One Big Holiday

My Morning Jacket have been doing this for twenty-five years, and almost nobody knows who they are. One of the great American rock bands, out of Louisville, Kentucky, making albums that sound like nothing else, and most people have never heard the name.

The first time I heard them I didn’t understand what I was hearing. A huge, reverb-drenched sound, and Jim James singing like he was at the bottom of a canyon trying to reach God.

“One Big Holiday” is the song that converts people. It opens with a riff that sounds simple until you try to play it — sliding intervals, accents where you don’t expect them. Then the drums come in, and the bass, and you’re in the middle of something enormous. A wave you can’t get out of.

James wrote it about wanting to escape. Take everyone he loved and disappear to some place where the rules didn’t apply. Wakin’ up feelin’ good and limber / When the telephone it ring / Was a bad man from California / Tellin’ of a stone he’d bring. The words are cryptic, close to nonsense, but the feeling underneath them is not. Run. Leave. Make your whole life a vacation from the bullshit.

The thing that gets me is the buildup. The song keeps ascending, adding layers, getting bigger and bigger until it sounds like it might reach escape velocity. The guitars pile on. The reverb deepens. James climbs higher. Then it all releases into a cascading outro that sounds like joy.

That’s the part that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t sat with the band. Twenty-five years of this. Shows that run three hours because they can’t stop jamming. Records that don’t sound like anyone else’s records. And still, the name lands on most people as nothing.

“One Big Holiday” is an invitation. Come with us. Leave everything behind. See what happens. Five minutes in, you believe you can fly, and you wonder how a band this good stayed this much of a secret.