Songfacts®:

• Prior to forming My Morning Jacket, Jim James was the vocalist and guitarist of Month of Sundays. Songwriting duties were shared between him and guitarist Aaron Todovich. Sadly on November 14, 2003, James received the news that Todovich, who had been on antidepressants since the age of 15, had committed suicide. Both this mournful album closer and "What A Wonderful Man" were penned in response to the loss. James told Mojo magazine December 2011: "When we recorded 'Dondante,' I feel like the friend we wrote it for - who'd been so sad, in tons of pain - was in the room with us. He manifested in the song. We were all crying as we were playing."
• Month of Sundays was a rock band founded by James and a group of his childhood friends. The Kentucky natives made the rounds at pizza parlors and small venues around Louisville, but, said James in a 2012 Louisville.com article, their sound was "WAY too loud and abrasive for anyone into most mainstream music, but we were way too uncool for Louisville's booming post-hardcore/indie rock scene at the time."
  
  Meanwhile, James was looking for an outlet for his introspective acoustic songs, and his brash band certainly wasn't it. So he founded My Morning Jacket, and Month of Sundays eventually split up.
• My Morning Jacket recorded their 1999 debut album, The Tennessee Fire, at their home studio on a family farm in Shelbyville, Kentucky, where Month Of Sundays also recorded an album's worth of songs a year earlier. While MMJ's career heated up, the Month Of Sundays songs stayed on the back burner for nearly a decade. In 2007, the group released the tracks on a self-titled album under the name Monte de Sundua .
• Z was the first My Morning Jacket album recorded in a professional studio setting outside of the Shelbyville farm. Produced by John Leckie (Radiohead, The Verve), the album marked a significant shift in the band's sound as they leaned into the psychedelic-rock elements they teased on earlier albums, trading acoustic guitars for keyboards and synthesizers. There also weren't any empty grain silos in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, where the band recorded the album at the remote Allaire Studios. The spacious farm buildings had provided them with their trademark natural reverb on earlier records, but the effect took a backseat on Z.
• In January 2004, a few months after My Morning Jacket released their third album, It Still Moves, original guitarist Johnny Quaid and keyboardist Danny Cash left the band. They were replaced by Carl Broemel and Bo Koster, respectively. Broemel also played the saxophone on this track.
• "Dondante" was used in the 2024 movie Suncoast, starring Nico Parker.