Jason Pierce
Capturing Creation
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J Spaceman: Sorry, I'm a bit on English time so I'm rolling out of bed and the first thing I want is a drink, cuz it's like my lunch time, so my head's gone a bit.
NATN: When did you get in?
JS: Just two days ago. Yesterday. Well, two evenings ago. So I've been here for a day.
NATN: Are you just doing press now?
JS: Yeah, unfortunately. So it all feels kinda dumb. No offense. But when you're here to do shows, there's kind of real energy, a bit of focus for it. When you're here to just talk about yourself, it just kind of dissipates and gets kinda strange.
NATN: Well I saw you when you guys were here for the Field Day show.
JS: Oh, did you go to that? You could only do that in America. You could only move a festival into a stadium last-minute and have people attend in America. I don't think you could do that in England.
NATN: In the pouring rain.
JS: Yeah, in the rain as well. But it was great.
NATN: What was it like from your perspective?
JS: Kinda mixed I guess. Hugely disappointed that it wasn't a festival. Do you want a drink? Did you order that? Oh. Whenever you move from a festival to a stadium, it gets easier for the band, because we're indoors and you get all the stuff.
NATN: With backstage..
JS: Yeah, so it gets so much easier for us and it gets so much harder for the audience, cuz it's raining...So kinda disappointed, cuz at a festival everybody's in it together. And festivals aren't really about the music. And I thought that Field Day, the way it was set up and the reason we were coming out, was they were trying to do something like Glastonbury. And although what gets reported and what gets filmed and what gets talked about is the music, if you ever go to Glastonbury, the last thing that's important is the music. What's important is the volume of people, and the music is a sideshow to it. People will catch maybe bits of sets and they'll catch 20 minutes of the White Stripes or the end of Spiritualized, but what's important is the whole kind of energy of it and getting out for that. So um, I was kinda disappointed because of that, but it was still good. It became a music thing, which was what was weird. That's a long answer, isn't it?
NATN: No, that's great. Yeah, it was a strange experience for sure, but worth having. I was hoping to see Beck, but what are you gonna do?
JS: Yeah, he was wounded, wasn't he?
NATN: Apparently so. We were only going to go to the first day anyway, so we got a strange mix of bands from what we were expecting.
JS: I hope they get it together next year.
NATN: Have you been to Coachella?
JS: We did Coachella the first year, and it seems to have gotten together.
NATN: Yeah, it seems like one that works in America. We don't have anything like Glastonbury.
JS: Glastonbury's like nothing else on the planet. I think it's the best festival.
NATN: So it's been two years since your last album, and now you have a new label and I guess a bit of a new sound. What's been happening?
JS: I think the main thing..there are two things that kind of influenced the making of this record. And one was being asked to play guitar with Springheel Jack. They put together an album called Amassed, which is a primarily improvised jazz record. Free jazz. But they got a kind of all-star cast of American and European free jazz players. And it was kind of an amazing feeling of pride to be asked to perform alongside these people. I look at myself as a guitarist that just plays as something that has to be done. I was saying I've never hit a jazz note in my life. And I don't know one scale from the next scale. So I think to be recognized like that as a player, a guitar player, was something else. And it kinda coincided with talking to Dr. John just after September the 11th. And he was saying 'you should write about this shit'. Not specifically the 11th, but just sort of where we're at. Where we're going, and what we're doing. And he said, 'because your shit means something. People listen to it.' And so this kind of dumb pride, somebody expressing a massive interest in my guitar playing alongside somebody else I admire saying you know, 'your songs are the shit.' Kind of made me want to put that into focus for this album, and write something that was very much about the songs and capturing those songs in their best form. And so, hence Amazing Grace. Because I think when people learn things, they edit themselves and they make things easier for themselves. So you get people who are very skilled, skilled at what they're doing, but it isn't neccesarily as exciting or as free-form or as random as when you're learning how to do that. So I wanted that kind of absolute moment of time just prior to learning. So people couldn't say 'well I've always played this on the bridge,' or 'here's the roll to the chorus, here it comes.' And we got this kind of unique moment in time, which I think was quite exceptional. So that was the deal. And because it's in the recording, there's very little we did after that. A few overdubs, a few big placements, a few bits of strings and whatever. But it was all about capturing that, and again I learned from Spring Heel Jack. I think that's a really magic way to record people. Not to process them or EQ them into radio-perfect sound. But you've got the sound of people expressing their music. That's another long sentence.
NATN: How did that feel to you? Because you've gotten used to on other records sort of poring over the sonic intricacies.
