Interview with Jason Pierce - Spiritualized

Interview by Grayson Currin

"I must confess nervousness in advance of a phone call to Jason Pierce, the co-founder of Spaceman 3 and, later, Spiritualized. From afar, Pierce has always seemed slightly manic with the media, embracing its platform to talk about his process of making a record but quickly turned off by its questions about his personality, his drug use, and the personnel problems of his bands.
Up close, though, his music-- especially its obsessions, like its overwhelming volume and scope and its pervasive tension between getting high with Jesus, getting high with drugs, and possibly dying in the process-- means a great deal to me. When I listen to a Spiritualized record, I listen to it on repeat for days on end, committing fully to Pierce's own full commitments. When he makes a record, he does so completely. Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space exited via a 17-minute closing groove, and Let It Come Down featured 100 musicians, including Dr. John. At his best, Pierce sounds like an all-or-nothing sort, one not prone for small talk or half measures. So why would this self-involved titan want to waste time talking about a new record that, for him, is already old?
To my surprise, Pierce had a lot to say after awaking near noon in a New York hotel. Our conversation spilled outside of the time slot set by his publicist, and, throughout, he seemed genuine, thoughtful, well-considered. If he was ever going to respond that way, now seems like the time. The past few years have been difficult for Pierce: In 2005, he nearly died, weighing just 112 pounds and entering type-one respiratory failure in Royal London Hospital. He was diagnosed with "advanced periorbital cellulitis with bilateral pneumonia."
When he came to, Pierce was left with an album he knew he needed to finish but comprised of songs with which he could no longer connect. He found his muse in a filmmaker and, once again, in American soul and folk music. Songs in A&E, Pierce's sixth studio album as Spiritualized, is a full-volume, ultra-dynamic return to glory. And the Spaceman likes to talk about it.

Pitchfork: Jason?

Jason Pierce: Is it that time already? [laughs]

Pitchfork: Rise and shine. Should I call back?

JP: No, it's fine. You're probably the first of many for today. How are you doing? I didn't realize it was so late already. I've just woken up. I've got to hit the ground and start talking about myself immediately.

Pitchfork: Today is the last day of three days of press-- interviews and photo shoots in New York. What's the difference between this press trip and others? The 2001 trip seemed busy and stressful.

JP: What was it like in 2001? I can't remember. I can't compare the two because I can't remember what 2001 was like. But it's good. It feels good. I feel quite a lot of relief just to have finished that record, so it's gotten a lot easier now.

Pitchfork: After your stay in the hospital, how frightening was it to think you might need to give up on the songs you'd written? That's a lot of work simply to scrap.

JP: Sometimes it seemed like it was just as hard to try and finish it as it was to throw it away. Yet, those songs were all written before my illness. The whole album was written with kind of fictitious characters in mind. The whole idea was to write an album that was outside of myself and, hopefully because of that starting point, I would write an album that was considerably different than anything I'd written before. But then when I came back to it after my illness, all the songs sounded deeply personal, almost like they were more related to me than if I started with me as a central character. It was really harrowing and really kind of impossible to find a way back into it until Harmony [Korine, the filmmaker] became involved.

Pitchfork: How long have you known Harmony?

JP: Only since I met him when he came to see me at the Daniel Johnston show. He came to see me and asked me if I'd get involved with some music for his film, Mister Lonely. He's not like an old friend. He became a friend, but he put me-- I think it was kind of a dumb move-- in a studio to make some music. And it was hugely liberating because I didn't have to front the music I was making. It was literally incidental music. It was incidental to his film, so I didn't have to stand by it and say, "Look, this is my new project. This is where I am today. This is what I'm doing." By being in the studio just working with sound like that, it just became...I was producing a lot of music, and-- somewhere during that process-- I decided to work on my own album in parallel to the film music. So the two kind of bled into each other. There are bits of my album in the film. There are bits of the film in my album. And the film gave the album an atmosphere, a sense of space that it was in, which it didn't have before. Before I became involved with Harmony, the album just sounded like 11 old songs that came after each other. The film kind of gave it this space that it sits in now, that makes it work.
Also, Harmony is like the craziest person I've ever met. He really is out there. And the enormity of his thing, his film, put my album in perspective for me. He's this crazy motherfucker who's taking on that, and all I've got to do is piece these last bits of the jigsaw together. It was fortuitous and kind of the best thing artistically for me, but also on a friendship thing, you know?
Pitchfork: Had you seen any of the film when you started recording?

