Jim James was going through a lot circa 2005, when he wrote the songs for what would become My Morning Jacket ‘s classic fourth album, Z . Two of his close friends had taken their own lives, and James was drinking too much and grappling with depression. “I thought it would be our last album,” he says in the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now , which celebrates that album’s 20th anniversary. “That’s why I named it Z . Because I was entertaining taking my own life as well, and I was feeling so pessimistic that I was sure that [the album] wouldn’t work out. I was sure that it would suck and that everybody would hate it and that everything would collapse. That’s how powerful depression is. And thankfully, that wasn’t what happened.”

James is in a much better mental place now,

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