JS: Well I just thought it might sound more affecting. I got to thinking that all the records I love were just documents with very little added to them, whether it's Howlin' Wolf or Robert Johnson, or I don't know, just so much recording I got back to listening to just seemed to be not about processing or not about constructing the sound, but there's something more like capturing the electricity of it. I'd like to say it's kind of liberating, doing things this way. But the truth is, I'm just as obsessed about doing it this way as I was obsessed about the intricacy of constructing something. So it's not this liberating moment in recording for me. It's certainly not garage recording. There's this whole other process going on, that's me making music.
NATN: What was the band setup in the studio?
JS: We were primarily a five-piece. John Coxon, Doggen and myself playing guitars, Tom Edwards, who's a percussionist in the band, and then John Aiken came in as a replacement drummer. Our drummer got seriously ill, we replaced him for the sessions. But we got kinda fortunate with John because he's a really good friend of Kevin Bales, our original drummer. So there was no kinda pressure; he could get well without worrying he'd lost his gig. And somebody was in to do the session, no matter how good it was -- and it was pretty exceptional -- he was never gonna lose his job to it. So he was just gonna get well and come back. And he's back with us, which is great. That's the best news, better than having the album finished, to be honest. So there's five people and some others came in to play some keyboards. That was pretty much how the core of it went down. Then the choir, three girls, the strings and the horns went in afterwards.
NATN: So the symphonic sound came in afterward as overdubs -- is that how you did it on the last record? I remember seeing you used about 100 musicians on that one.
JS: Yeah, it's kind of the economics of it. Cuz if you have a lot of players, and even with the amount of players on this album, it still comes to about 21 or 22 players, you require rehearsals to make it work. It's hard to get that free-form thing happening with a lot of people involved. And also the economics of having a bunch of people waiting around for their callup was just not looking good.
NATN: You can't really have a 100 people in a room and just say "Ok, here's the new song, have at it."
JS: Yeah, so the last record was so about the arrangements. That was primarily where it was at. The songs on the last record are not that dissimilar from the songs on this record. I mean Let It Come Down, even within the theme of the songs, is similar to a lot of the stuff on the new record. "Lord Can You Hear Me?", that's an old song, but the Betty Ford song "The Twelve Steps," there's about five songs that would have fit in well with this new record if they had been recorded in that manner. "Straight And The Narrow" definitely. But the last record was so about arrangements, and so about sort of romanticizing big bands and Ray Charles and Cole Porter sessions and sort of taking that and not looking back. And this is different. It isn't "stripped-down." I think you can only use the word stripped-down because the last record was 100 people. Nobody would call 22 people stripped down. But this was about that kind of beautiful moment that just happens when people are not quite in control of what they're doing. It's just about on the edge. I think this is a great record. I think the songs will possibly get a lot better though, as we perform them and take them to new areas when we play them live. What was captured on this record was the magic that will never happen again, like people hitting notes that they didn't know were actually gonna work. And when people learn that back from the record, it's like theyre making the music. And that's what was so exciting about the free jazz recording. They were making music on the spot, just forcing this sound out that was just out of nowhere without any kind of...I won't say no thought, because that would be a lie. I can't explain it. But it was quite magic how that Spring Heel Jack record came together and the way it was about listening and contributing to what you're hearing rather than playing the parts you know, or the "right parts" to the song.
NATN: In playing the new songs live...
JS: Oh yeah, you've seen it. I keep forgetting you've seen it.
NATN: ..Have you noticed yet any sort of changes or adaptations that the band has made that differ from the "embryonic" album versions?
JS: Well it takes a while before they really start to go and then it takes a while longer before you get this kind of sublime confidence that makes it easier to put the kind of expression across. Stuff that we've been doing the longest, like "Walking With Jesus," and songs that have sat within what we do for a long time, they kind of just roll out, and not roll out in that they're comfortable, but it becomes easier to just inject a feeling and emotion to them. Because the last thing you're concerned about is whether you're hitting the right notes or whether you can get your head around it. And I guess that's different...it's an area beyond what I've been talking about so far. I've been talking about this magic moment at the beginning of the process of a song. I think there's one fifteen years down the line where it's another kind of thing where you can roll them out effortlessly but you can fill them with emotion because the last thing you're really thinking about is the song, the performance of it.
NATN: What other songs in your canon do you think come out like that at this point?
JS: Well, older songs. I think "Walking With Jesus" came out most obviously on our last tour like that. "Come Together" is a bit like that...
NATN: "Take Your Time" maybe? I think y'all played that at Field Day.
JS: Yeah, I think that's what really brought that home; I'd never really thought about it until we did those four shows in America. And then we realized that you could hit that energy within "Take Your Time" almost effortlessly, kinda without even really going after it. Because of that kind of confidence that you're gonna get every time. Which is not always a good thing, but it's really good for now!
NATN: Can you tell me about the genesis of some of these songs? I noticed that a few of them have upfront references to other sort of classic tracks, like "This Little Light Of Mine."
JS: Yeah, who wrote that?
NATN: I think it's just a traditional, you know?