JP: I don't think he'd started shooting, so there wasn't a lot to look at, you know? I'd read the script. A friend of mine was in the film, so I'd seen the script. I knew what he was talking about. I wasn't completely in the dark. I started the music immediately because it seemed like it didn't matter. If I was making music, I was making music. Whether it was in the film or not, it was still making music.

Pitchfork: What was your goal for the music for the film, in terms of sound, idea and even technique? Or did you not have one in mind?

JP: The music for the film? [pause] There's a question. I don't know. I can't remember. I think I was just in the studio on my own, so it wasn't like trying to construct anything. It wasn't like being with people and saying, "This is what we're trying to achieve here." I just sat with a piano or a drum or whatever and just made music. That's why it's hugely liberating to do that kind of stuff-- I'm trying to achieve this kind of thing.
Making a record's a real fight for me. I'm constantly fighting with this thing inside of me that says I should be sitting in a room with Matthew Shipp or I should have Han Bennink on drums or this song should be playing for the next 20 minutes in my head, not a silly little pop song. It's constant.
Things like "Soul on Fire"-- I didn't want that on the album. When it's a pop song, I don't really want to do pop songs, but they exist and sort of come out by accident. I couldn't find anybody to back me up on that. I couldn't find anybody to say, "Yeah, that's a good idea. Take ‘Soul on Fire' off the record." With Harmony's thing, I was kind of free to do that, to say I'm going to make some music now that doesn't have to fit into anybody's criteria. They didn't really even have to fit the film.
The beautiful thing about Harmony is that he's constantly challenging what works in a film and what doesn't. Whether you love it or hate it or whatever, it's constantly in this place where it's not a comfortable place to be. It's not like "Ahh, yeah, I understand that on the simplest of forms, or on the simplest of terms." So it didn't matter, you know? If he took it, he could have it. If he didn't, it didn't matter. I was still making these pieces of music because it made sense. And maybe, in an odd way, they were more about what I'd been through than these old songs that sounded like they were about what I'd been through.

Pitchfork: I imagine it felt really good just to be creating again.

JP: Yeah, and having somebody value that as well, which I felt was also really important, too. I'm not the most confident person, anyway, and to have somebody who really valued and was excited about these things... I don't work on my own records in a kind of public way. I don't play stuff for people and go, "Is that all right?" I don't do sort of jokes and say, "How was that for you guys?" It's a deeply sort of personal thing, and it has to be good for me to justify everything else that goes on, even calling up a band and saying, "C'mon, let's get together." People have to put effort into that, so-- until it's great in my mind-- it's like, "What the fuck's the point of that effort?" With Harmony's thing, I was working with someone who was deeply enthusiastic about what he was doing, and it was absolutely the best time in my life to be working with someone who was like that.

Pitchfork: When you played the Mainlines shows last year, you were playing some of the songs that became Songs in A&E. How close were they to finished?

JP: They kind of existed as songs, but I don't think they were finished. They hadn't found that kind of...I'd mixed 'em a few times. I'd tried everything. I'd tried to mix 'em like I was mixing an old Spiritualized album-- mixing up the sounds and applying reverbs and stuff. And I'd just gone through everything to try and get this down and finished, and it just sounded like the application of an idea to something. It sounded wrong. I think the mixes were finished maybe a year after we'd played them live.
For a while, I tried to make them sound like the acoustic thing, like, "This is how they're supposed to be. Let's do it like the acoustic shows would do it." But it sounded wrong. It seemed like I couldn't find a space for them to sit in that worked. And then it all kind of happened, having gone through all of that. Sometimes it's easier to make decisions when you know that you've tried things that are so wrong, you know, "OK, I don't go that way with it. I don't go this way with it." The way I work, I kind of have to go down all those wrong paths to know that the one I'm doing really is the one that is going to work.

Pitchfork: Did those shows help you see how the songs should work, or how they should fit together?

