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Last fall, several concurrent Taylor Sheridan shows were streaming new episodes each week. That included the Yellowstone mothership, which ended its run after five seasons with 1923 currently finishing up earlier Dutton stories until a series finale on April 13. From there, an unprecedented Sheridrought will begin, and although an extensive archive from the ex-Sons Of Anarchy cop is available for streaming on Paramount Plus and Peacock, the lack of new content might feel “off.” That is, until the next show in his universe arrives.

Which Taylor Sheridan Show Will Come Next After 1923?

In all likelihood, that will be The Madison. Paramount Plus hasn’t yet publicized a release date for the Yellowstone-related series, but late summer or early fall is a safe bet.

Filming on the Michelle Pfeiffer-starring show’s first season wrapped earlier this year with locations including Montana and Texas. According to the series synopsis, viewers can look forward to a “heartfelt study of grief and human connection following a New York City family in the Madison River valley of central Montana.” The cast includes Matthew Fox, Beau Garrett, Amiah Miller, Kevin Zegers, Patrick J. Adams, and Elle Chapman.

From there, Mayor Of Kingstown is currently filming a fourth season, as reported by TV Insider. And both Landman and Tulsa King were both officially renewed for second and third seasons, respectively. As for Lioness? No formal word on a third season has arrived yet, but Zoe Saldana “signed up for three seasons at least,” as she told Vanity Fair.

If you are still looking for a Neo-Western fix, however, Ransom Canyon will soon debut on Netflix, which is already streaming Territory. Both are non-Sheridan shows but will nonetheless appeal to the same audience.

Drake and Michael Jordan are similar in at least a couple ways, aside from just being among the most successful figures in their respective fields of music and sports.

They’re both connected to the NBA: Drake via his professional relationship with the Toronto Raptors and MJ via being the best to ever play the game. They’re also both enthusiastic gamblers. Drake is a partner of the gambling platform Stake. Jordan is famous for his wagering ways, and the “quarters” scene from the The Last Dance documentary (and the fantastic SNL sketch parodying it) brought that knowledge to the forefront for a new generation.

Now, we have another MJ gambling story, courtesy of Drake.

In a new video shared today (March 21), Drake dubbed Jordan the “real-life gambling GOAT” and explained:

“He’ll gamble on anything. I think I remember it was All-Star Weekend [in] Toronto [in 2016], and he had an event to be at. I beat him at ping-pong, like, a couple times, and he just wouldn’t leave the ping-pong table. He kept just betting me, like, bands. 10 bands, 20 bands. Just kept betting because he just couldn’t stomach the loss, you know? He’s definitely not a quitter. I respect him deeply for his gambling nature. So, yeah, I’d say Michael Jordan’s definitely one of one.”

Check out the video here.

In November 2020, Dallas rapper Mo3 was shot and killed while driving on the freeway in his hometown. A month later, Dallas police arrested a suspect in the shooting, a 21-year-old named Kewon Dontrell White. And on Tuesday, police found and indicted another suspect, who they say paid White to kill Mo3: fellow Dallas rapper Yella Beezy.

According to USA Today (via Complex), Yella Beezy (whose real name is Markies Conway) was arrested on Thursday afternoon (March 20) on charges including capital murder with remuneration, which is basically legalese for “hiring a successful hitman.” The maximum penalty if he’s convicted could be the death penalty, which is still legal in the state of Texas.

According to reports at the time, White had ambushed Mo3 in broad daylight, opening fire on him on I-35. When the rapper attempted to flee on foot, White caught up with him and shot him in the back.

White has been serving a nine-year sentence on firearms charges stemming from the killing, while Yella Beezy has had a plethora of legal issues going back to 2021, when he was arrested for possession of a firearm. Later that year, he was arrested on sexual assault charges, which were later dropped.

Uproxx cover stars Jonas Brothers has spent the last two years celebrating the entirety of their discography as part of The Tour. But as The Album proved, the musical siblings still have more creativity in the tank.

Today (March 21), the Jonas Brothers put broke up rumors to bed yet again with another infectious song, “Love Me To Heaven.”

