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 JASON PIERCE was sitting on St Kilda beach during his last trip to Melbourne, watching an elderly man say goodbye to his daughter. It was at this moment that the creation of his new album began. The result was the tune The Waves Crash In, from SPIRITUALIZED’s stellar ‘comeback’ album, Songs In A And E. DANIEL ZUGNA reports.
I say comeback because Pierce almost shouldn’t be with us. In July 2005, he spent over a month drifting in and out of consciousness in a London intensive care ward, struck down with double pneumonia. His condition was so dire, the Last Rites were blessed upon him. Whilst most of the tunes were written before the illness, the album remains irrevocably touched by the experience.
“Music comes with this kind of time-lag. There aren’t many other places in the world where you’d be interested in ideas that people had two-and-a-half years ago,” Pierce laughs. Indeed, the album has been a long-time coming. He says he found it difficult to complete the album after leaving hospital. His inspiration came in the form of film director Harmony Korine.
He explains, “I did some shows with Daniel Johnston, a celebration of his songs and his music. Harmony Korine was at the show, and he’s a big Daniel Johnston fan. I met him after the show and he asked me if I wanted to make music for his film. I was at a real low point at that moment in time, because I’d tried everything to finish these songs, to try to make them contemporary. He put me in this studio where all he wanted was music, which seems like the most simple thing in the world: just sitting around and making music. It was like being a child, I didn’t have to front it, there were no expectations, I didn’t have to explain what I was doing to anybody. I just sat in a studio making sounds for his movie. It was really liberating, it kind of bled into the record, I ran my record against it and the songs on the record became kind of saturated with these soundscapes as well. The songs found a space that they could fit in, which is where they are today, and it meant I could finish this thing.”
With the focus shifted from ‘songwriting’ to simply ‘writing music’, a new door opened in the creative mind of the Spiritualized founder. The music appears in the form of six shorter tracks on the album, which I incorrectly refer to as ‘interludes’.
“They’re not really interludes,” Pierce explains, “those sounds are within the other songs as well. They’re little pieces of musical glue that link the tracks, and the tracks are saturated with those sounds as well. Harmony’s just this beautiful, crazy man, who just came into my world with a lot of ideas, and a lot of enthusiasm. It seemed that if this guy could take on the enormity of his films, and all that entails, then I sure as hell should be able to piece together my eleven-track album. It really seemed like the right time that I met him, it just made sense of what I’d been trying to do, or it made a new sense of it, because I didn’t even know what I was trying to do before that.”
"It seemed that if this guy could take on the enormity of his films, and all that entails, then I sure as hell should be able to piece together my eleven-track album"
Pierce also found freedom in writing the songs about characters, such the Melbourne duo mentioned above. For the famously elusive Pierce, it represented a kind of liberation.
He says, “I figured if I could write about characters, then I could write some sort of novel to it, and I hoped that that would change the way I wrote songs. But the end result sounds more personal in an odd way. So, in that way, it doesn’t sound like there’s been a great movement in the way I’m writing songs, but I was trying to put that idea of characters out there. The idea was to try and write about these characters. I tried to take it outside of myself I guess.
“I’m always looking for new start points, and in an odd way the starting points for the songs on this album were more traditional than ever before, they were written on guitar so the shapes of the songs became almost like standards. I didn’t think that was a bad place to start, as long as it didn’t end there, as long as I didn’t try to make a record that sounded like a whole load of old traditional songs. I had to drag them into my world. Don’t Hold Me Close started to sound too countrified, so I added a clarinet in there, which is the least country-like instrument in the world. I tried to drag them somewhere else.”
Already acclaimed as Spiritualized’s best album since 1997’s landmark release Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, Pierce is philosophical about what that actually means.
“It’s nice that people are saying that,” he offers, “it’s nice that I don’t feel that I’m having to defend it. I felt like I had to defend Amazing Grace against charges that it was a garage album, so much so that when I went back to that album when we did some live shows recently – I had to go back and re-learn some of the chords – I fully expected to hear a garage record, and I heard songs like Rated X, and Oh Baby, and Lay It Down Slow, and I couldn’t hear any garage music in there, so, it’s just a random thing, y’know? It’s nice that people are getting inside of this, but it’s not a given, and it can’t ever be important, you can’t ever make records and then say, ‘is this ok?’; ‘what’s this one like?’; ‘how do you feel about this?’. I can only make the records and put them out.”
SONGS IN A AND E is out now through Shock.
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