, I find myself thinking about what Z meant when it was released 20 years ago and what it means through the lens of live performance in 2025.
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It may seem quaint now in a post-social media age when genre barriers have all but disappeared for music fans, but Z felt like the hardest of pivots in the early aughts. It was an evolution from three albums of rootsy jamming (most notably, 2003’s It Still Moves) to spacey synthesizers, shorter song lengths, and lyrics that skewed more surrealistic (or maybe spiritual, depending on your own religious convictions), all of which earned MMJ the now-tired superlative of “the American Radiohead” from several publications.
The psychedelic detour proved to be prophetic not only for the band themselves (subsequent releases Evil Urges and Circuital would both be viewed as similarly and even controversially metamorphic), but several later acts who would fall under the loosely defined umbrella of “alt country” — at least at some point during their rise. Sturgill Simpson, Big Thief, and even Kings of Leon would all come out of the gate saddled with the Americana label, only to go a little more cosmic a few albums in. And while MMJ certainly wasn’t the first country-adjacent act to drastically weirden their sound, Z (along with Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) feels like the modern template for doing so.
Where the band’s transformation in 2005 felt purely aesthetic, however, hearing the record’s morphing sounds in a live setting 20 years later felt contextual and thematic — a response to the chaos of modern history in the making. When James finally addressed the crowd at the album’s halfway point — between an extra dubbed-out “Off the Record” and extra-carnivalized “Into the Woods” — he spoke briefly about the album’s importance in their career and its relationship to New York (the band relocated from their native Louisville to the Catskills for recording). He then went on to proclaim that everyone in the ornate Brooklyn Paramount ballroom was on a new plane of consciousness together to celebrate peace and love.
Now, I know how those words look on paper — vague, shamanistic, perhaps even cultish. And being invited to let loose and enjoy one’s self in an environment of rising authoritarianism isn’t exactly revelatory. But it is increasingly essential amidst the fear, violence, and turbulence of 2025 and beyond, and James has always come across as sincere in his calls for harmony. The brevity of his banter also prevented it from being condescending or sermonizing.
With all of that in mind, the expansiveness of Z suddenly felt heavier, a reminder of the importance of staying flexible — artistically, socially, societally — so we can hold onto some happiness in a world that none of us can predict. And by the start of a second, non-Z set, it became clear that all the various shards of MMJ’s prismatic identity were still there and always had been — past, present, and future. Encore closer “Magheeta” took on a little bit of the cybernetic freakiness of Z (the LEDs helped), the live debut of oddity “The Devil’s Peanut Butter” off the Z 20th anniversary edition was an immediate fusion of the pre- and post-Z eras, and come to think of it, had “Off the Record” even been that dubbed out, or were the riffs extra-muscular and mountained up? Probably both. Even the three cuts from this year’s is were already seeing their accessibility give way to amorphism.
It’s also worth mentioning the giant stuffed bears that have been an onstage mainstay almost as long as My Morning Jacket have been a band. They’ve always been somewhat totemic, with one of them famously gracing the cover of It Still Moves as a kind of symbol of meaningful guidance. But the ursine imagery was especially palpable last night, a specter of a past that had never really disappeared in the first place. For a legendary live act, owl and bear are in the same menagerie, artistic pivots eventually come full circle to blur the lines of several genres, and elasticity becomes a means of fulfillment — and thus a means of survival — for band and audience alike.
Get tickets to the My Morning Jacket’s upcoming tour dates — including more full Z performances — here. See a full photo gallery and setlist from the band’s Brooklyn Paramount concert below.
My Morning Jacket Setlist:
Z:
Wordless Chorus
It Beats 4 U
Gideon
What a Wonderful Man
Off the Record
Into the Woods
Anytime
Lay Low
Knot Comes Loose
Dondante
Chills
Where to Begin
Half a Lifetime
The Devil’s Peanut Butter
Squid Ink
Wasted / En La Ceremony / Wasted
Encore:
Tropics (Erase Traces)
Smokin’ From Shootin’
Die For It
Mahgeetah