On the angelic new tune, the Jonas Brothers take romantic admiration to biblical heights. Nick opens by leaning into the tune’s theme of yearning, singing: “There’s a lonely vintage aching in my chest / Every single night, you ain’t in my sight line / Almost holy, how this feeling never rests / It should be a crime how you take me so, so high.”

Nick and Joe add, “Could give me everything, but it ain’t enough / You can’t put a price on the human touch / I could be down, but you love me to heaven / Love me to Heaven, babe / Turns out the northern lights don’t impress me much / Guess I’m just a fool for the human touch /I could be down, but you love me to Heaven / Love me to Heaven, babe.”

Listen to the Jonas Brothers’ new single, “Love Me To Heaven”, above.

While rap stans battle on social media, pitting their faves against each other in some sort of fanfic Highlander, the girlies have been uniting in solidarity for the past few years, making it a priority to show sisterhood in the face of the genre’s ingrained misogyny.

So, naturally, when the latest rap it-girl, Doechii, broke out last year, fans couldn’t help comparing her to its past breakouts and using her to put them down. However, one, Megan Thee Stallion, says she “loves” the Florida rapper contrary to what those fans want, and has put her on her “album wishlist” of artists to collaborate with.

“I see Doechii, b*tch, I love Doechii,” Meg said during a recent livestream with fans. “I do wanna do a song with Doechii. That is on my album wishlist. But I really have no song right now.”

Meg also explained how she’d approach the potential collaboration, elaborating, “I feel like Doechii is the kind of person that you’d have to be in the studio to make a song with. I would like to hear a beat that she would like to rap over. Also, challenging myself to rap over beats I would not normally rap over, without losing myself.”

Considering Doechii’s recent history of collabing with the likes of JT and Jennie, it seems like she’s the sort of girls’ girl who’d be down. And Meg has a history of making friends with many of rap’s rising stars, from GloRilla and Latto to Flo Milli, so this rap writer, for one, would love to see that collab happen in the near future.

The 2028 Summer Olympics are going to be filled with California love. As the world’s top athletes kick their training into overdrive, the Olympics organizing committee has seemingly done the same as it relates to talent recruiting–and according to reports atop the list is Kendrick Lamar.

During a sit-down with the Associated Press, the 2028 Summer Olympics organizing committee chairman Casey Wasserman hinted that a Kendrick Lamar cameo at the Summer Games should not be ruled out.

When asked about which acts he would consider for the games Los Angeles takeover Wasserman leaned into a hometown heroes roster. “Fortunately in my day job I represent Kendrick Lamar,” he laughed. “He is truly an L.A. icon, so I think it would be a pretty fair bet that Kendrick will be involved in the Olympics in Los Angeles in some way.”

Now, this isn’t to say that Lamar would perform at the coveted international competition, but it does not quite rule it out. There are a number of other ambassador related responsibilities Lamar could sign on to. Still, most are California dreaming that it includes him touching a microphone at some point.

Lamar’s recent Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime show performance pulled in massive viewership and could easily be replicated during the 2028 Summer Olympics. With his latest album, GNX, serving as a love letter to his Compton upbringing, Lamar could very well use this rumored opportunity to invite other natives to share their talents with the world.

Black Hawk Down star Josh Hartnett has had an incredible few years, from his standout cameo in The Bear‘s third season to appearing in an especially unsettling Black Mirror episode to taking a flatteringly weighty Oppenheimer turn. He also revisited his former horror stomping grounds (The Faculty, 30 Days Of Night, Penny Dreadful) while starring in M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap.

In doing so, Hartnett portrayed both a dad taking his daughter to a bucket-list concert and a serial killer. The story ended up being as (twisty and spoilery) as you’d expect from Shyamalan, and his character, Cooper, seemingly pushed the door open to spread mayhem on another day. The film is now sitting on Netflix’s Top 10 Movies list, and that added interest is sparking questions on whether Cooper’s misadventures could continue.

Will There Be A Trap 2 From M. Night Shyamalan?

