Outta My System

Album: Circuital (2011)
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Songfacts®:

  • This poppy tune began as a Muppets collaboration. An executive recruited My Morning Jacket to record music for a new version of the Muppets' Electric Mayhem band in which MMJ would play behind a curtain while Muppet holograms performed onstage. However after the executive got fired, the project disappeared. Another Circuital track, "Wonderful (The Way I Feel)," also originated from the ill-fated Muppet sessions.

    Frontman Jim James also got a call to write a couple of songs for the 2011 The Muppets movie, but they didn't use those either. "So now, twice, Muppet glory has been within my grasp," James told Rolling Stone. "It's pretty heartbreaking, but it did propel us just to kick into high gear and finish our own record."
  • We suspect that some of the tongue-in-cheek lyrics - "They told me not to smoke drugs, but I didn't listen. Never thought I'd get caught and wind up in prison" - wouldn't have made it onto the Muppets project anyway.
  • The song's music video was directed by James Frost, who previously helmed the visuals for Radiohead's "House Of Cards" and OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass." It features plenty of spacey animation as My Morning Jacket are transformed into cartoon cyclops, whilst comedian Zach Galifianakis plays an animated wizard.
  • By the time they released Circuital, their sixth studio album, My Morning Jacket had employed many different methods of recording and producing in many different spaces. Their first few albums were recorded in makeshift setups around a Kentucky farm before the band graduated to professional studios that offered all the bells and whistles for a more polished sound. For Circuital, they set up shop in a spacious gymnasium in Louisville and recorded live to tape.

    Jim James spoke with The Toronto Sun about the recording sessions. "I don't want to seem too retro, but there's just a certain purity of recording to tape," he explained in the 2011 interview. "It's like a mirror - you only see what you put into it. Whereas the computer is a crazy hologram machine. You can put the image of a frog into the computer and turn it into the Devil. So for us, it was just fun to focus on getting good live performances. We've always done our basic tracking that way, but it's been tough to get a live vocal - by the time the band gets the song down, I'm spent. But this time I really wanted to record the vocal for every song live with the band, because I feel that makes for a more emotional connection. So we didn't rehearse any of the music before we got to the space. I sent the guys really simple demos so they kind of knew the songs, but that was it. So it became an all-in-one process where we were learning the song and recording the song at the same time. And it turned out great."

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