Jim James is back with a visionary new album, Wowed Out. James is a 3x GRAMMY® Award-nominated singer, songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and founding member of My Morning Jacket. This release is his first solo record in eight years. The album sees him transforming a vast archive of music he’d originally composed for two major film-scoring projects from the early 2010s into an audacious, immersive new work of soulful psychedelia.

In a modern world wired for constant astonishment, Wowed Out, finds James searching for another kind of wonder. Taking its title from James’ self-coined term for the sensory overload he’s experienced in an age of chronic overstimulation, this is the fifth solo LP from the Kentucky-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist. The album’s unlikely genesis closely mirrors its underlying themes of reclamation and rediscovery. Produced entirely by James, the album took shape in the fall of 2025 as he began sorting through a stash of recordings created with his longtime friend, award-winning composer Brian Reitzell. (Reitzell is known for his extensive work with Sofia Coppola, including such films as Lost in Translation, The Virgin Suicides, and more.)

“For years I kept returning to all this music we’d made and couldn’t figure out what to do with it,” James says. “But for some reason, last year everything started flowing in a really beautiful way.”

Wowed Out ultimately served as something of a dream project for a musician long infatuated with lost musical artifacts and sample-based experimentation. The album sets its existential musing against a gorgeously transportive sonic backdrop, steadily sinking into the subconscious through its shapeshifting texture and ethereal atmosphere. Mixed by James in collaboration with GRAMMY® Award-winning engineer Emily Lazar (David Bowie, David Byrne, Beck), songs like “Lost Child” and a radiant folk-rock reverie, “Hands On,”  offer a radically sincere statement against disillusionment, one that argues for tenderness as resistance, nature as refuge, and awe as a counterforce to dread and despair. In the end, Wowed Out unfolds as a fully realized world rather than a collection of moments, its revelatory enchantment affirming the restorative power of truly awakened attention.

Released 8/28/26 via ATO Records, Wowed Out is available here on clear pink vinyl LP and CD.

TRACKLIST:
Baby Dear
Hands On
Come Again
Lost Child
Home (Green)
We Love Our Life
Wowed Out
Whole Heart (Into It)
Rewind It
Your Door