Jim James escapes information overload through beauty and hope.
We’re living in an age of information overload, where almost everything is aimed at shocking or amazing us. Wowed Out is where Jim James thinks our brains are at, and who’s to argue with him? On his fifth solo album, the Kentucky-based singer-songwriter has embarked on a quest for another kind of wonder, saying that he was aiming to make music that acts as “prayers for people, regardless of what religion they believe in.”
In autumn 2025, after My Morning Jacket had completed the tour supporting their tenth studio album, James returned home and rediscovered a vast archive of music, which led to a surge of creative inspiration. The unused music had been composed for two major film score projects in the early 2010s with acclaimed composer Brian Reitzell, best known for his collaborations with Sofia Coppola on landmark films such as Lost in Translation. James explains: “We were trying to do something unexpected, but the producers had some fear around anything too far off the beaten path, so we ended up getting fired from both films. For years, I kept returning to all this music we’d made and couldn’t figure out what to do with it, and for some reason, last year everything started flowing in a really beautiful way.” James has yet to publicly identify which two films the music was written for.
This is James’s first solo record in eight years, and it’s based on the instrumental cues and short score pieces that he unearthed. He produced the album and played all the instruments on it, apart from some of the percussion and drums, for which Reitzell was drafted in. The album begins with the keyboard-heavy Baby Dear, on which James plays pump organ, bass Rhodes, and various synths. The opening keyboard pulses have an ominous feel to them, which lifts as the song progresses. It’s followed by the contrasting musical style of Hands On, which has the guitar to the fore. It’s an uplifting piece of sunlit folk-rock reverie. Lost Child is underpinned by a sample from Maxine Brown’s version of the Goffin and King classic Oh No Not My Baby. It’s reminiscent of Beck’s clever use of samples on Odelay and is the sole track not derived from the archival recordings.
The epic Home (Green) clocks in at just under eight minutes, in which James ponders the future of humankind: “Can it work, this humanity? Will something come and take our place? Only in time will it be known. Will we cultivate or destroy our only home?” The soulful Rewind It wouldn’t be out of place on Lambchop’s Nixon; it’s that good. We Love Our Life commences with a Joy Division-esque riff and rumbles along as James affirms that there is “divine grace” and that “we love this place.” In many ways, the title track, Wowed Out, is a song of hope about embracing love and the present. As James says: “I really believe there’s another path through all this bullshit, and it starts with putting down our phones, taking care of ourselves, and being kind to other people.” The album finishes with Your Door, which is drenched in mellotron. The music is downbeat, but James sings that“I’mfinding life more beautiful than I ever really knew.”
This is a potpourri of soulful psychedelia with a dash of progressive rock. Touchstones include Brian Eno, Curtis Mayfield, and Talk Talk circa Spirit of Eden, with hints of Sigur Rós and Mercury Rev thrown in. That said, James is very much his own man, and that makes this musical collage a beautiful piece of art and easily his best solo album to date.
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