Jim James is best known as the frontman for the very successful band My Morning Jacket. In 2008 while performing at the University of Iowa James fell off the stage and got banged up pretty bad. In the months following, while recuperating, James was given a copy of Lynd Ward’s seminal wordless novel Gods’ Man
which as James says “really struck a chord.”
How much of an impression did the book have? Well, his latest album and first solo release, “Regions of Light and Sound of God,” is based entirely on the book!
From Salon’s interview with Jim James we get a glimpse of how it came about:
So Gary Burden, who designed My Morning Jacket’s “Evil Urges” album, gives you Lynd Ward’s book “God’s Man.” Did it hit you right away that you wanted to create something based on it? Yeah. Yeah. The novel really struck a chord with me. You gotta get your hands on a copy of it, because just holding it in your hands is very powerful. It’s one of my favorite works of art of anything. I consider it more a work of art than a book even. They just reissued all of Lynd Ward’s work in this two-volume set that you can get in a lot of different places. There’s just something about the art of it that really spoke to me on a deep level, kind of deeper, even, than the story it tells. I really got sucked into it and really started scoring it like it was a film, almost, just really sucked into it. We’ve been brainstorming it and trying to make it a film, which hopefully will happen, but you never know.
It’s the story of an artist staring down temptation at a particularly dark time. And it particularly resonated with you because you’d just taken that horrific fall from a stage in Iowa — the lights went out at the end of a song, you took a step in the dark, and fell into nothingness.Yeah, it was pretty wild. It was definitely a hard time. It was weird, because the overall, in-a-nutshell story, is this artist who’s super down on his luck and meets this guy, this really dark, shadowy figure, that offers him this magic paintbrush. He shows all the other artists throughout history that have used this paintbrush, like Van Gogh and Rembrandt and all these famous artists, and he’s like, “You’ll end up like these artists if you use this paintbrush.”
Here’s temptation.And the guy’s starving, and he’s like, “OK, done.” He doesn’t really realize what he does, but of course he signs his soul over to the devil and has to pay it back later. I don’t really feel like I ever signed my soul over to the devil or anything, so that part of the story I didn’t really relate to. But I did relate to him traveling down that path that wasn’t right for him and it leading to this fall and I feel like that had happened to me. I was on a dark path. And being obsessed with the book before and as that happened to me, it just intensified it all. Because it was the worst thing that ever happened to me.
But you felt like the fall happened for a reason?I did, yeah. I don’t say it’s my fault, because I don’t like to hold blame towards myself or anybody, but I feel like it wasn’t an accident. I don’t look at it that way. But luckily, everything’s fine from that so I can look on it with gratitude and accept it as a lesson that hopefully I learned from. But in the book, after the artist falls off a cliff, he meets this woman who nurses him back to health and they have a beautiful story and that happened to me too. So it was just a weird parallel déjà vu thing that was happening.
Track list:
1. State of the Art (A.E.I.O.U)
2. Know Til Now
3. Dear One
4. A New Life
5. Exploding
6. Of the Mother Again
7. Actress
8. All Is Forgiven
9. God’s Love to Deliver
and if James’ has his way we might get to see a film version of God’s Man before too long.
The Library of America recently published a 2 volume compilation of all of Ward’s wordless novels edited by Art Spiegelman.
If you want to start at the top – James Jaffe is offering rare publisher’s presentation of Ward’s first two books which includes a signed woodcut by Ward.
Other copies here
Previously on Book Patrol:
The Library of America Goes Wordless: The Novels of Lynd Ward