JS: Right, traditional. I think that's the root of a lot of it, is that it's traditional American music, which is like the core of music. And I look at "Amazing Grace" as the other area that sort of forged American music. It's kind of like white people from Europe bringing...actually sadly enough it's white people from Europe going to Africa to get the other pieces of the puzzle and bringing them back to America. So you've got that mixture of kind of white church music with American or African blues music. That's kind of the genesis...this is real genesis, isn't it? And then this massive thing came from that. And I love it. I love all that music. I love the language of that blues and spiritual music. And you can say things with lyrics and with language and with poetry that you can't say in conversation. You know, when it comes to the language of a song you can kind of say anything, but when it comes to like speaking, people would not buy it if I started speaking like someone from Mississippi or whatever, but I can say anything I want with music.
NATN: I guess that's the beauty of music in general. People can listen to one piece of music and interpret it in different ways, and then play their versions back to each other and everyone might learn something that they didn't hear in the original piece. Even the creator.
JS: It's something else, it really is. And each part is such a small part of it, and that's what's also exciting. For all people thinking that they're such an important part of music and such a big player, that's such a tiny part of this whole that you can't cover in a lifetime because there's so many bits that are just wildly exciting along the way. If you're even slightly interested in sort of tracing what brought this kind of music about, what went into this to make this happen. Even if you just turn a few pages of it, you're gonna find more and more types of music. It's amazing.
NATN: You've said before that you started Spiritualized primarily as a live band, and I'm particularly fond of your live record at the Albert Hall. Would you say this new album is sort of a culmination of that desire in that it probably sounds more like your actual live show?
JS: Probably. But it's something that every other album had to be put in place to make this album, to have the confidence to make this album. To know how to put an album like this together. But it's still about playing live; I still maintain it will be 10 times better live. And everybody says 'we're on tour to promote our album', whereas it always feels the other way around, that the album allows us to come out again and play live. The album to me is like a one-off thing that you play it and you're gonna hear a similar kind of take on it. Whereas if you're performing live, the whole thing just gets more and more exciting. I've said it before, it's like you've got seven people on stage and you're hitting all the notes where you think they're gonna work best, and then it's like somebody rips off the roof and just tips in a whole load of other sound. And it's just glorious. And you don't get that from an album. I'm not really talking about going to watch a live show, I'm talking about being involved in performing live. It just gets more electric, more realized, just more excessive. That's what's exciting.
NATN: I sometimes think it's fascinating how music, people making music and playing it, has been going on for thousands of years, but records as a document of one specific performance, have only been around for about a hundred years.
JS: Yes, but saying that, records as far as Americans are concerned, cover just about everything to do with American music, aside from the kind of indigenous people who were here before, everything is represented. Whereas European people, you've got 350 years prior to any kind of recording. but American music, you can buy any form of it pretty much on CD, which is kind of exciting. There aren't many places in the world like that. And that is the kind of music that I make. That excites me the most.
NATN: Yeah, that is interesting. You can get back to the roots.
JS: Yeah, pretty much, you can hear the roots of the music in a recorded form. And that's good. Or interesting, or unusual.
NATN: I guess on the other spectrum of that is that music is being transmuted into digital form en masse, being condensed into ones and zeroes with the option of instantly sending it around the world. What is your take on the pros and cons of digital music, or the digital distribution of music?
JS: I don't think that's a problem. I think the main problem with the Internet, I think, is that if you're trying to hoodwink people, if you're trying to pull a fast one, and say "hey, you should buy this album, it's amazing, you've never heard anything like it, and it's released on this date. Come buy it and you won't be disappointed." If people can't hear it beforehand, you can get them to part with their cash, and if you can get enough people to do so, it can propel it to a high chart place, which sort of drives it even further, and that's kind of a successful business. The Internet cuts into that, because people can hear it before, and it's not so precious about the release date. If they like it or love it, they'll say 'i'll get round to buying this sometime, the next time I pass the store'. It's not so geared toward this one date, or the marketing of it. And I think if you've got something that's really beautiful and it's really well done and nicely put together, I think people who are interested in owning it will own it. And the other thing is it depends on the value you put on your art form. A lot of people who make music are really little more than court jesters. Some of them have put more into developing the art. But realistically, what are they worth? A million dollars, two million, five million? Am I getting close? Who gives a shit? It's just this kind of inflated value. So what some of these people are thinking is, every time someone hears my music via the Internet, they're ticking off "oh, that's ten lost dollars". And it's just like, how much do they think they're worth? And most people who are vocal about it are worth an incredible amount anyway. So I'm fine with the the whole Internet..I'm certainly fine with digital music as a form; I think the sonics of digital music are very good. It's hard to find the differences when you hear it. I do have a slight problem, leaving the Internet for a bit, with people who are talking about this whole resurgence in rock and roll and garage music, which I think is really exciting -- that people are putting guitars back around their necks and making single notes sound like the most interesting and exciting things on the planet. And it is. I have a problem with people who are kinda saying, "but what's most important is the authenticity with which it was recorded." You know, people saying it's all about valves and a certain kind of technology that stopped in 1971 or whatever. I think that's...I'm all for having basic sounds, but I think rock and roll should always look forward, and that people should always look outside of themselves to make music. It shouldn't be about learning to play a rough approximation of Junior Kimbrough and then performing that through a valve amp and saying this is authentic rock and roll. Because that to me is backward. I think rock and roll is dissatisfaction, like Jerry Lee saying "when the hell can I leave this little studio and get me a big band." People just going way outside of what they are able to do. Rock and roll isn't cabaret. Jeez, my sentences are wearing me out.
