• News

• All

Mar 18, 2025 By Mark Redfern Photography by Silvia Grav

My Morning Jacket are releasing a new album, is, this Friday via ATO. Now they have released its third single, “Half a Lifetime,” via a music video. Danny Clinch directed the song’s video. Watch it below.

The song started out as a demo for the band’s 2005’s album Z and was reworked for the new album.

“It’s about doing whatever it takes to get where you need to go, instead of bailing when things get hard,” says My Morning Jacket’s Jim James in a press release, “which is funny considering that it literally took a half a lifetime to finish.”

My Morning Jacket are featured in our current print issue, Issue 74, The Protest Issue. Buy a copy from us directly here.

Previously My Morning Jacket shared the album’s first single, “Time Wasted,” via a music video. Then they released its second single, “Squid Ink,” via a music video.

The band features singer/guitarist Jim James, bassist Tom Blankenship, guitarist Carl Broemel, drummer Patrick Hallahan, and keyboardist Bo Koster.

Brendan O’Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam) produced the album, which is their 10th, and this is the first time James hasn’t produced one of the band’s albums himself.

“Up until now I’ve never been able to let go and allow someone else to steer the ship,” James explains. “It almost felt like an out-of-body experience to step back and give control over to someone who’s far more accomplished and made so many more records than us, but in the end I was able to enjoy the process maybe more than I ever have before.”

As for the short album title, is, James says: “I like how the word ‘is’ indicates a sense of presence in the now—there’s no logic or rationale behind this record; it just is. All these songs came into existence out of an attempt to connect with something beyond the human experiment, which for me is one of the most beautiful things about music—that connection with something larger than us, yet something we are all equally a part of.”

It’s been 26 years since the release of My Morning Jacket’s debut album, 1999’s The Tennessee Fire. “One of the cool things about being around this long is that we’re not afraid to scrap something if we don’t absolutely love it,” James says. “It feels really great to have a collection of songs we all love this much, and to know that we worked as hard as we possibly could on them. Hopefully those songs will be helpful to people and give them some kind of peace as they try to deal with the insanity of the world—because that’s what music does for me, and doing the same for others is always my greatest dream come true.”

In September My Morning Jacket shared a new song, “Aren’t We One,” and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the November presidential election. The song is not included on the new album.

My Morning Jacket’s last studio album was 2021’s My Morning Jacket.

Read our interview with My Morning Jacket’s Jim James on the 2018 Midterm Elections.

Subscribe to Under the Radar’s print magazine.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.