No official word has arrived yet. However, Shyamalan revealed that he was into the possibility during an interview with The Playlist (via ComicBook). As The Sixth Sense director revealed, he had quizzed test audiences on whether they wanted a sequel, and that answer was a resounding “yes.” Additionally, he described how, immediately after completing this film, he found himself wanting more, too:

“I went back to the office the next day and felt an absolute loss that I wasn’t going be with these characters again. I used to run to the editing room. I loved this movie and I wanted to be with this music and these characters and Cooper and Riley and Lady Raven, all of them. And so that was a strange feeling. They become a part of you when you’re making these characters. And, and it was such a joyful experience; we were laughing through it and, playing, and the audience can feel that. So, yeah…”

Will Warner Bros. Pictures notice the increased streaming interest for Trap? The movie has been streaming on Max for months, but now that Netflix is in the game, there could be more movement in that direction. As well, Hartnett made it known to The Playlist that “I would love to work with Night again.” Fingers are crossed for an announcement.

Japanese Breakfast‘s new album might have the word “sad” in it, but today is a happy day: For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is out now! To celebrate the occasion, Michelle Zauner released the self-directed music video for shuffling album highlight “Picture Window.”

“We shot the video while I was living in Seoul last year,” Zauner said in a statement. “My idea was to follow a couple, constantly tracking left to right, as one partner charges boldly forward and the other, progressively anxious, becomes increasingly reluctant to follow.”

The couple is played by actors Kim Gyuri and Omega Sapien.

She continued, “I wanted this video to feel like a short film, and watching it back, it’s bittersweet to look back on my year abroad — the wonderful people I met, the neighborhoods I loved and lived in. The constant tracking from left to right is a reminder of how time continues to pass no matter how forcefully you struggle to beat it back or rush to get ahead of it. I watch out the window as the scenery passes, visualizing all my unlived lives swishing past.”

For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is out now via Dead Oceans. You can see Japanese Breakfast’s tour dates here.

“I’m not a hippie, and I’m not not a hippie” — this is what Jim James told Uproxx’s own Steven Hyden in 2008 and I propose the same is true of My Morning Jacket being a jam band.

Yes, they’ve been known to play four-hour live sets, including the one that served as their coronation for “house band at Bonnaroo,” the jammiest of all major festivals. They love pulling out surprise covers and pushing six-minute songs to eight or ten minutes with extra guitar and saxophone solos. I don’t really know how to evaluate metrics on nugs.net, but when I click “featured artists,” My Morning Jacket is in the top eight. That has to mean something.

On the other hand, how much do My Morning Jacket really jam? There are multiple My Morning Jacket shows I’d describe as “life-changing,” ones that have taken place in small clubs and vast, outdoor amphitheaters. But improvisation never seems to be a big part of the experience: Most of the songs just sound like longer, louder versions of what appeared on the album, and take on similar forms from show to show and year to year. And about those albums, here’s the most compelling evidence against My Morning Jacket as a jam band: the live shows are a crucial component of appreciating what they do, but not essential. How many true jam bands can you say that about? In fact, it’s not hard to imagine people who became My Morning Jacket fans entirely off their studio albums, because they’re people I know in real life. That’s not a slight against them, My Morning Jacket albums are just that good.

Well, some of them. Most of them, really. Especially if we’re talking about their first four, which I took as incontrovertible evidence that My Morning Jacket was the greatest American rock band of the (still fairly new) 21st century. I will no longer make that argument in 2025, because I will amend it to “one of the greatest,” and stress that, hey, you really gotta see ’em live to get it.

My Morning Jacket’s tenth album, Is, is out this Friday and is really annoying to write about because it’s difficult to describe it without using the word “is” twice in a row. It’s also tricky to write about because it follows my choice for, by far, the worst My Morning Jacket album and is thus likely to be graded on a curve. It’s nice to have them back, and it’s nice for them to have a reason to go back out on tour before Z celebrates its 20th anniversary this fall and reminds me of the level at which they were operating in the mid-2000s. (I declined to include 2006’s officially released, double-live album Okonokos on the list, even if it was a priceless cheat code for MMJ evangelists back then as both a document of the greatest live band going and a greatest hits at a time when their catalog was a bit unruly.)

