My Morning Jacket, a band that has defied efforts to pigeonhole it for more than 20 years now, launches a new tour May 14 at the Mobile Saenger Theatre. Front man Jim James has a lot to say about what the band is bringing to the party – and it includes the possibility of hearing some unreleased songs.

There’s also a short film coming soon, related to a vinyl release of a legendary Bonnaroo set.

James recently took time for a Q&A with AL.com. Tickets for the May 14 show are available through Ticketmaster, with prices starting at $39.95 plus fees. But make up your mind quick: As of Monday it appeared that only a few dozen seats remained available and most of those were in the upper balcony.

The following has been lightly edited for clarity.

It’s exciting to have a tour kicking off in Mobile, but what does that mean to the group?

Jim James: We’re just excited to be back out again. I just feel this new sense of gratitude, honestly, just being, I know it sounds kind of silly, but just to be alive and to be out in the world again, and playing with people and seeing people.

A lot have changed over the band’s career. In the band’s most recent album, 2021′s self-titled set, the song “Lucky to be Alive” even talks about the changing economics of the business. We’ve got from the pandemic to the post-pandemic to resurgence to sort of a “back to normal” feeling in 2023, though everybody uses that term cautiously. What’s your perspective on the state of play?

For me, I really think there’s this whole gratitude thing. I’ve really been thinking about it a lot. I think as humas we’re kind of built to take things for granted, it’s just kind of in our nature. Especially if we’re safe and we’re doing OK. We kind of get into our routines and kind of forget everything, and it was really interesting how the pandemic took that away from everybody in one way or another.

For me it’s just been this reflection on just the simple joys of life. Just being able to be with people. Being able just be healthy, and walk on the earth one more day and give your friends a hug and play music with people. Just that basic stuff. I’ve gotten lost so much in life, be it in my own depression or events in the world or whatever, that I just kind of get lost, I think that’s human nature. I think one of the greatest gifts of the pandemic … is this kind of, I don’t know, it was almost like a giant meditation or something, a way of trying to keep coming back to what’s important, like what do you love, what do you cherish, and trying to not take that for granted anymore.

My Morning Jacket is hitting a mix of venues on this tour, and that seems unusual – you’re rotating through theaters, amphitheaters and festivals, from 2,000 people to 10,000 or more. Not everybody is so flexible. What’s behind that?

It’s so interesting now, especially post-pandemic. The touring world is just insane. Everybody is playing. Everybody’s back out, because nobody could tour for so long. There’s a lot of people out, which is really cool, on one hand, but it also makes touring a lot more difficult for everybody, because everybody’s kind of out there. I image folks in towns are looking at the calendar going like, ‘Dude there’s 10 concerts coming through this month, how do I pick?’ And so it’s kind of making the availability of rooms or theaters and clubs and amphitheaters and stuff like that, everything is so crazy because everybody’s had to really roll and adjust a lot, trying to pivot and make things happen.”

I should mention that even though the band doesn’t have a new album out, you do have a new release pending. It’s called “Bonnaroo 2004 (Return to Thunderdome)” and it’s the official vinyl release of a rainy, muddy festival set that has been described as legendary and iconic. What does it mean to you personally to have a set that people regard that way, 20 years later?

We’ve just really been geeking out on it, so much. We’re just so grateful to still be around, grateful people are interested still. We’re going to release a short film about that show sometime soon, in the next week or two, that we’ve been putting together. We had to dig and dig and find the footage from 20 years ago, and we were laughing so much about how much the world has changed. We all look so much younger. It’s crazy seeing the kinds of cell phones people had back then. It’s pre-smartphones, pre-everybody filming, pre-social media and all that stuff. It was kind of a cool way to look at the world. We were really just so grateful that we still enjoyed hearing the music and we still enjoy playing the music after all these years. So it was really cool to kind of dig back in and not only mix the music and listen to it but to look at that video too. They didn’t film the entire set, everything that they filmed was three or four songs. And then we had some footage from that day, and we had people talk about it. So I’m glad for people to see that film we put together and take that walk down memory lane.

You’re a songwriter who sometimes throws out the standard format of three verses, chorus, maybe a bridge. “One Big Holiday” and “In Its Infancy (The Waterfall)” are examples. Do you know going into a song that it’s going to be like that?

We don’t. It’s really weird. We just let the songs go where they want to go. Songs are so wild. They’re like living creatures. It’s like they have a mind of their own. Sometimes they’re open to your input and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they just want to be what they’re going to be, and other times they’re open to being shaped and changed. Sometimes when we’re playing and recording you’ll go off on a tangent with a song and you’ll end up somewhere you never really expected to end up. And then other songs just kind of rigidly stay the way that they came out of your brain or out of the universe or whatever. It’s really interesting too the way that some of them work out really easily and some of them never work out. Some of them, I’ve got songs from 20 years ago that I really like, I like the chorus or I like the verse or whatever but for some reason it just cannot come to be finished. But that’s kind of cool too, because sometimes things have popped back to life after sitting dormant for 10, 20 years. That’s always pretty interesting.

You’re at a point where a band has a wealth of material to choose from for a show, maybe it’s a struggle to pack in everything it wants. How do you approach a setlist?

We really try to and look at where we’re playing, when was the last time we were there or near there – we’ve never played that theater before, so that’ll be really cool. We’ve been to Alabama many times, obviously, but we’ve never done that theater. So that’ll be a kind of cool fresh, cool thing. If you’ve played the same venue a lot of times, we really try to look at the set list and say, ‘OK, what did we do last time we were here? Let’s make sure we don’t do that same thing.’ So we’ll just kind of look, and we’ll probably look at the last time we played Hangout Fest, or what was the closest thing we played and just make sure we do a lot of variety so that people who may have come last time are going to get some different songs.

We always have different things that we’re interested in or trying to play. This tour we’re trying to work on some new songs, some unreleased songs, so we might try putting some of those in the set. Every day is different, too. Some days you’re feeling really energetic and really stoked, other days you’re feeling kind of sad and depressed. So that kind of makes its way in.

So that’s exciting, the possibility we’ll hear some new stuff.

We’re just working through a lot of stuff. There’s a lot of songs, a lot of ideas, and you never really know until you get out on tour and start sound-checking stuff and how they feel. But we’re kind of hoping to play a lot of unreleased stuff. Just kind of to educate ourselves as to what feels good and what’s working. That should be interesting.

We never have done that a lot in the past. We’ve kind of waited until we’ve had an album out and played new stuff. Because sometimes people, when you play new stuff, don’t seem all that stoked. But other times I think it’s really interesting, especially with stuff you’ve never done before, trying to work something out before it actually gets recorded. That can be cool in this retrospective way, whenever the record comes out, people who were there can be like, ‘Oh, I remember they played that song for the first time ever there. And it was slower or it was faster’ or that kind of stuff. I used to really not like the constant digital documentation of everything, because I didn’t want a fan to hear a song on YouTube first where it sounded like s–t, but now there’s just so much content out there. I think it’s actually interesting, to think of somebody hearing some new song for the first time, just off somebody’s cell phone or YouTube or whatever then someday hearing a real recording of it.

Is there anything else you’d like fans to know?

We’re just really genuinely excited to be there, to play that theater. We’ve never played that theater. That’s always cool when, you know, we’ve been touring for over 20 years, 23 years or something, and sometimes we’re just like, ‘What, we’ve really never been there? There’s still places we haven’t been?’ That always makes it really fresh for us, so that’s going to be a cool way to start off the year and start off the tour.

We’re all feeling good and feeling healthy and really excited to be there.