| Spiritualized – Broken Heart Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Obviously it's a cliche to refer to the breakup with Kate Radley when looking under the surface of the tracks on the album "Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space". This is surely one of the most heartfelt and fragile songs Jason has ever written, and obviously draws on pain and heartbreak experienced somewhere. The listener can equally use it to find solace, as a way of expressing feelings by proxy. When your own emotions are damaged to the point you can't find the words to express them: it's like Jason Spaceman has done the hard work for you, hence you can draw strength from the knowledge someone else has also felt your pain. In all the media interviews and conversations with fans Jason had just after the release of this in 1997, he made a point of explaining that virtually every song recorded since Sam Phillips put Elvis on the map, has used the first and third person to lyrically relay emotions and so forth, which the singer/artist/writer/performer or whatever has expressed as their own, but in most cases music journalism has not held the writer or performer to their word, in respect of the songs they were singing, as a reflection of personal experience. Jason was right to point this out - Sam & Dave are not perpetual "soul men" and Evie Sands might just sometimes be able to let go, despite the heart-wrenching pleas, whilst John Lennon was not always a "Jealous Guy". Yet the music journalism surrounding Spiritualized's third album, seemed determined to attribute every emotion expressed over the course of the record, to the actual events which happened in J.Spaceman's real life during the years preceding the release of this seminal work. Whilst I appreciate his frustration with the lazy reporting typical of most reviews of both the "Ladies and Gentlemen..." album (upon release in 1997) and the subsequent gigs it toured, all charged with the momentum of a band already known for its brilliant live shows, now with the added impetus of touring and playing songs from a record elevated above previous Spiritualized albums by the incredible public and press reception. Yet Jason's own emotions were very much bound up with certain resonances implicit in the heartfelt feelings present in some tracks. Now we are able to better look back with perspective, I think it's fair to say Jason utilized feelings from his heart and soul to emote the raw and intense experiences, both in the break with Kate, and other experiences that prompted and influenced his creative brilliance, as he composed tracks for this album. It's no surprise that alongside rhetoric and metaphor, the songs that express emotions in their most raw form, happen to come across as songs Jason felt most personally, when he performed the album live some 12+ years after its release - from the London Barbican to the Radio City Music Hall in NYC - now it seems a lot easier to see where tracks such as that in question here, are one of such that have a special and personal place we can legitimately link to the original circumstances that surrounded the release of "Ladies and gentlemen..." way back in 1997. If you look up the "Don't Look Back" gigs on YouTube, it's not hard to see what is still close to Jason's heart all these years later. I was lucky enough to see a few of those concerts live, but for those who missed them there's still some pretty good footage available online, which is as close to the next best experience anyone's likely to come now - when heard through a decent hi-fi, home cinema etc. |
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| Spiritualized – Out Of Sight Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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This is one of Jason Pierce's greatest lyrics, and as with many of the songs from this criminally underrated album "Let it Come Down" - shows a real progression in lyrical sophistication (first evident on "Ladies and Gentlemen...") compared with the first two Spiritualized albums and his Spaceman 3 material. His clever inversion wordplay found in this song is subsequently explored in the track "I Am What I Am" (co-written with Dr John) which was finally recorded and released on 2012's "Sweet Heart, Sweet Light" (although the lyrics originally appeared with a very different tune on live performances from 1998). "Out of Sight" is clearly a favorite track of Jason's. Since the tour that followed the release of "Let it Come Down" he has rarely performed tracks from this album. Probably because (apart from "On Fire") the grand orchestral and choral arrangements make those tracks hard to play live with the normal electric Spiritualized band. However when the band played the whole "Ladies and Gentlemen..." album live, with full choir and orchestra - at every show the song he chose as an encore, the song to follow that album's closer - the epic and cacophonous "Cop Shoot Cop", was a fantastic live rendition of "Out of Sight"! |
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| Belle & Sebastian – Sleep the Clock Around Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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That's BS - paracetamol tastes much worse that Diazepam if you let it dissolve in your mouth, whether they be 2s,5s, 10s or old-style jellies! But this song has nothing to do with any of that, folks are getting caught in a distraction with no bearing on the song. |
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