On a song-by-song basis, My Morning Jacket can still reach that level, though as my Indiecast co-host argued in his “Best My Morning Jacket Songs” list from 2021, they’re topping out at “maybe their 27th or so best song.” But again, how many true jam bands can you say that about 25 years or so in? As the man said, let’s ohhhh sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiit ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuun through the My Morning Jacket catalog, from worst to best.

10. My Morning Jacket (2021)

In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s shocking 2016 electoral victory, subscriptions to New York Times and The Washington Post skyrocketed, as did ratings for CNN and MSNBC. This all stemmed from an earnest, honest belief that our collective vigilance was the only thing that stood between doddering democracy and full-on fascism. That obviously didn’t pan out and what we got instead were millions upon millions of previously unplugged Americans “living inside the news,” as pop psychologist Oliver Burkeman put it — people from whom you once received fantasy football tips or The Bachelor intel or Nextdoor updates now fancying themselves as amateur geopolitical experts, treating congressional hearings and down-ballot elections as the main event in their lives, with jobs and family something they occasionally checked in on. There was an inevitable trickle-down effect into pop culture as well, as urgent and important political art was crowded out by countless musicians who now confused their righteous indignation and good intentions with having something new to add to the discussion.

Such as My Morning Jacket. This wasn’t supposed to be the takeaway from their 2021 self-titled, which was promoted as a complete overhaul of their creative process after their longest hiatus. Jim James and company reverted back to self-production and painstakingly spliced together hours worth of jams into proper songs, like they were Miles Davis, Can, or Talk Talk. Unfortunately, the lyrics read like a collage of #resistance bumper stickers, with James expounding on social media (it’s bad), racism (it’s bad), the mall (it’s bad), and love (it’s good and the more you give, the more you get).

But maybe that’s just me — most critics ran with “rejuvenated” and “best since Z” anyway. Fair play, since in the fall of 2021, people took whatever they could get to remind them of the “before times,” and “hearing My Morning Jacket play nine-minute songs live” was a part of that, even if it involved hearing James recap the most recent season finale of Stranger Things. For better and (mostly) worse, My Morning Jacket is truly a record of its era.

9. Is (2025)

The presence of Brendan O’Brien immediately suggests is as a course correction from My Morning Jacket. After all, this is a producer best known for setting hard boundaries on headstrong, jam-friendly rock institutions better known for marathon live shows (Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen, Mastodon… yeah, I guess Incubus counts, too). And wouldn’t you know, after weighing My Morning Jacket down with grueling epics like “Devil’s In The Details” and “In Color,” not a single song on is pushes past the five-minute mark, a first for a My Morning Jacket album.

Form follows function on the punchiest MMJ record yet — there’s MPC-mashing electro-pop (“Lemme Know”), Danger Mouse metal (“Squid Ink”), AM radio gold (“Everyday Magic”), and an obvious stab at their own “D’yer Maker” (“I Can Hear Your Love”). At times it sounds effortless; Most of the time, it sounds too easy. Either way, it’s an album of modest, met ambitions and consummate professionalism, with nothing either as naggingly catchy as “Love Love Love” or aspiring to knock “Mahgeetah” or “Wordless Chorus” out of the closing spot on upcoming setlists. Which is probably still enough for it to be their fourth consecutive album to get the “best since Z!” treatment from critics anyway.

8. Circuital (2011)

If I’m to claim that Evil Urges was a failure of quality control rather than artistic inspiration, it stands to reason that Circuital is every bit the “return to form” it promised. The fake horn fanfare on “Victory Dance,” the kiddie choir of “Holdin’ On To Black Metal,” and the entire lyrical premise of “Outta My System” showed that Jim James hadn’t abandoned his goofier ideas, just used them in service of better songs. The title track showed they hadn’t abandoned the jam-band demographic either, while “The Day Is Coming” codified “spooky electro-arena rock” as a mandatory inclusion on My Morning Jacket albums (see also: “It Beats 4 U,” “Touch Me I’m Gonna Scream Pt. I”).

So why isn’t Circuital higher? Maybe it’s the polite polish lent by Tucker Martine, whose recent production charges included the NPR-friendly folk-rock of Neko Case and The Decemberists. Or, maybe it’s that I gave up on My Morning Jacket proselytizing when they touted Circuital as a “return to form,” something that cut against the fearless, forward-thinking approach that got them here. Circuital is still a very good album, one that’s better than I typically remember, but one that set “very good” as the standard which has been the enemy of true My Morning Jacket greatness since.

