It Still Moves Turns 20

It Still Moves was the culmination. At the very end of the ’90s, My Morning Jacket emerged from Kentucky as an aberration — ghostly seekers, not obviously retro yet totally out of time. They played with familiar forms, strains of country and rock’s heyday, but drenched them in enough reverb to make it all feel alien, like an alternate dimension echo of things we knew in our own world. Their first two albums, 1999’s The Tennessee Fire and 2001’s At Dawn, had stoked some fascination; their live shows were already building an ardent fanbase. But then It Still Moves arrived, 20 years ago this Saturday, and their whole ethos was fully realized. And as these things sometimes go, just as MMJ arrived at a place they seemed to have been looking for all along, It Still Moves would also mark the end of the band as we once knew them.