The friendship between My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James and Louisville Orchestra conductor and music director Teddy Abrams dates back to 2014, the year Abrams moved to Louisville to become the youngest director in the ensemble’s 82-year history. Upon taking over, Abrams immediately started focusing on attracting young locals to the symphony, arguing in a PBS miniseries that funk, jazz, bluegrass, and folk were all not just viable, but fertile sources of inspiration for orchestral pieces. Abrams is also a composer, and thus a collaboration with Louisville native James seemed not as much an “if” as a “when.”
It would happen two years later, when James contributed guitar to an Abrams-penned song for Muhammed Ali that was released on the day of the boxing legend’s funeral. Now, the two of them have gone in together on a full-fledged project. The Order of Nature: A Song Cycle is a nine-song program featuring James as vocalist, recorded live at Louisville’s Festival of American Music last April. Each song is either an original composed by James and Abrams, a classic cover, or an Abrams reworking of a James solo cut—none are from the My Morning Jacket catalog. James sent Abrams demos of these songs in acoustic form, which Abrams then filled out with new orchestral arrangements.
The arrangements frame James’ sonorous voice so that it sits at the serene eye of a symphonic and choral hurricane. James lovingly interprets Nina Simone on the Charles Reuben-penned “The Human Touch” and later puts his own spin on Simone’s version of “Who Am I?” the Louisville Orchestra keeping him surrounded and supported, not suffocated. When James bellows to the heavens on the latter, “Will I ever live again?/As a mountain lion, or a rooster, or a hennn?” it’s equal parts spiritual and goofy. That’s a familiar mode for James, but not so much for Abrams, who simply follows his lead and crafts an avalanching grand-piano podium for James to project from.
Some of James’ solo songs struggle to emerge from under the shadow of their former selves. “Here in Spirit” and “Same Old Lie” were highlights on James’ psychedelic Eternally Even, but Abrams’ cinematic grandiosity swamps them. Compared to the fine-grained studio versions, they just sound flat-footed.
Conversely, Abrams’ rollicking arrangement on “Over and Over”—the third official version of the song that James has released in two years, after it appeared last year on Uniform Distortion and its rearranged companion album Uniform Clarity—fluffs it with Bacharach-ian details, its trumpet micro-gusts and lush strings ushering it towards a brightness that the two prior versions couldn’t unlock. That blissful feel creates a new, suddenly essential contrast with James’ lyrics about the tragedy of repeated mistakes; after all, the idea that “we drop the same bombs” and “we shed the same blood” is about as irrational as layering happy brass and a fiddle solo over such grim sentiments. The song’s impact practically doubles. This sounds like the version it was meant to be, the best one.
The loose thread binding the album is Mother Earth’s ability to unite—or as James has put it, “the fact that nature doesn’t know how to hate.” But for every ounce of energy that The Order of Nature spends preaching peace, harmony, and the wonders of the great outdoors, it burns more working overtime to convince newcomers of the power and magic of the Louisville Orchestra. “Back to the End of the World,” the album’s majestic center, nibbles a melody from the Fred Neil-penned, Harry Nilsson-popularized “Everybody’s Talkin’” and Bruce Channel’s “Hey! Baby.” It’s lovely and rich, but like much of the album, it also strains a bit in reaching across the classical-pop divide. In Abrams’ own words, when it comes to writing music, “it’s really important that the atmosphere matches the experience.” But the merging of Abrams’ and James’ worlds owes more to geography than to atmosphere. That makes The Order of Nature something of an inherent gamble. The two composers end up breaking even.
Buy: Rough Trade