7. The Waterfall II (2020)

There’s an old saying in football that the backup quarterback is the most popular guy in town. And to a certain extent, that’s true of long-rumored and unreleased works like Songs From The Black Hole, Electric Nebraska, Cigarettes, and Valentines, and at least a dozen Prince and Neil Young albums. This also applies to the “long lost twin” of planned double albums, such as Machina/Machines Of God II and The Waterfall II, collections that were once promised as quickie follow-ups, only to be shelved, eventually released without fanfare, and taken up as the superior work when their predecessor failed to meet expectations.

I don’t really think The Waterfall left much to be desired, and it certainly wouldn’t have benefited from being a double album; like most My Morning Jacket albums post-Evil Urges, it was a bit too self-conscious to reach the heights of their earliest work. But I also wonder if My Morning Jacket denied The Waterfall II the same opportunity by not calling it anything else and allowing it to exist on its own terms. Jim James was a literally and figurative broken man during The Waterfall‘s writing process, and while most of part one spoke to his relationship woes, there’s a more pervasive admission of defeat throughout the moodier sequel (just witness the opening line on “Spinning My Wheels” — “I’ve been wrong for so long/risking my life for the sake of the song”).

I initially viewed its July 2020 release date as a shrug, permission to treat it like so many other peak-pandemic data dumps happening at the time, yet The Waterfall II had an unwitting prescience to it; Jim James was as sick of being trapped in his own body in 2013 as everyone else was seven years later.

6. Evil Urges (2008)

If we were to survey 1,000 My Morning Jacket fans for their individual albums ranking lists, I guarantee Evil Urges would have the most variance. Upon its release, Evil Urges was viewed as the logical extension of Z, or a restless artist’s reaction to Z‘s consensus praise, their weirdest album, or due to the presence of Joe Chicacarelli (who slicked up The White Stripes and The Shins one year prior), their most blatant crossover attempt, a bold severance of My Morning Jacket’s jam-band umbilical cord, or a complete misreading of their strengths.

Over the past 17 years, I’ve held all of these opinions. But Evil Urges is the most divisive My Morning Jacket album because it’s the most divided; the “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream” duo and “Smokin’ From Shootin’” expand My Morning Jacket’s range into bionic arena rock, dark disco, and platinum-plated country ballads, all of which still stand as career peaks. And then there’s the “Prince doing Ween doing Prince” funk-pop oddity “Highly Suspicious,” which — let’s just be clear here — is actually kinda underrated at this point. Or, at least, underappreciated, since it’s no more goofy than “Into The Woods” or “Off The Record” or “your ass, it draws me in like a Bermuda highway.”

This is also why I won’t totally knock “Librarian,” a song which cannot be accused of being forgettable, even if it’s my immediate pick for the worst song to ever appear on a My Morning Jacket studio album (until 2021). If anything, Evil Urges is sunk by the songs that hew closest to “classic My Morning Jacket,” specifically riff-rockin’ deep cuts like “Remnants” and “Aluminum Park” that I have no recollection of whatsoever.

I don’t know if Evil Urges can be called a “career killer” or even a “career ruiner” in a literal sense: These guys will play Red Rocks and Bonnaroo until Jim James hangs up his Flying V. But you weren’t hearing “American Radiohead!” anymore after this one.

5. The Tennessee Fire (1999)

From the beginning, there was always something misleading about The Tennessee Fire. I only lived in Kentucky for a year, but I never got the sense that any of its residents would want to be confused for Volunteers. And yet, My Morning Jacket’s debut album had that title, despite being so famously steeped in bluegrass lore; Most notably, Jim James recording his vocals in a silo located on a farm owned by guitarist Johnny Quaid’s grandparents, in a tiny Kentucky city that was once home to the real Colonel Sanders.