JP: Kind of, and also that they were to good not to finish. We had to find a way to put this album together, and, also, I had to make them contemporary again. I don't mean contemporary like contemporary to modern music. I mean contemporary to me, contemporary to my life, like I wasn't just working on a set of old songs. At times, it felt like someone had asked me to remix my last album or the album before that. "What is that? It's been finished forever. It's been a long time since it's been finished. What's the point of carrying on with it?" That's what this record felt like when I was working with it. So [the shows] kind of made the songs contemporary again.

Pitchfork: Mixing has always been so important to Spiritualized records. You're infamous for struggling through that process over a long period of time. What were the particular challenges of mixing this one?

JP: A lot of those challenges are the same as every record: You have to find that space. My records don't mix in a conventional sense, like, "Oh, here you go." I don't mean they're unconventional records, but they just have to find a space. It's almost accidental. I tried everything with this one, and I don't mind going down paths that I kind of know aren't going to be the one that will work. But I might get a tiny little gem that I can carry into the next process. It's weird because, what I ended up with this record, I ended up mixing it with no studio effects. I ended where I was with Amazing Grace, where anything that was added to it in the mix stage just sounded like I'd applied some reverb to it or whatever. So all the reverbs in the sounds are the rooms that the tracks were recorded in.
That was the energy in it, and I was quite happy because that's what I'd been trying to talk about when I was working on those albums with William Parker and Evan Parker and Matthew Shipp [2003's Spring Heel Jack Live]. Those records are all about performance and just sticking a microphone into the performance and capturing it, not about trying to produce a record, you know? I kept saying I got sick of listening to people's productions, like people who had no ideas, no songs, nothing to say but could still con people's ears into thinking those songs were there by the application of production. I kind of wanted my record a little more honest than that: "Well, this is us. We put a microphone on it. Here it is."

Pitchfork: Care to name any names?

JP: [laughs] No, you can fill in your own. You can fill in where you feel like they apply. A ton of stuff, you know? I'm not talking about the tiny little specific thing. I'm talking about a lot of music. It's that kind of thing where people still talk about making songs for radio or doing a radio mix or something. The idea of making a record for the medium with which you're going to try and sell that record is just kind of weird. I make records. I don't make records...[breathes in]
People are now telling me, "Albums are dead. You've got to make your records in tiny, bite-size pieces people can download." Well, I don't want to fucking do that. I make albums. I make these things that have their own space and time, and they fit. There's a link and a relationship between certain songs and certain ideas and certain themes. I'm kind of going, "What next? If you want me to do little bite-sized things, I'll just do the chorus for you. Or I'll just have them download the notes A and E." You can read an excerpt from a novel or a book in a magazine, but you can't deny that it's from a book, you know?
I don't make records for this medium with which we're going to sell it. The selling of it can never be more important than what you're actually making. There's too much of that in the world-- in everybody's world, not just in music. There's too much, "Are you hip to this kind of stuff?" "Hey, this is cool." "Are you hip to it, because this is what we're selling today?" I think it's bullshit. I'm rambling now.

Pitchfork: You mentioned selling the notes A and E instead of the record itself. Tell me about the titular pun.

JP: I don't think it translates in America very well. "A and E" in England only means "Accident and Emergency." I did suggest that maybe we call it Songs in Accident and Emergency and spell it out in America, like subtitle it. If I say "The record's called Songs in A & E," to someone in England, they'll go "Accident and Emergency." They'll know what that means. It's written everywhere. It's written on every single hospital.

Pitchfork: Did that medical reference become apparent from your time in the studio, or reflecting about that time?

JP: I've got a feeling that it was there before again, before I went in there. But my memory's lost that one I'm afraid. It was always a good pun. It wasn't meant to allude particularly to a stay in a hospital. The idea that-- I don't have to explain it-- that the keys of A and E musically and the idea that these songs are...it kind of fits in with all my songs. I think they're all Accidents and Emergencies. I don't know why I do this. It's not any easy process. I don't even think I'm gifted in a way that someone can just stick a microphone and say, "Hey, this guy can play the guitar." Because I can't! I don't even play the guitar. The only time I play the guitar is when I walk on the stage, and that's it. It sort of seemed like it fit with the way my songs kind of came together, anyway.

