Deeply philosophical, humble, adept, and creatively nimble, Jim James is equal parts mystic and mad scientist. As close as we can get to a psychedelic prophet these days, he’s like an artist from a bygone era, in his wide-brimmed hats and sharply tailored dark preacher’s coats, dressed like someone just as ready to play a festival as to lead a séance. Looking at the cover of My Morning Jacket’s 10th album, is, I’d say the latter. With a cosmic sensibility plumbed from the ’60s, he’s a bit like Donovan during his “happiness runs in a circular motion” phase and looks unnervingly like the late Garth Hudson around the time Dylan got his hands on the Hawks and turned them into the Band. But there’s a gentleness, a stillness, in the music he crafts both in his solo work and in My Morning Jacket—although, according to the musician, it’s something that has eluded him personally.

Haunted by ghosts and the specters of a childhood spent being bullied, he suffered with crippling depression as a result, suspecting that some of the taunts that were hurled at him as a child might be true. Over the years, he hasn’t tried to outrun those demons so much as tire them out, becoming something of a workaholic, accomplished and facile, working harder and doing more than anyone else, bordering on being a control freak when it came to songwriting or when let loose in a studio: He produced all of My Morning Jacket’s previous nine albums.