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At Home With Jim James, A Conversation About One Record

Jim Jameswas 21 years old and shopping at Ear X-tacy, the legendary Louisville record store, when he first discovered the George Harrison album that would change his life.

Jim James plays ‘All Things Must Pass’ by George Harrison on his M1 record console. Photo by Sheva Kafai

Harrison died in 2001, not long after James discoveredAll Things Must Pass, so for him “it took on this cosmic thing, this extra sadness, because I was just so in love with this music… It’s crazy because [the album] is so long, but the whole thing is just so deep and so wise, and there’s some of it that’s so silly and childlike. It’s really a bold, brave statement from somebody that was so successful.”All Things Must Passwas important enough in James’s musical evolution that in 2009, his first solo EP, Tribute to, consisted entirely of Harrison covers. “My Sweet Lord,” in particular, is in constant rotation. “The word ‘God’ or the word ‘Lord,’ to me, means a more universal consciousness. I believe we are all God and that God is love and God is everything.” he says. “With ‘My Sweet Lord,’ I just feel this universal wash of love. There’s a certain hypnosis; it’s almost like air to me. It sustains me and keeps me alive the way really no other song has, because it doesn’t project itself. Alice Coltrane’s music is similar to me, where there’s this beautiful expansion of consciousness and love and god and awareness—this deep ache of what we go through on Earth, trying to understand our role in the cosmic scheme of it all.”

At home Jim listens to a WrensilvaM1 Record Consolein Natural Walnut.

When James mentions that he breathes “My Sweet Lord” like air, he means almost literally. “Sometimes for weeks or months, I really don’t listen to any other songs. I listen to it on vinyl a lot, but I listen to it on Spotify in the car or wherever, and every single year when they do Spotify Wrapped and present your top song to you and it’s this big surprise: ‘Your top song of 2019 was ‘My Sweet Lord.’ Every single year, ‘My Sweet Lord’ comes on. ‘You’re in the 999999th percentile.’ They’re like, ‘What’s wrong with this dude,” he laughs.My Morning Jacket is currently in the studio recording their tenth studio album (out early 2025), and besides that, they’re almost constantly on the road touring. So when he first used his Wrensilva console, he “just sat there and cranked it and really bathed in it” on vinyl. (He also listened to Eddie Dunstedter’sWhere Dreams Come True, an album of songs on pipe organ from 1961.) James decided to place his console where his TV was mounted, and so when it arrived he simply “ripped [the TV] off the wall. So now when I walk in I see this beautiful piece of reality.”

“There are so many records you’ve found that you really don’t remember the exact moment you found it, but this one—I remember the day…”

He was talking to a friend who worked there, Jeremy Podgursky, the singer and guitarist in a band calledthe Pennies, which was at the time playing a lot of shows with James’s then-new rock band,My Morning Jacket. And so when James told Podgursky how much he loved the song “Long Long Long,” a Harrison-written song from The White Album, Podgursky responded, “Well then you must loveAll Things Must Pass,” James didn’t yet know the 1970 rock masterpiece, Harrison’s first solo album after the Beatles broke up—but he bought it that day. “There are so many records you’ve found that you really don’t remember the exact moment you found it,” James recalls now. “But this one—I remember the day, I remember what my bedroom looked like, I remember the person who told me about it. I remember so clearly everything about it.”

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