26 years later, it’s still misleading, but more because anyone working backwards through My Morning Jacket’s catalog will still be shocked at how much “early MMJ” sounded like a lo-fi solo project, one that hewed far closer to Will Oldham than, say, Lynyrd Skynyrd. There’s just enough of the latter for The Tennessee Fire to sound like a logical step towards At Dawn (specifically, the opening “Heartbreakin’ Man”), but the core is comprised of bleak, bleary weepers like “I Will Be There When You Die,” “They Ran” and “I Think I’m Going To Hell.” The Tennessee Fire will always be “the one before At Dawn,” but don’t be misled by that either; it’s still a fascinating and irreplicable document of My Morning Jacket taking sixteen guesses at who they wanted to be.

4. The Waterfall (2015)

While they’re best known as a band that has made at least four songs with the word “wonderful” in the title and curated a festival in Mexico called “One Big Holiday,” there’s always been an undercurrent of darkness in My Morning Jacket, if you knew where to look. The silo reverb on The Tennessee Fire left a bitter aftertaste on James’ loner soliloquies, At Dawn was dotted by images of violence, even It Still Moves had flickers of heat lightning and thunder in its overcast ambience.

But you had to read Jim James’ interviews to get a sense of the actual mental, physical, and spiritual toll that comes from 15 years of non-stop recording and touring. That is, until The Waterfall — “I’m getting so tired of trying to always be nice,” James spits on lead single “Big Decisions,” a lyric that would’ve been without precedent in the My Morning Jacket catalog where it not preceded minutes earlier by the poisonous acoustic ditty “Get The Point” (“So I’m tryin’ to tell you plainly how I’m feelin’ day to day / And I’m so sorry now that you ain’t feelin’ the same way,” though “sorry” should be in air quotes).

The Waterfall isn’t completely defined by James’ romantic disillusion, as the opening, klieg-lit duo of “Believe (Nobody Knows)” and “Compound Fracture” are My Morning Jacket at their most Coachella (not Bonnaroo)-core. But it’s nonetheless a distinction that gives The Waterfall (and its sequel) an edge over the competition in the “best since Evil Urges, but not Z” sweepstakes.

3. At Dawn (2001)

Best day-drinking album ever? I’ll admit to being extremely biased on this front, since I discovered At Dawn dropped during a semester where I needed only one class to graduate from a large Southern university, thus spending most of my daylight hours on the porch listening to the Allman Brothers and Sigur Ros in equal measure and contemplating the big, scary world out there with no real urgency on the matter. In other words, the target demographic for My Morning Jacket’s merger of genres that share a laid back approach to life, but for extremely different reasons. Or, more succinctly, “Southern rock, but what if… a constant four-beer buzz?”

My Morning Jacket would’ve found an audience with or without the reverb, but the uncanny production broadened, rather than contracted, the reach of At Dawn, drawing in cred-conscience listeners who might have scoffed at dry runs of “Lowdown” and “Just Because I Do” (that said, I’ll never not fast-forward through the interminable blooze workout “Honest Man”). Whether it’s the eerie minimalism of “If It Smashes Dawn” or the curtain-raising grandeur of the title track, At Dawn is cloaked in a dreamlike haze — specifically, the lighters-up coda of “The Way That He Sings” was the “where have you been all my life?” moment, the one of many on an album steeped in a Southern rock lineage without making it an explicit part of the music (as it did with Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera, another “where has this been all my life?” album from 2001). James was probably singing about the indescribable magic of music in general, but on At Dawn, many rightfully took it as him singing about himself.

2. Z (2005)

Steve’s consumed more My Morning Jacket live bootlegs than I could hope to in five lifetimes, so I’m not in a good position to argue with his belief that all My Morning Jacket songs sound better live. The preponderance of evidence even from my experience is on his side — I thought I merely loved My Morning Jacket before I saw them preview about a third of Z in a hotboxed 40 Watt during the summer of 2005. After that show, I was convinced they were the greatest American rock band of the 21st century. When I hear the newer stuff in the context of the classics, I actually like them more, not less, as they’re now part of a fascinating, unpredictable artistic trajectory rather than a 45-minute album I’m inevitably going to compare to Z.

