Did My Morning Jacket lose any equipment, since so many musicians lost priceless, irreplaceable gear in the floods?
We lost some equipment. Since we were on tour, we didn’t lose a lot, but we had stuff at Sound Check, the same place that the country acts had their stuff. The only thing there was empty cases, so there was somewhat expensive stuff lost. But everything we needed wasn’t there. I went there and it was wild. It was piles and piles of destroyed equipment. You could see the water line was up four feet on the drywall. Everything below that was destroyed; everything above was moldy and smelly. People lost a lot of good gear, irreplaceable stuff. Sound Check is open for business again, though. So why did you choose to go solo again at this point in your career? What was the impetus? It worked out on timing. It wasn’t conscious or planned out. I started working on solo stuff in 2005, working on music with my friends Teddy and Richard in Nashville. We’d record a song here or there, and once I got six songs, I thought, ‘This could be an album.’ I kept on writing and did five or six songs in 2009.
