Songfacts®:

• This ode to taking walks is close to Jim James' heart. Before he moved from Louisville, Kentucky, to a one-bedroom apartment in New York, the frontman took the same 90-minute stroll nearly every day. He told Rolling Stone magazine: "It's very meditative. When the blood starts pumping, s--t comes out. Rhythms come, lines come, melodies come. A lot of the songs on Evil Urges came from those walks."
• James described his songwriting process to American Songwriter: "Music usually comes first. A rhythm will come in my mind, and then a melody thing starts going. Usually, I'm excited about just singing, 'cause that's what I enjoy doing most. So if I'm making a demo, the beat and the vocal melody are like the two most important things to me. I'll also play guitar, just to have something to sing over and just to have some bass. But it's usually a beat and a melody that comes first. But sometimes on certain songs, it all falls out in a big clump. A song like 'Sec Walkin' off the new record was like that. It came all at once, but it came like 75 percent finished: there were one or two lines that I was still searching for throughout the process of playing it. So the songs come in a lot of different ways."
• Evil Urges is a musically diverse album that covers a range of genres. James hoped this tune's classic country-pop flavor would reel in listeners to purchase the album only to get the shock of their lives when they discovered a sonic surprise like the synth-funk "Highly Suspicious."
  
  "I think that's always been a goal of ours - to hopefully turn people on to different kinds of music," he told American Songwriter. "We hope that somebody might hear a song like 'Sec Walkin'' on their triple-A radio station and go, 'Man, that's a really nice song.' So they go buy the CD, put it on and 'Highly Suspicious' comes blasting through their speakers and they're like, 'What the f--k?' Maybe they might get turned on, you know?"
• My Morning Jacket call themselves a rock band, but they've been tagged as alt-country and Southern rock throughout the years. On their first three albums, in particular, they captured a rural feel by recording in grain silos on a farm in Shelbyville, Kentucky. They wrote Evil Urges in the mountains of Colorado and recorded the album at Avatar Studios in New York City.
• "Sec Walkin'" was used on the TV series Arrow in the 2014 episode "Heir To The Demon."