Stumped by My Morning Jacket in a Small Apartment in Honolulu

I was introduced to My Morning Jacket in the fall of 2003 while watching Late Night with Conan O’Brien during my ninth and final semester at the greatest university on Lake Superior, the University of Minnesota-Duluth. They played the tune “One Big Holiday” from It Still Moves in all its five-minute-plus rocking glory. Conan’s reaction to their performance was something along the lines of “I AM GOING TO BUY THAT ALBUM!” Anyway, I was hooked from that moment and immediately requested It Still Moves for review (I was editing an online music site called 30music.com at the time), and fell in love with it while having a Moosehead Canadian Lager in my room after Monday night class. Since then, I have always enjoyed MMJ. They are a band that pushes boundaries with their near-hypnotic blend of folk, rock, and sometimes simply bizarre jams.

Fast-forward 12 years and I am standing in Hungry Ear Records, a cozy record shop in the Mōʻiliʻili district of Honolulu. I am there to purchase the new Mumford and Sons, but as I am browsing, this vibrant-looking record is staring at me as I stare up at it on the wall in the NEW RELEASE section. It’s the new My Morning Jacket, titled The Waterfall. I am intrigued. I had not taken a chance on a new record in quite a while. Typically, before I buy a record, I will preview it on iTunes or Amazon or just find a YouTube stream if I desire to hear it in its entirety. But this time I wanted to go old school. I wanted to take a chance on a band that I knew I at least liked enough to take a chance on. So I dropped the 20-whatever dollars it was on the double gate-fold vinyl and carried it back to my apartment with that sense of excitement I used to get after spending $100 on compact discs at Cheapo in Uptown Minneapolis on payday.

After a spin-through of the new Mumford, which is quite good (and still holds up), I place The Waterfall on the turntable and wait with anticipation for the needle to drop and the music to pour out of my JBL Bluetooth speaker. The opener, “Believe (Nobody Knows),” starts slow with a fairytale-type sound leading into some very, very interesting vocals. I know Jim James is known for pushing the envelope vocally, but what I am hearing is so unusual that I feel he has either lost the plot entirely or found some insanely potent marijuana and recorded the entire record completely stoned out of his mind. The vocals are deep, slow, nearly slurred—definitely not the Jim James falsetto-ish vocals I am used to enjoying. But I try to accept this new direction he is taking his art. He has every right to. A career this long, what else is there to prove? As the record progresses, this slow, echo-y, distant, and just very slurred vocal style is found on every song. While I still cannot quite accept or wrap my head around it, I hear melodies in the songs that make me realize this album will just take some getting used to and, if I give it four or five spins, perhaps I will learn to absolutely adore it. So, I get to the fourth side of the album, and at this point I am about ready to give up on not only this album, but MMJ altogether. I cannot take it anymore. It was OK for a while, but now it is just downright annoying and I have thoughts of selling the album back to the record store for whatever it is they will give me—peanuts, I don’t care.

I then have a thought that maybe, just maybe, I should play the record at 45 RPM even though it is a 12-inch record to help speed things along, so I switch it to 45 RPM and.... BAM!... it sounds almost too fast, but the vocals are immediately normal and coherent!

Turns out the suggested play speed of the record is 45 RPM instead of 33 RPM, which I assumed it was, as every single one of my 12-inch records plays back properly at this spin rate.

I feel like a fool and start it over at the proper spin rotation, and am blown away with how simply great this record sounds (at proper speed).

I doubt something like this will ever happen to me again because so many elements had to come into play—a perfect musical storm—to even begin to make this ridiculous story a possibility, but it is something I will never forget. And from now on, when I purchase a record I have never heard before, I am going to check the little label to confirm whether it spins at 45 RPM or 33⅓ RPM. Interestingly enough, nine years or so later at Banana Records in Kobe, Japan, I come across a used copy of S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinu TNT by Akron/Family that has the suggested speed of 45/33⅓ for its final track. God is in the details.

Relive the moment Conan O’Brien falls in love with My Morning Jacket