Jim James of My Morning Jacket to release solo album

Jim James has done plenty of work lately outside the confines of his Kentucky-based roots-rock band, My Morning Jacket: In 2009 he recorded and toured with Conor Oberst, M. Ward and Mike Mogis as Monsters of Folk, and earlier this year he took part in an all-semi-star homage to Woody Guthrie called “New Multitudes.” There’s also “Tribute To,” the 2009 EP of George Harrison covers he put out under the name Yim Yames.

So far, though, James hasn’t released a full-on solo album of original songs, something set to change on Feb. 5, when he’ll issue the rather grandly titled “Regions of Light and Sound of God” through ATO Records. James produced, engineered and played all the instruments on the record, for which he drew inspiration from “God’s Man,” a book of woodcuts published by Lynd Ward in 1929.

“‘God’s Man’ came to me at a very important time,” James said in a statement. “Some of the things happening in the book were happening to me in real life, in a very strange and painful, then a very beautiful way.”

Seems heavy, but as the disc’s trippy first single, “Know Til Know,” demonstrates, James has a way of lightening an existential load. (Listen to the song below.)

“I wanted the album to sound like it came from a different place in time,” James added. “Perhaps sounding as if it were the past of the future, if that makes any sense -- like a hazy dream that a fully realized android or humanoid capable of thought might have when it reminisces about the good old days of just being a simple robot.”

We totally feel that, Jim.

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