NATN: If someone who had never heard your music asked you to play your favorite three or four Spiritualized songs for them to give the idea of what the band is, what might you play em?
JS: They'd probably have to all be from the last record. Cuz there's enough going on in that to give some idea. I was saying earlier that there's songs on the last album that could sit easily on this album. And I think there's songs all the way through that can sit well. The form of this band was in place 10 years ago. It was never really gonna deviate from that..this is the music that I like and this is what I do. And the moods within it are quite subtle. So there was a big period in my life where I was absolutely blown away by drum n' bass and jungle. And it informed the music that we were making. But not in these broad moods that people generally make in music, that people can easily perceive. And people quickly write 'this band is avant garde' or 'this band is experimental' when I always think they're not quite as experimental or avant garde as people want to say. It's all about embracing the next big fashion in music. So I knew what I wanted to do ten years ago, and things were always gonna get into it and influence it, but not enough to make it really veer off or change where it's at.
NATN: Yeah, that makes sense. There are definitely songs from each of your albums that you can feel the connection and that also is what strikes me about the live album, is that the songs just flow into each other. I've only seen you twice actually.
JS: You didn't go to the gig here?
NATN: No, I missed it.
JS: It was great. We'll be back in October though. I don't know where we're playing.
NATN: The other time I saw you was in 1998, when you were opening for Radiohead in Chicago.
JS: So you only see us whenever we play with Radiohead.
NATN: Yeah, right! Funny. But you just were able to keep the energy on sort of a trajectory, with the songs all complementing each other. Now, you guys have played some unique venues in the past, including the World Trade Center and the CN Tower. Do you have any further ambitions along those lines?
JS: Not really. We were kind of joking about playing the world's most dangerous show.
NATN: What would that be?
JS: Oh, I don't know, in some kind of military zone somewhere. Somewhere where there are kids who would really love to get out and see a show. But I think that's just fantasy. Those ideas aren't really talked about much. When everything is in place, it all kinda works on the fly, you know? I haven't got any great ambition to do stuff like that, it just sort of works out at the time. Those shows just happen. The Mt. Etna shoot was like that -- just seeing it on TV one day and two days later we were there on the mountain with rocks flying around us. I like that kind of thing -- 'hey let's just do it' -- and if everything is in place, you can make the right calls and make that happen. I think we just put everything in place at the moment, so it's all ready, just in case.
NATN: There have always been heavenly references sort of, on past albums, and you reference Lord again in "Lord Let It Rain On Me." Are you really reaching out to some spiritual being, or is it just that the music itself is religion?
JS: It all comes down to language again. It's just the language of...if you say 'let it rain on me' as a line, people might think, 'oh, he's kind of down, or he's kind of dismissive'. If you say "Lord, let it rain on me," you're in a fighting mood. You know, "Lord, let it rain on me" is like "come on, show me what you've got," you know? So it just makes sense to everybody who had that kind of upbringing, that Western society upbringing. Same thing with "Amazing Grace" -- people know what you mean without even having to talk about it. I mean, it has some kind of resonance in people's lives, whether you're religious or not. Even if it's just a state with which to attain, the idea of Amazing Grace is universal. And it's the same with this. I think it's laid out a bit plainer for people on this one: the lines like "heaven ain't above us, there's no hell below us." This is where it is, you know? This is where it matters.
NATN: So just bring it on.
JS: Yeah, just bring it on, and let's sort it out. There's no kind of weight to the idea that we can work toward this kind of eternal happiness, that you'll be judged. I'm just saying that it's about now, it's about what's going on today, and that's what's important.
TROY CARPENTER | Troy Carpenter founded NATN from a Chicago apartment during the ambitious winter of 1998 with co-conspirators Ben French and Jonathan Cohen. After a five-year stint in New York, he and wife Lourdes have recently relocated to Indianapolis, where he spends days listening to music and nights in the kitchen at Elements restaurant. Musical heroes: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Super Furry Animals. What else makes life worth living: Sushi, Phucty, runs in the park, and the Atlanta Braves.