Spirit level

He could just join the re-hash club and tour Spiritualized's classic album, but Jason Pierce has other ambitions, he tells TONY CLAYTON-LEA

JASON PIERCE looks as if he’s been through the wars. Sitting in a hotel ante-room in Dingle, his sunglasses are placed on a small table, despite the howling wind and driving rain outside. His work in Spiritualized has amalgamated gospel, psychedelia, strings and free-jazz wipe-outs that often make you wonder if you’re in heaven or hell.

Right now, though, the softly-spoken, frail-looking Pierce is in reflective mode. It seems he has only recently left the confines of his studio, having spent more than 12 months working on the forthcoming Spiritualized album, Sweet Heart Sweet Light.Is he still in a bit of a daze?

“Yes, I am, to be honest,” he says. “ I’ve spent over a year working on it, and I’ve been so involved in it, at the moment there are no words to describe it.

“I kind of wanted to make a rich man’s record, the kind where you could pursue your ideas without worrying about money – like The Beatles, who latterly in their career had the luxury to work on songs without being told by the studio engineers that they had run out of time. But I didn’t have the money, so one of the ways of allowing me to do it was to record it in my house, and not in an expensive studio.”

Not that he and his musicians were trapped in a home studio 24/7; session work was undertaken in Wales, and a visit to Iceland was arranged to work on the string parts. But time, says Pierce, was of paramount importance. “Time is money, isn’t it, so in the house, there would be flexible working hours – some days I’d be working on the music round the clock, other days it’d be three hours.”

His main goal for Sweet Heart Sweet Light, he says, was to make a pop record, to end up with music that wasn't hidden behind lo-fi distortion. Pierce wanted the songs to be crystal clear, and had in his head a batch of bands to reference: The Beatles, Beach Boys, Captain Beefheart, Big Star, Can, Link Wray, and The Ronettes.

“Many of the records I was looking at were kind of lost in time, so in an odd way I’d set the bar low – it’s easy to make a record that has no commercial expectations.

"Now, let it be said that the new album is nothing like The Beach Boys' Smileor The Beatles' Revolver, but I did want a sound that had been truly realised. I also wanted to sing my songs, rather than just read the lyrics off a piece of paper into a microphone. That took time, but when I got them down it was a performance rather than a read-through."

He was also concerned about the fact that acts touring their classic albums dominate a certain strand of current live music. “It’s almost like it’s the end of the road for them,” notes Pierce (who did this himself just twice, in 2009, as part of an All Tomorrow’s Parties event).

"I want to make albums like Ladies And Gentlemen... right now, not hold it up as an example of how good I used to be. I wanted to go away and write an epic album, and my thinking was that if I'm not competing with anybody then so be it, I'll just compete with myself."

Pierce is aware of his place in rock music which is a determinedly peripheral one. Sweet Heart Sweet Lightis only his seventh album in more than 20 years, and this somewhat limited output reflects both his creative processes and his lifestyle choices (he spent a lengthy period of time in intensive care in 2005, following an unspecified illness). "You get one chance to do these things," he says of the albums, "and it's a slow process because it's nigh on impossible to invent new music. Music for me evolves slowly, so the only way to succeed is to do the best you can to move it in the right direction. In so many parts of music it seems the brakes have been put on, with people saying 'let's look back', when what they should really be doing is looking forward.

“The worst thing about it is I go to hear bands playing their old records, and I’m crossing my fingers – as are a lot of people, I reckon – that they don’t do any new stuff! But I wanted to make a new record that said very clearly, ‘you know what, it’s better than the old stuff’.”

All of the tinkering, all of the time spent on getting something right – everything is in the details, says Pierce.

“In the late mixing stage, you can obsess about whether a fade is an eighth of a second too long or too short, but that’s no different from the early mixing stage of a fade being 10 seconds too long or short.

“The details get smaller as you pursue the goal. I’m not obsessive when it comes to takes – we do about three to four takes of a guitar part and that’s it. Mixing records is based, for me, on four main principles: is it too loud, too quiet, too bassy, too trebly? Simple as that. Yes, you can pursue that almost in a mathematical way, but even if you don’t the end result can be magic. And you don’t necessarily have to understand how it gets to be magic; you can pursue the science of it, but if you don’t it doesn’t make it any less glorious or ruin its beauty.”

Wind and rain still screeches and stings outside. Pierce is looking forward to mooching around Dingle the next day as well as to the gig in St James’s church the following evening. He fidgets with his sunglasses and reaches for his cigarette packet. Our chat, I sense, is coming to a close.

Does his level of meticulousness help or hinder, I ask finally. “It has to be helpful, doesn’t it?” he says. “That said, you can tinker with things too much and for too long and get the wrong results, but that’s the challenge. Some of my favourite sounds are field recordings, but I don’t make records like those. I need and want layers of sound. There is trial and error, for sure. Trial and terror, too!

"Is it mad? It's only mad if you don't finish it. Or if, having worked on something for so long, you break it. But Sweet Heart Sweet Light?No, I don't think it's broken."

Spiritualized perform as part of Other Voices,broadcast on RTE2 during March. The band play Vicar St, Dublin, on March 24. Sweet Heart Sweet Lightis released through Domino Records on April 13