Jim James, My Morning Jacket’s guitarist, singer and primary songwriter, says he collaborates with himself when he’s creating music.
“Collaboration is everything,” he said during a 2026 Song Summit lab discussion titled “The Creative Thread: Connecting Sound, Sport, Film and Story” on Saturday at the Park City Library.
“I love playing all the instruments. I love playing bass. I love playing drums. And that spirit, that muse, is there. So I never feel like I’m alone.”
Jame said the scope gets a little bigger when he works with his My Morning Jacket bandmates.
“It’s different because we’re a force,” he said. “I don’t need to play the drums. I don’t need to play the bass, but that same (spirit) is flowing through all of us. It’s creation and music, but above all that it’s friendship.”
Saturday’s lab, which included filmmaker, painter and recreational athlete Chris Benchetler and was moderated by musician Ross James, no relation to Jim, and was sponsored by the Song Summit Foundation, also touched on Benchetler and Jim James’ perception of AI’s impact on art.
“I like to suffer,” said Benchetler, whose latest film, “Mountains of the Moon,” screened with a live band performing the score later that Saturday. “The creative process is the root of it all. It’s the adversity and hardship and working through our lived experiences to create what’s living inside of us.”
Benchetler should know, because he took four years to complete “Mountains of the Moon.”
“It (was a) process with skiing, surfing, snowboarding, planning, mountain biking — every sport that has shaped me as a human,” he said. “The film is essentially an extension of my mind.”
Every single component of the film was created by humans and not AI, Benchetler said.
“We brought generators and lights, and every shoot we did needed about 30 people, and a couple of hundred people were needed over the whole process,” he said. “That is the through-thread of the film.”
Benchetler also filmed at night.
“I wanted to control and paint landscapes with (our own) light and have contrasts and colors and without sunlight dictating where we could shoot,” he said. “We were doing everything by hand as humans and somehow pulled it off.”
Jim James believes AI hurts art.
“Everyone wants to talk about AI, but as long as there’s one musical artist who is sitting unheard, why are we even talking about it?” he said. “There are so many great artists out there who have beautiful music that they want to get out to the world, but nobody will listen to them or give them a chance. Yet, somehow people think it’s OK for this AI thing to be happening.”
The whole concept of AI is silly, especially to artists, James said.
“Why would you want to give up your precious art?” he said. “I come home and talk with my spirit and my muse and make this music that fuels my life. So why would I want to give that up just so I can talk to a computer and (ask it) to make music that is ‘kind of sad that sounds like The Beatles and Metallica who are singing about spaghetti?’”
While James knows there are things regarding AI that are out of his hands, he tosses around a fantasy about it in his mind.
“I have this dream that maybe AI will be like benevolent aliens that will save us all,” he said. “There’s this story where aliens show up in massive ships in the sky all over the Earth.”
For 10 years the aliens don’t do anything, James said.
“They don’t talk to Earth,” he said. “They don’t shoot at the Earth. They don’t blow up the Earth, but people start freaking out and begin to band together to defeat the aliens.”
That unity ends all wars and conflicts on Earth, according to James.
“So I like to think AI can be a benevolent force that shuts everything down, so that we have to be hooked up to feeding tubes,” he said. “(And while we’re like this), the (leaders) say, ‘Alright everybody. All this (crap) stops until everybody figures their own (stuff) out.’ And then they pair us with proper therapists who force each of us to face our (individual) demons and get real with ourselves.”
The scary aspect of AI comes when people can’t tell if it is artificial, James said.
“One of my friends asked me to check out a song,” he said. “My friend told me that it’s a ’70s soul band covering AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black.’”
It was an eight-minute soul jam with full horns and psychedelic guitars, according to James.
“It was tremendous, and then my friend said, ‘It was AI,’” he said. “That’s where it’s messed up.”
One way to push back on AI is to attend live concerts, Ross James said.
“You talk about how polarized people are and how they fight on the internet, but you get people from both sides of the aisle in a room at a Grateful Dead show, and that stuff just goes out the window,” he said.
Benchetler doesn’t think the live-performance experience will ever die.
“Take my film for instance,” he said. “I think using (musicians) to live-score the film and create that opportunity for people to come listen to that and feel the art means more than just visually seeing it. I think the fact of creating for the sake of creating will always exist. It’s what drives me.”
Versatility is another benefit of human-made art, Jim James said.
“I think expressing yourself by going home and sitting with your own personal existence and trying to create something meaningful is the root of all things,” he said.
For information about Jim James, visit jimjames.com.
For information about Chris Benchetler, visit chrisbenchetler.com.
For information about Ross James, visit rossjamesmusic.com.
For information about the Song Summit, visit songsummit.com.