My Morning Jacket and their frontman Jim James are doing what Neil Young did years ago—melding musical scenes. While Young, armed with Crazy Horse, collided folk with grunge, My Morning Jacket more ambitiously blends an overwhelming array of genres, from reverb-heavy guitar grooves to folk melodies to danceable dub and soul. Go to a concert by either and you will see hippies and hipsters, mothers and daughters, flannel-shirted men and backwards-capped frat boys, all bobbing as one.

What is this unifying force that both singers have been able to tap into? Whatever it is must be big, because they speak very different musical languages.      

Young has always been a romantic through and through, from his roots in folk to his emotive and naturalistic lyrics. He sings about the physical world—its people, its beauty, and its weight. His songs feel with bare nerves.

James’ language is a supernatural one. I’m going to cop out and call him a postmodernist, a word that can eat itself before revealing anything about an artist. But despite the word’s pitfalls, it works to capture James’ intentional evasion of definition and his disillusionment with words. James would probably disagree with this tag, as he disagrees with most labels attached to his music (comparisons to Neil Young included). Unfortunately, this would only make him more postmodern.

On the surface, the muse speaks through Young and James with the same voice. People talk about the similarity of their metallic wails, somehow both angelic and rustic. But dissecting their voices reveals the contrasting nature of their artistic methods. 

James’ voice sounds like Young’s with the rust filtered out. Free of grit, his pipes can reach unearthly pitches that Young’s never could. On Z, My Morning Jacket’s last studio album, James’ voice becomes more of an instrument than ever before, splintering through the subtle harmonies of tracks like “Gideon” and exploding at the end of the KISS-like stadium rocker “What a Wonderful Man.” James’ voice, like My Morning Jacket’s music, never sits still long enough to get pinned down.

As they post on their website, My Morning Jacket aims to create songs “like clouds.” This idea recalls Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” production technique, which created layers of sonic density. But James ensures, with his dexterous and slippery vocal range, that these walls are permeable and evasive. He doesn’t use any blueprint or formula to construct songs. Like wind pushing a thundercloud, James’ voice melds with, flows through, and collides into reverb-laden basslines and guitars that wrap you up before you know what hit you.

Young’s voice, in contrast, hangs onto folky fibers even at its most metallic registers (“Down by the River” and “Hurricane”) and reverb-thick arrangements (of Freedom and Ragged Glory). It tears at itself from the inside out, unable to unload the weight of heartache and pain. The natural conflict in Young’s voice is also what makes it so genuine.

Young has always relied on an honesty of expression with his lyrics. Although his words often slip into abstractions, he always delivers them clearly. And when he isn’t making political statements, he speaks about experiences and feelings—of love, loss, and aging—that any sentient being can relate to. This isn’t to say that Young can’t write complex and abstract songs. His aching voice has always created tension between a song’s meaning and its mood. This is apparent on both lyrically-abstract albums, like On the Beach and Zuma, and gut-wrenching love songs like “I’ve Loved Her so Long” on his self-titled solo album. One truth Young’s music reveals is that any experience usually holds more than one emotion at once.

My Morning Jacket creates similar tensions of mood in their music, but their songs are more intentionally cryptic. James makes the lyrics hard to hear. He bends and evaporates the meaning of words in a wash of sound. Also, the fragmented nature of his lyrics makes them more ambiguously abstract than Young’s. Much like Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, James swirls together phrases and images that often lack a clear narrative, speaker, and subject. In “Into the Woods”, which sounds like a Neil Young tune that took some hard drugs and hitched a ride on a carousel, James says, “A kitten on fire / A baby in a blender / Both sound as sweet as a night of surrender.”