It’s a synesthetic swimming pool of memory.Īs is often the case with Jim James’ lyrics, abstract ideas follow concrete images. The sounds, words, and mood all literally put you in that space. You don’t just hear the line “Watchin’ the crowd roll in” and think about arriving at a concert. One thing James is a master of is art imitating life – not just in the text, but in the whole emotional being of a song.
The first verse then goes on to hazily recreate the feel of a My Morning Jacket show. The song opens with one of James’ most beautiful images: “Watchin’ a stretch of road, miles of light explode.” But James takes that visual nugget and opens it up into the abstract in the next line: “Driftin’ off a thing I’d never done before.” Is James here referring to working on a lyrical idea of something he’s imagining rather than having experienced in real life? Or is the exploding light “drifting off” of something in a visual way that is unknowable to James? It’s a completely abstract – and totally captivating – line. There is a pure love song tucked between the cracks, but “Golden” is also a sort of Yim Yamesian universal love song – a song about the meaning and mysteries of life. “Golden” has all the touchstones of the Jim James school of songwriting. He took on Sweet Emma Barrett’s ghost at Preservation Jazz Hall in New Orleans and once told an audience in Louisville that the ghost of his youth was simultaneously occupying every space he had ever been in his hometown. James is no stranger to the great unknown.
“Golden,” the third cut on My Morning Jacket’s third album, puts Jim James in the company of great metaphysical poets like John Donne, and raises questions that it doesn’t care to explicitly answer.
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