I posted a few months ago about a recent project, led by Bob Dylan, to record the “lost notebooks” of Hank Williams. It so happens that 2012 marks the centennial of the birth of another great songwriter (and Dylan hero), Woodie Guthrie; and a new album, The New Multitudes, has just been released, of Guthrie’s lyrics which were never set to music. His daughter Nora, who heads up the Woody Guthrie Foundation, has been inviting contemporary performers for years to prowl around in his ample unpublished archives. (In 1998 and 2002, it was Billy Bragg and Wilco doing the honors, for Mermaid Avenue, Vol I and II.) This time around she’s tapped four indie-neo-folkies for the task.

Unplugged from the loop as I usually am, three of the singer-songwriters were otherwise unknown to me: Jay Farrar (who normally performs with Son Volt), Anders Parker (Varnaline), and Will Johnson (Centro-Matic). (Apparently the project began as a Farrar solo project.) As for the fourth, I sorta-kinda recognized his name, billed as Yim Yames, in its own right. But without question I recognized his regular band’s name, My Morning Jacket. (You may recall their “Circuital,” featured here last May: reverb-heavy, pounding-rhythmic, and graced with a nearly static video of — as it happens — a so-called “magic eye tube.”

The reason I hadn’t quite remembered Yim Yames’s name is that it’s the quasi-pseudonym/alter ego of MMJ’s front man, Jim James. No one seems to know why he chose this or any other any pseudonym. A conversation at a Pearl Jam (!) fan forum suggests that he did it on a lark; other references I saw, while not explaining it exactly, say that he uses it to distinguish his solo work (as here) from the stuff he does with his regular bands, MMJ and Monsters of Folk.

Crazy artistes…

Anyway, one of James’s lead performances on the Guthrie album is the one below, of “Talking Empty Bed Blues.” (He’s looking rather David Crosby-esque in the video.) It offers a lovely, surprise segue from haunting solo-acoustic-and-vocal to stirring, anthemic group harmonies, and back again:

Lyrics here. Among the behind-the-scenes audio notes posted at SoundCloud for the album, though, is one from James on why the lyrics spoke to him.