Pitchfork: Particularly with Let It Come Down, you talked about the songs not necessarily being autobiographical, so it seems that writing outside of yourself has always been of interest. You mentioned before finally making this record about characters. Why haven't you tried that before?

JP: I think that you've just got to be honest, and sort of the greatest music is almost recorded by accident, coming out of people that are not doing it to make...There's always this talk of the industry of music and about selling records and whatever, but that ignores probably the majority of music that isn't about trying to sell itself, that isn't about being connected to any industry. There's a huge amount of music where someone just happened to have a tape recorder and turned it on or hit the red button while they were in the back of church or recording something in their front room. There's a huge amount of that music from America.
I've just got this thing that music has to be honest. So I never really wrote about characters, but this album was definitely about a group of people that were going to populate these songs, which I'd never done. "The Waves Crash In" was called "The Old Man Says Goodbye to His Daughter at the Gate", and it was about exactly that. It was about an old man filled with pride and sadness that his daughter was old enough to leave home and go out into the world. His whole future was embedded in this person, like this lineage of time. "Borrowed Your Gun" was that kind of sentiment as well, that the future is with children. The lines at the end of "The Waves Crash In" were the girl's lines back to the father. He's like, "Look, I'm really sad to see you go, but I'll try and be with you forever." And the girl's throwing these lines back that are saying "I know you think I'm staggering but lately I've been staggering," with both senses of the word.
But, like I say, that may have been where I started with it, and I can still relate that story about that's what it's about. But it kind of isn't about that anymore. It became deeply about me and where I was. Now that it's finished and it's out there, even that's irrelevant. Maybe it's relevant for a couple of weeks while I talk about the album, but eventually the songs become about and for whoever's listening to them. I've said the line about Ray Charles a million times, but nobody listens to him singing "I Can't Stop Loving You" and wonders who Ray can't stop loving. They apply that to their own lives. That will happen with this.

Pitchfork: Did the lyrics change at all when the titles changed?

JP: No, they were the same lyrics, the same words.

Pitchfork: So only the titles changed?

JP: Yeah, and a different sense of what the song meant to me. "Death Take this Fiddle" was written from a place with pride, almost like life isn't worth living unless death is around. As soon as you understand that and as soon as you can go really close to death, everything can make more sense. That's a place where people will always want to go. Obviously, after my illness, it could no longer really sound like that anymore, but that's where it started. To write a song like that with any form of pride after an illness sounds like the actions of a fool. The whole sense of where it was at changed.

Pitchfork:You keep mentioning the sort of American music where there just happened to be a microphone, where a recorder happened to preserve an authentic musical moment. People always talk about you buying the Stooges record as a teenager, but when did you first hear this sort of soul or folk or gospel music from America?

JP: A little later than that. The blues thing was slightly more mainstream. There were a lot of kids who were into rockabilly when I was a kid, when I was 16 or so, and listening to John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters and that kind of stuff.
The Staple Singers was probably the first gospel stuff I heard. I used to listen with Natty [Brooker, original drummer of Spaceman 3]. He taped a lot of radio shows, like Alexis Korner radio shows. The Staple Singers was somewhere in the middle of all that. The main reason was they just sounded alien. I think the track was "Tell Heaven," and it's just this long, extremely slow vocal thing. A lot of what people were playing as blues then was more like white blues bands. So [The Staples] immediately sounded alien, like it just dropped from the sky or something. Once you get an in, it's like anything. You want to hear more. "Where did this come from?"
It still seems like it's endless. I found those Mississippi Records from Portland, and they've got whole catalogues and more of that stuff. You listen to like the Rev. Charlie Jackson, and you think "Wow, where's this from?" It's some guy in Kentucky with an electric guitar playing this amazing stuff...and then there's a whole ton more of this kind of stuff. All of the George Mitchell stuff that Fat Possum just put out...It's this kind of thing that, but for the sort of luck of that person being there at that time and putting something down, this music almost wouldn't be here. But for that kind of accident, they're there, and there's more of it. It's beautiful stuff."

You can find the interview here:
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/50952-interview-spiritualized

By the way a very interesting site to RSS and keep updated.

I can't wait to see Spiritualized live for the first time I just hope Alive's sound will be much better than last year's...