I'm Amazed

Album: Evil Urges (2008)
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Songfacts®:

  • This number that addresses politics is one of the band's more accessible songs. Frontman Jim James told Rolling Stone magazine: "I've gotten tired of normal Rock & Roll sounds. But I like that there's a song like 'I'm Amazed' where anybody who's seen us live over the years can get into it."
  • This was My Morning Jacket's biggest hit to date on Billboard's rock and alternative charts, peaking at #5 on Adult Alternative Songs.
  • On a genre-hopping album that runs through patches of soul, funk, dance, psychedelic rock, and hip-hop, this Southern-rock track is a familiar place to land for longtime MMJ fans, who recall the folk harmonies and campfire ballads of their early days. The respite was well-placed after "Highly Suspicious," a bizarre, Prince-like effort that's unlike anything in the band's catalog.
  • The band performed this song, along with the album's title track, on the May 10, 2008 episode of Saturday Night Live.
  • This is one of four songs from the album that were used on the American Dad! episode "My Morning Straitjacket" in 2009 (the others being "Highly Suspicious," "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Part 2" and "Remnants"). In the episode, featuring the band playing themselves, Stan ends up becoming a My Morning Jacket superfan after he crashes their concert to retrieve his daughter.

    Mike Barker, the animated series' co-creator, was inspired to write the episode after watching the band play their legendary four-hour set in the driving rain at Bonnaroo a year earlier. Barker recalled the experience in a 2009 interview with Rollo & Grady: "At Bonnaroo, I'm watching these guys create this lush, intense sound as the rain is washing over them… and as the sheet of rain attacks the stage, the raindrops are being illuminated by the multi-colored stage lights, and it was just… biblical. And it was one of those moments - and by moment I don't mean during a certain chorus or something, I mean the entire time the guys are playing - it was one of those moments where everyone in attendance realized they were witnessing something really special."

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