Back in May, the recording artist Jim James slipped into town for one of those semi-secret small-venue industry gigs, at Rough Trade, in Williamsburg. Showtime was 10:45 P.M. In the midafternoon, post-sound check, he walked around the corner to a coffee shop and ordered an iced latte. “I haven’t had a drink in four months,” he said. He had just turned forty and now found himself in a period of midlife not-quite-crisis-more-like-reëvaluation. He was taking a break from his band My Morning Jacket, after nineteen years and seven albums, and had recently gone on a seven-day silent retreat at a place called Spirit Rock, north of San Francisco. “After a day and a half, I was losing my mind,” he said. “I felt like I was in some kind of weird Buddhist prison.” But before long he had an epiphany: “I realized that I really love people.”

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A tall woman came into the café, and she and James kissed. People—what’s not to like? She turned out to be his girlfriend, a singer in his solo band. They agreed to meet up later at the hotel where they were staying. He wore a coat with a Druidic hood, which he pulled over his head when he stepped outside, to protect his signature mane from the rain. The hood came down moments later, in the back seat of a Lyft car. One felt, riding alongside him, as one might in a dream about sharing a cab with a Trappist bear.

James had recently seen “Long Strange Trip,” the documentary about the Grateful Dead, and its depiction of Jerry Garcia succumbing to heroin addiction had persuaded him to make some changes: party less, step off the rock-star treadmill. “I’d never done heroin or anything like that,” he said. “But there’s something about the relentless pounding of the road that physically destroys you. Drinking’s real bad for me, because I like to drink, and I can drink a lot. But the thing I always forget about is the cumulative depression.”

A decade ago, he went dry for a year, after a bad fall from the stage. Although he’d been living in Manhattan, to convalesce he moved back into his parents’ home, in Louisville, Kentucky. He’d grown up there, and attended Catholic schools, where he was teased a lot. “I was a classic nerd,” he said. “I had huge glasses, and we couldn’t afford the latest fashions.” His parents, he said, had recently found his first guitar, a Fender Squier Stratocaster that he got in eighth grade, and he’d started playing it again onstage, because it suited the rambunctious garage-rock texture of the stuff he was doing. “The Strat sounds terrible—it’s great,” he said. He was about to release an album of this material, called “Uniform Distortion,” which takes up the toxicity of our civic discourse. “Because I was picked on as a kid, it breaks my heart when people pick on each other,” he said. “We’re not in junior high anymore.”

Later, James stopped by a restaurant in Dumbo, where he ordered a Cobb salad, in advance of his pre-show nap. Talk turned, as it will, to that day’s outbreak (now forgotten) of Trump-related news. “I never had cable growing up,” he said. “We couldn’t afford it. But my girlfriend and I got back to our hotel late a couple nights ago, exhausted, and we thought, Let’s watch some cable TV. One hour and I was depressed. I felt like I’d been poisoned.”

This month, James released a companion album, “Uniform Clarity,” featuring just him and an acoustic guitar, and he is embarking on his first solo acoustic tour. The other day, he called in, on his way from Louisville to Los Angeles, with an update on his midlife whatever-it-is. He’d taken up painting, using cardboard boxes as canvases, and had completed a wood-safety class, so that he can make his own frames.

“My life isn’t how I thought it would be,” he said. “I don’t want to sound morbid, but I always thought I’d either be dead or would be married and have kids or something by now. I don’t feel sad or anything, but I do feel a little lost—and that I’m searching, mostly for love. I always thought I’d find something, or someone.” He’d broken up with the singer from the coffee shop. “When you’re single, there are so many hours in the day,” he said.

As for alcohol, he cited Björk, who once said that she allowed herself a litre of vodka every Friday. “She liked drinking but knew it was bad for her, so she let herself do it guilt-free once a week,” James said. “So I’m trying to take that approach. If I’m good ninety per cent of the time, I try not to give myself too hard a time when I indulge.” ♦