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Music

We'll Always Have Bonnaroo: Why My Morning Jacket Is the Sound of the South

My Morning Jacket brought the Southern night to life at Bonnaroo.

Photos by Joshua Mellin

When night falls during summers in the South, the air comes alive. It's something I'd taken for granted as a kid, growing up in North Carolina; that was just how summer nights felt. Night comes with its set of possibilities anywhere in the world, but southern nights invite the outside in in a particular way. They sit there, serenely, as dusk stretches out longer than seems possible, and the sense of the earth—the live, breathing, natural earth—as a vibrant, actual entity is acute. Bugs hum in the air. Trees, always, loom darkly at the edge of your field of vision. The world and its infinite, endless lifetimes show up, with stately grandeur, and take a seat all around you. The night takes on a mystical dimension, and, feeling it around you, you become grounded in this place.

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Ever since I moved out of the south, nine years ago, I've struggled to find hints of that feeling. My first year up north, at college in Minnesota and profoundly aware of how still and empty the nights suddenly were, I began to listen to My Morning Jacket constantly. While Z had been my entry point at home, its tight but wonky and bombastic rock the perfect match for the lively, quirky, musical world of my hometown, I was seized that fall and winter in particular by its follow-up, a live album called Okonokos. I'd listen to this and an earlier live EP, Acoustic Citsuoca, constantly, imagining the twinkling lights of these shows, picturing wide open night skies, and letting the songs sweep over me. I didn't make the connection at the time, but in retrospect it's obvious: My Morning Jacket is perhaps the preeminent Southern band, the band that best captures the loose, calm, untamed feeling of those summer nights and lazy days spent lounging in the shade. Their music is like a dispatch from that side of the South, the wild one that is the most unfamiliar to people outside of the region but in many ways is the most important.

Due to this association, it's natural that My Morning Jacket has become, over the years, sort of a house band for Bonnaroo, regularly playing the festival (this year was their fifth appearance as a band) and perfectly bridging the gap between its jammier hippie roots and its place today as one of the crown jewels of an increasingly mainstream festival circuit. As much as Bonnaroo is a household name and a festival that people travel to from all over the country, as much as, with the boom in festivals nationwide, its appeal on a strictly musical level is less distinct than it once was, the mythic idea of it endures in part because it is suffused with that very Southern spirit, that mysticism of the night coming alive.

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Bonnaroo is still in many ways a distinctly Southern festival, and it captures the weird cultural mix of hippiedom that exists especially strongly in the South, where camping out and drinking beer in the woods is a mainstream cultural activity rather than something reserved for hardcore outdoorspeople. The South may be fairly maligned for its backwards politics, but actual Southerners tend to pretty naturally adhere to Bonnaroo's motto, “Radiate Positivity.” Hearing Southern accents at Bonnaroo feels like it goes hand in hand with the constant unsolicited high fives from strangers. So of course My Morning Jacket has to play, has to be there to make sure with slam-dunk certainty, that the night comes to life. Naturally, they took the stage at dusk.

My Morning Jacket's latest album, The Waterfall, has been touted as a return to form, but, 17 years into the band's career, it's also a statement from people who have necessarily become more comfortable with themselves with age. While It Still Moves and Z are albums that sweep the listener up in spell of possibilities with massive choruses, their peaks the sound of wide-eyed youth, The Waterfall is more focused in its grooves, darker and more tempered in its sound. But it is, as I read it, a radically positive album, a response to a relationship dissolving that takes solace in total acceptance, particularly on “Spring (Among the Living),” and in embracing an open-minded mysticism, particularly on “Believe (Nobody Knows).” Somehow My Morning Jacket have become both more grounded in the real world and bigger mystics at the same time.

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Despite my ardent fandom for their live recordings, last night's set was my first time seeing My Morning Jacket, and I was worried because it didn't seem poised to unfold under my ideal circumstances. I was late getting to the set, I still hadn't eaten, and I was worried I'd have to leave early to check out something else. I was not fully in the contemplative mood that the combination of that magical hour and My Morning Jacket deserved. But, as my festival posse and I made our way through a crowd buzzing with energy to buy pizza from a vendor at the back of the field to the rush of “Off the Record,” as we settled into a spot on the lawn drinking beers through the riffs of “Tropics,” I realized that I felt totally in the right place. This electric charge, this sense that the night was fun because we were here, surrounded by it, and had nowhere else to be, was part of that unique nocturnal power in the South. The guy next to me, who I'd met earlier in the day, sat with his eyes closed, busy, as he'd explained when we walked up, “tripping balls.” It was, for all of us, a time for total acceptance of the moment. We were living My Morning Jacket's credo.

I casually observed Jim James's enormous hair and his absurd, corny, psychedelic suit, but mostly I let the music and its wild jamming wash over me, satisfied that I'd never heard such a cool sax solo, that this extended groove of the band playing the same three notes over and over perfectly captured the drawn-out night. Occasionally the set would resolve itself into something particularly familiar—the high notes of “Gideon” were, predictably, a highlight—but part of the appeal of the performance was the way that it seemed to be constantly reaching some sort of peak. People listen to My Morning Jacket to get lost in the hugeness of the music, and, whether they are the dude tripping balls next to me or the guy in a trucker hat, tanktop, and Camelback farther down fist-pumping to every word, they each find their own way.

So yeah, last night was pretty and grand and a little bit mystical, which was obviously how it should be. We were in the South, it was night, My Morning Jacket was preaching their gospel to our middle-of-nowhere corner of the world, and everything was incredibly fun.

Kyle Kramer is still sweating profusely in Tennessee. Follow him on Twitter.