20th Anniversary Vinyl 3LP Reissue with Bonus Disc featuring Six Previously Unreleased Tracks from Jim James' Live 2001 Acoustic Performance at KVRX! 

Color Of Vinyl Subject To Change Without Notice / Call To Confirm Colored Copies Are Still Available

Darla Records presents an expanded 20th Anniversary Edition of My Morning Jacket's classic breakthrough record At Dawn with the added bonus of a complete Jim James live acoustic set of seven tracks recorded by Erik Wofford in the Radiology X-ray Room of the old Student Health Center, University of Texas on March 17, 2001, just three weeks before the release of At Dawn. The live performance was recorded and later broadcast on KVRX. Featured all together here for the first time are six previously unreleased tracks from the session, plus "Bermuda Highway" (Live KVRX) from the same, which is also featured on the compilation Chapter 2: Early Recordings. This is a recording of outstanding quality and captures a peak performance by Jim James.

Many consider My Morning Jacket's second record At Dawn (2001) their best record. Singer/songwriter Jim James' soulful voice and lonely country-rock songs are more intoxicating than ever here. Jim has a voice that's both honey and charcoal, like Neil Young at his most vulnerable. The songs are great deep south gothic canvases filled in with gracious acoustic and electric guitars, painterly strokes of harpsichord, harmonica and lap steel, drums swimming in the deepest, darkest, widest pools of reverb, dirigible harmonies that will have you weeping, with incensed atmosphere so thick, it's absolutely biblical. At times melancholy to the point of desperation, there's still a fiery joy to the proceedings, the same sense of euphoria meets-tragedy that Neil Young and Johnny Cash can muster, with a serious sense of traditional folk, the collective conscious of American blues, country, and rock 'n' roll. 

"[Live KVRX] was recorded live, but not broadcast live. I multi-tracked to an 8 track Otari mx5050 tape machine and mixed it at a later time. The main thing to take away from this is there is no artificial reverb on these tracks. That's just what that surprisingly small 15x15 room with tile walls sounded like; essentially a chamber reverb. Jim liked reverb so much during this time that he loved being right in the middle of it, playing around with its natural decay. Notes are made a little more percussive so he could enjoy the wash of reverb bathing him, almost like a conversation with a room. This recording will stand out in my mind as one of the most special moments I've been involved in. I still own the cheap acoustic guitar he played for this session and will cherish it forever. A few years after this recording, the KVRX building was torn down so this is one of the few documents of what this special room sounded like. I still want to build a chamber reverb with these dimensions and materials some day." - Erik Wofford