At Dawn by My Morning Jacket

At Dawn, My Morning Jacket's second album, came out on Darla Records in April 2001, with frontman Jim James producing. The Kentucky band had started out as a vehicle for James' folky acoustic songs, and their first Darla album, 1999's The Tennessee Fire, had won them a devoted following in, of all places, the Netherlands, which kept them out on the road.

This is where they started stretching. The songs get longer and wander further afield, pulling Southern rock, psychedelia and alt-country into the same haze. Like the first record, it was made on a soybean farm belonging to James' extended family, deep in rural Kentucky, and he sang his parts inside an abandoned grain silo so the building itself would supply the reverb. You can hear it: that voice comes floating in from somewhere across the fields, huge and ghostly.

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