My Morning Jacket’s New Album The Waterfall II Out This Friday
It has been five long years since My Morning Jacket last released an album. And intermittently for some time after The Waterfall arrived in 2015, Jim James would talk about how there was all this other material left over — enough for a sister album that could come out quicker than MMJ’s LPs tended to. Obviously the latter part has not been the case, but that only really made the prospect of a second Waterfall more enticing over time. If there are more songs like “Compound Fracture” and “Tropics” and “Like A River,” I’d like to hear them.
And now we finally will. After teasing something that sure seemed to be the long-lost Waterfall companion album, My Morning Jacket have now officially announced The Waterfall II. It’s out this Friday, and the band are hosting a listening party on their YouTube and Facebook pages this Thursday at 9PM ET. The album’s out physically 8/28. And MMJ will be performing on the Tonight Show on 7/15. Suddenly there’s so much going on in the world of MMJ!
The story is a version of what we already knew: Back when they were recording The Waterfall, MMJ had an overflow of material and imagined putting out more music from those sessions. Apparently, they even once considered a triple album project. But they’ve pared it down to double album status, a sort of delayed reaction sister project that, in a way, came about because of quarantine. Apparently James was walking around listening to his music on shuffle, one of the the songs from The Waterfall II came on, and he was struck that it still felt relevant.
Given that this music comes out of the same breakup that partially informed the original Waterfall, a press release describes the album as having some dreamy and then heavy-hearted moments. There’s no song along with today’s announcement — everyone gets to hear the album together for the first time on Thursday. But you can check out the tracklist below, which features “Feel You” — apparently the song in today’s teaser — and “Magic Bullet,” which MMJ previously released in 2016.
TRACKLIST:
01 “Spinning My Wheels”
02 “Still Thinkin”
03 “Climbing The Ladder”
04 “Feel You”
05 “Beautiful Love (Wasn’t Enough)”
06 “Magic Bullet”
07 “Run It”
08 “Wasted”
09 “Welcome Home”
10 “The First Time”
The Waterfall II is out this Friday, 7/10. It’ll be out on CD and vinyl on 8/28 via ATO. Pre-order it here.
