Songfacts®:

• This dreamy ballad with an utopian outlook about finding peace was originally began as a Muppets collaboration. Frontman Jim James explained to UK newspaper The Sun what happened: "We were going to write new music for the Muppets' band The Electric Mayhem but the guy who dreamed up the project at Disney got fired and the guy who took his place let the whole thing drop off the face of the earth. It's hard to have much control in a giant corporate world like Disney so the project was lost."
• Another Circuital track, "Outta My System," was also originally penned for the same aborted project.
• While they already had the Muppets tunes waiting in the wings, most of the songs on Circuital only existed as sparks of inspiration when the band went into the studio. "I tried to not do very defined demos," James told Uncut magazine in 2011. "I'd simply record the melody and idea on my cell phone so I wouldn't forget it, but I wanted to have the magic moments of the song being captured in the actual 'album recording' one hears on the record. We wanted the main core of each song to be live, with each of us feeling good about what he had laid down in that take."
• My Morning Jacket did a lot of experimenting on their previous album, Evil Urges, jumping from genre to genre on each track. They still mix things up on Circuital - "Holding On To Black Metal" borrows a riff from a Thai pop song - but the album isn't as… effervescent as its predecessor.
  
  "Evil Urges is very bubbly or triangular - like Sprite or soda or beer," James opined in a 2011 MySpace interview. "Circuital feels more smooth like milk or water." "It deals with returning to the same place that you started as everyone has to do," he continued. "Hopefully you do learn more and come back to that same place as a new being with fresh thought."
• With the help of their producer, Tucker Martine, and rolls of carpeting they bought from the Salvation Army, the band outfitted a Louisville church's gymnasium into a studio space. It was hot and stuffy, but it gave them the freedom to rock out without interference from anyone.
  
  "It was like Boy Scout camp - just the seven of us in this massive room, no staff or nothin'," James told The Guardian of the Circuital sessions. "If the tape machine was f--ked, we couldn't call in an engineer, we had to work out how to fix it ourselves. And I think that sort of approach gives us more of a sense of triumph about it all."
• In a 2011 Stereogum interview, James explained how the band set up their studio space at the church and how the recording experience tied in with the theme of the album.
  
  "We set up a control room on the stage and then played out on the floor, on the basketball court. We recorded everything to tape right there in the gymnasium," he explained. "The record really feels more circular in nature, mostly because we played just standing in a circle there on the floor. There is this cool thing that happens when you are all playing live in one room and everyone's sound is bleeding together in all of the mics. It's like all these points being connected in time, unlike most recording where everything is isolated and then blended together later in a machine. That's kind of where the title of the record came from - it was like we were all connected in this one continuous circuit.
  
  There was a little bit of overdubbing that happened on a couple of the songs, but for the most part things were recorded live in one or two takes... and that's what you hear on the record."