Return to the Lush Life

Back from his deathbed, Jason Pierce sees the light and gets re-Spiritualized.


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Published: Jul 22, 2008

RECORD ME I'M SICK: Jason Pierce started writing the latest Spiritualized album in a hospital room.

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In July of 1997, if you were doomed to heartbreak and hard drugs but hadn't quite succumbed, Spiritualized's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space was there to put you over the edge. The album was a monument to tainted love chiseled by Jason Pierce's bittersweet orchestral maneuvers and desperate romantic lyrics. It was woozy trance-rock classic that pitted drug use against heartache, and it came packaged as a prescription medicine box with dosage advice, warnings and a foil blister pack. Pain-numbing Brit bop done right, it was sick stuff in more ways than one and to more than just Pierce.

"I don't know if it's specific to that record," says Pierce when asked if he knew how many people found themselves in a multidrug haze after Ladies and Gentlemen was released. "It's a circumstantial thing, isn't it; age, the moment or time in which that record came out. It can be the single most important piece of music in your life if it fits into where you were and what age you're living and what you're doing."

Whether there were specific drugs in his life was never made totally clear during our conversation. More obviously it's the epiphanies around that record — the rise and fall of a love affair — that stand out. But with time, all of what was Ladies and Gentlemen then has become less important to Pierce in the present. "I'm guessing that Ray Charles' 'I Can't Stop Loving You' doesn't still focus upon or conjure notions still as to whom it is he stopped loving. Though that may be oversimplifying," he laughs.

Pierce has lots of good reasons to put the past behind him. One is that the singing-songwriting guitarist had been deathly ill since 2005 with advanced periorbital cellulitis and bilateral pneumonia.

Did he nearly die? Yes.

"I don't want to feel too much like all I talk about is dying or that experience, but I was pretty ill."

Did he see a light?

"I don't know. There's little to report in that regard. I don't have an idea honestly of what my circumstances were like. I think it affects the people around you so much more than yourself."

Is he better now? Indeed. So much so that he's been able to record new solo music for director Harmony Korine's 2008 film Mister Lonely and has just released the first new Spiritualized album in some time, Songs in A&E. It's named for the Accident and Emergency Ward of his British hospital and was started while he was still in the throes of pneumonia. There's a huskiness in Pierce's usually angelic voice now — an octave dropped — that radiates both illness and age. "It's nice, huh?" says Pierce. "It's getting tired. It's not a bad thing for your voice to age. At least you hope you have the opportunity."

Often more threadbare than previous Spiritualized records, A&E feels like a slightly lusher brand of forlorn English folk, the Fairport Convention coming down from a meth jag. Songs like "Death Take Your Fiddle" and its life support machine groan or "Sitting on Fire" and its weary woe are caught in Pierce's tangle of guitars.

There may be soulful moments ("Sweet Talk") and rousing anthems ("Soul on Fire") that speak of "a hurricane inside my veins." There may be the usual Spiritualized stretch of time ("Baby I'm Just a Fool") where an interminable song seems guided by the idea of prayerful mantra. But the whole A&E thing feels leaner and meaner than Spiritualized's epic wall of sound. And for this, blame the hospital Pierce sat in and the acoustic guitar he was plucking.

"It's as if it came with these songs attached," says Pierce, a guy who's never been a sit-around-strumming-an-old-acoustic type. "Usually I play or hum tunes into a machine and work out the chords later. But these songs just came from that 1929 black Gibson that was lighter than a postage stamp. I'm not romantic enough to really think the songs wrote themselves. Yet you can't help but wonder whether it was the devil's handiwork, or a random event that came out of the guitar in my hand."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Spiritualized will play Tue., July 29, 7 p.m., $25-$27, with Dirtbombs and The War on Drugs, TLA, 334 South St., 215-336-2000, livenation.com.