Because… come on, have you ever heard Z in headphones? Before 2005, most people felt like a five-star My Morning Jacket album would just be one where they sounded like they did live. No one was asking for them to cut the reverb (or their hair for that matter) and turn out a 10-song, 45-minute, all-killer, no-filler album, but when they gave it a shot, it wasn’t just a matter of getting better equipment or shortening the song lengths (though they did that).

Z was borne of crucial lineup changes and the unexpected pairing with John Leckie, a producer best known for The Bends and A Storm In Heaven, whose studio credits trace back to George Harrison, Pink Floyd, T. Rex, and XTC. In short, a guy who knows how to make head trip music — witness the tremolo guitars rushing into the chorus of “It Beats 4 U” or “Off The Record” hopping into a lunar rover for its second half. But Leckie and My Morning Jacket knew when to lay off the effects pedals, whether it’s the perpetually underappreciated ballad “Knot Comes Loose” or James letting out a Frank Black-like howl on “Dondante,” a sound which is all the more stunning for having never appeared in any My Morning Jacket song before or since. And yeah, I suppose that the past two decades have proven Steve right about how “Gideon” and “Wordless Chorus” have always been meant for amphitheaters, but at least for me, nothing will top popping in that (weirdly notorious) CD copy of Z and hearing a band that sounded boundless.

1. It Still Moves (2003)

Like most people, I first heard Z as a brilliant leap forward for My Morning Jacket. But now that 20 years have passed, weren’t most of the things said about Z already true of It Still Moves? Did My Morning Jacket not reinvent classic Southern rock for the 21st century on “Steam Engine” or “I Will Sing You Songs,” the defining articles of “country-gaze” before anyone knew what to call it? Could you hear “Mahgeetah” and “One Big Holiday” and still remain unconvinced that My Morning Jacket could write anthems, just because there’s reverb and also extended guitar solos? Are “Golden” and “Just One Thing” any less transportive than the above because they’re only four minutes instead of eight? When I look back on Z, I hear My Morning Jacket brilliantly hopping from genre to genre, but on It Still Moves, alt-country, folk, shoegaze, orchestral soul, metal, and basically everything from the American songbook coalesces into a single, sui generis whole.

If we’re to reduce artistic achievement to a set of quantifiable metrics, this spot should absolutely go to Z. It’s My Morning Jacket’s most critically acclaimed and popular album, the one where they “transcended their humble Southern rock roots” or whatever and snatched the “American Radiohead” crown away from Wilco. Whenever My Morning Jacket promise a “return to form” — and that’s pretty much all they’ve done since Evil Urges — the ensuing album is always modeled after Z.

And that’s exactly why I can’t put it at the top. My Morning Jacket seem to believe that, if they really, really focus, it’s possible to make another Z. Meanwhile, the uncanny magic of It Still Moves is untouchable by them or anyone else.

Good things come to those who wait and today (March 21), that is Lil Nas X fans. With the “Hotbox” musician deeply engulfed in his forthcoming album Dreamboy’s rollout, Lil Nas X has unleashed a half dozen new tracks.

But his latest single, “Lean On My Body,” isn’t exactly new. For Lil Nas X, it appears to be a case of third time’s a charm. In March 2022, Lil Nas X shared a snippet of the tune on TikTok (viewable here). Nearly a year ago, the song was released as the Grammy Award-winner teased his Nasarati 2 project. That body of work was seemingly abandoned, but with Lil Nas X now in his Dreamboy era, he decided to revive the self-assured song making it available on streaming and YouTube.

Of the Dreamboy records Lil Nas X dropped so far, “Lean On My Body” is certainly the most personal. Instead of aimlessly focusing in on his booming love life, Lil Nas peels back the curtain to address how his fame and family often conflict.

“My big sis just had another baby, popped ’em out the labia / My other nephew sittin’ in the class with a broken knuckle / He had to beat a n**** ass for talkin’ ’bout his uncle / Now listen, I ain’t sayin’ I condone that sh*t / F*ck it, yeah, I said it, I condone that sh*t / Choke that n**** out / Go corona on that b*tch / Walk that n*** like a dog, nephew, own that b*tch,” he raps

Lil Nas X’s troll-like behavior and controversial moments are a means to an end — a way to provide for his family. However, it does come with hurtful repercussions on the back end.

Listen to “Lean On My Body” above.