For Spiritualized fans who've been biding their time during the four long years since 1997's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, the good things are about to arrive. After much reorganizing and remixing, Spiritualized mastermind Jason Pierce has finally emerged from the studio with Let It Come Down. The album's an epic, melodic journey that passes through gospel, blues, guitar rock and classical music on its way to the musical beyond.
On first listen a logical if somewhat uneventful progression from Ladies and Gentlemen's hovering ballads and swaying melodies, on closer inspection Let It Come Down reveals a richness that will sate anyone who has been loving Pierce's music since his days in Spacemen 3. Using everything from French horns to kettle drums, Pierce and his cohorts have created a pleasantly bombastic mix. While gearing up for his U.S. tour, Pierce took a few moments to talk about emotions, religion and the music of his dreams as he reflected on the next phase of the Spiritualized sound.
Well, first off, why don't you start by telling me what took you so goddamn long? What was the process in the studio? Did it take you awhile to decide what direction you were going to head in after the release of Ladies and Gentlemen?
It's a long story. The way I thought we were going to go was a sort of "no God, only religion" sort of freeform style, where you've got a song and melody but then you can deviate from it, play around with it. That sort of process takes awhile to perfect. It's always been interesting to me the way that pop music has progressed over the years. Jazz, for instance, has used the same sounds, the same instruments, untreated, for years. This is broadly speaking, of course, but what has changed in jazz is the vocabulary of the harmonics. They don't use the same notes or the same scales, whereas popular music is still using the same scales and harmonics but the sounds have changed. And I think because people aren't stretching the harmonics, it's almost like the songwriting has been getting worse. But that's hidden behind these new and exciting ways of hearing sound. You can disguise ill-conceived things with new sounds, or the other trick is to use lo-fi to give it a certain charm.
And you wanted to move beyond this and start experimenting with structures rather than sounds?
Well, I wanted to focus on the orchestrations. Pop music is usually done like a film, where the core parts are written and then the orchestrations are added to that. I wanted to try it differently. So I set about trying to work way outside of what I had thought my abilities and expectations were. I guess that's the key every time, to try to make something that isn't about what was done last time, that isn't about treading water, or saying, "This is what the people want." It's about testing myself. I couldn't write or read music before this album, so I set about the task of writing every single note for the orchestra without any idea how to do that. So it was a long and exciting process.
How did you know you had found the sound and the style you wanted, that the album was finally complete?
I really wanted it to sound like a big band, like a session with Ray Charles or Cole Porter. I didn't want to sound exactly like those records, but I wanted it to have that feel, that immediacy, but at the same time an intimacy to it. For a long time it just sounded huge and bombastic. As soon as I realized a way of working around that, a way of retaining the intimacy, I knew I was on the way to finishing it.
While Let It Come Down is very much a Spiritualized album, there does seem to be an evolution. Yet there are still the obvious influences of the music you love, the gospel touches, for instance. I think that the thread that connects all your albums is the sort of guiding influence of the music you love.
There are people who say they don't want to listen to other people's music because they don't want to be influenced, but all you do then is place yourself in a vacuum. I think the more you can know about the way things have been done, the more you can go beyond that. I love the feeling in gospel. In gospel music, it doesn't matter if you believe in the message, it's about the way you react to the feeling of the music. To me spirituality is that feeling you get from music, that higher plane, it has nothing to do with organized religion. Although the name Spiritualized is good for getting through customs. "Yes sir. It's heavy gospel, sir." "Okay then, carry on."
I think that feeling you just described shows up lyrically as well. You tend to choose to sing about universal emotions honestly.
It's interesting because I think people think I'm this perennially lovesick, melancholic person and it's not true at all. I don't write about personal experiences as much as I write about general emotions. I try to do it with a bit of humor, but without smugness. I think with emotions like love, to write about it, you have to be apart from it. It's not about giving yourself over to it, it's about being able to express it because you're outside of that feeling.
I think there is also a strange familiarity about the music itself, something people recognize, although they're not entirely sure why.
Well, I didn't say this originally and it's a horrible line, but when I heard this quote it really struck me. Someone once said about music that as a musician you don't try to make the music you hear in your head, you try to make the music you hear in your dreams. And I think that's very true, although it may sound corny. In the end, when you make an album that's the feeling you want to come through.
Spiritualized plays Thurs., Oct. 25, at Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave. (57th St.), 247-7800.