Spiritualized Everything In Its Right Space
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Jason Pierce has this clever go-to riff when faced with the suggestion that his lyrics are overwhelmingly autobiographical. It’s certainly not a stretch to come to such assumptions over a canon so mired in self-destruction and dripping with narcotica.
“I say in every interview that when you listen to Ray Charles singing, ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You,’ there isn’t a single person to who listens to that and says, ‘who is it that Ray can’t stop loving?’ It’s about you, and how you relate to love.â€
He has this guitar, a 1929 Gibson that he bought in Cincinnati a handful of years ago, and is of the firm belief that the songs that would later populate the powerfully raw new Spiritualized album, Songs in A&E, came with the guitar. Surely they must have, you see, because Pierce doesn’t fancy himself to be a guitar player until he plugs one in onstage.
But yet, some four years ago, the man known worldwide as J. Spaceman, or rather “the Spaceman,†found himself writing the majority of the songs for A&E on acoustic guitar for the first time in his career. The songs came quickly, and the “the initial record was put together in a couple of weeks,†a striking comparison to Spiritualized’s earlier records, that took a matter of years to compose.
“I was going to try to write a record that was about fictional characters, that wasn’t about me, and wasn’t based around me. So hopefully that would create something new, in the way that Brian Wilson’s stuff seems to be about characters,†Pierce says, remembering his original mission, before double pneumonia left him hospitalized for weeks in the intensive care unit of Royal London Hospital in 2005.
Many of Spiritualized’s devoted listeners will likely interpret Songs in A&E as an excruciating journey into Pierce’s struggle to survive to the tune of blips and bloops of hospital gear, and the Spaceman concedes that the record has now become “more deeply personal, that it well just might have started with me as a central point.†So much for Ray Charles.
The lead single off Songs in A&E is “Soul on Fire,†an accessible, sweeping love song that feels warm, and not self-medicated warm. The kind of obvious, genuine warmth that isn’t necessarily associated with Spiritualized and this suits Pierce just fine. It is also just one of three songs on the record with “fire†in its title.
“It’s me playing around saying, ‘I don’t want ‘Soul on Fire’ on this record, it’s a pop song! What am I doing? Why would I want to write a song like that?’ I was also saying, ‘Come on, Jase, surely you can rewrite one of these so that it doesn’t have ‘fire,’ not in the song, but in the fucking title!’ And then not only that, but they wind up right next to each other, and they’re not even spaced out. Maybe if I had spaced them out a little, people won’t notice, but it’s just ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’ I didn’t even try to hide it, because it didn’t work anywhere else,†Pierce says.
The single is deceptive, however, because Songs in A&E has its harrowing moments that do connect to Spiritualized’s previous albums in spirit, and when seen in the broader context of the album’s journey, stands all the body’s hairs on end as the best storytelling should. “Death Take Your Fiddle†is augmented with what sounds like a hospital ventilator, but was created using the bellows of an accordion for effect. Another standout track that appears towards the end of the record, “The Waves Crash In,†has a similarly arresting DNA that also set the album’s overall tone and scope.
“[It] was originally called ‘The Old Man Says Goodbye to His Daughter at the Gate,’ and they were two of the characters in this fictional family group, if you like. It was about an old man full of pride and sadness that his beloved daughter was leaving, because that’s what happens in life. ‘Borrowed Your Gun’ has that sort of thing as well; there’s a sort of lineage that goes through things. With ‘The Waves Crash In,’ the lines at the end are the daughter’s lines [where] she’s saying, ‘I know you think I’m staggering, but I really am staggering…’ with both senses of the word. And that was the line,†Pierce remembers.
