J Spaceman, aka Jason Pierce, is the London-based artist behind Spiritualized, and formerly Spaceman 3. His latest record, Music for Williams Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton, with John Coxon, is out now.
1. Music
I went to see Bob Dylan two or three nights ago. My sound engineer said he was thinking about how lucky we were to be living in an era where we could actually go to see Dylan or Iggy perform live. Like being alive in the 16th or early 17th century and actually seeing Shakespeare perform…
And I was thinking about the way that everybody holds him in such high esteem — and rightly so, don’t get me wrong. But I was also interested in the way that one of the songs on his new album is called I Contain Multitudes, which to my knowledge at the time was a science book about life within the human body. It’s actually a Walt Whitman quote. It made me think that what makes Bob Dylan incredible is not that he’s on a pedestal way above everyone else, with some kind of magical or “God”-given mysterious talent that belongs only to only a few certain people, but that he’s exactly the same as everybody else. He quotes the things that interest him, the poetry and literature, and expands upon it. Almost like the way that people always say that Shakespeare invented the language… but he didn’t invent the language in the absence of the language itself. He did the things that everybody does, which is, “Oh, I’ll have that. And “I’ll expand on that”, and “I’ll steal that.” You know the line, “talent borrows, genius steals”? — it’s all kind of wrapped up in the same thing. And I don’t mean that everyone is on the same level as Bob Dylan or Shakespeare artistically. But I just found it interesting that the way Dylan writes songs is not dissimilar from the way everybody writes songs. That what makes him great is that he is just the same as you and I. It’s the normality that makes it exceptional.
It made me think that music is like that. That music itself is something that is within everybody. And thinking about folk music, and the way that people have always made music at all times, even under great stress, war, famine, etc. — it’s not just a business, where you write songs and you sell them. It’s something that people have always done, and always will do. What makes music really special is that, not the kind of stuff that’s untouchable, like people who can move their hands so fast you can’t see them on a fretboard. That’s not really that interesting to me.
What makes music special is that it’s within everyone. Everyone sings to keep the voices in their head quiet. And there’s nothing greater than human voices in harmony.
2. Language
I had a big argument at Christmas — which doesn’t make me sound like a good Christmas guest — about pronunciation. It was being argued that pronunciation isn’t important in language and I kind of disagreed. I mean, it’s always disappointing as a child when someone tells you you’re not saying something right, because there should be no hard and fast rules. But pronunciation is the difference between mean, moan, moon, mine, etc., and if you’re shouting “lee-on” or “line” at the top of your voice on the Savanna, you’re going to get eaten by the biggest cat. Language is about being able to make yourself understood — if you don’t get it right you’re not able to put your ideas across. And ideas are best served if they are understood.
But I love that you can play on that, you can pun, and you can twist it. I love the idea that you can express things that completely floor people, in just a few words that really move them. And it’s the same words that are open to everybody. They’re all there. You just assemble them in the way that best suits your purpose
3. Solitude and failure
Maybe this one is a cry for help — like, “Leave me alone a while!” But I think in a world where everyone wants to be “there” and to be seen, sometimes stepping back from that is the most important thing you can do for yourself. And with that, I think there’s a notion that people have the best of times all the time, but we all know that everybody suffers from every emotion, from all possible human emotions, at some time in their life, even when it all seems to be going well. So sometimes stepping out of that and recognizing failure can be the best thing that happens to you — you can find a way to go back and do it better, and realize, “Oh, I can do this”, or “I can circumnavigate that and go here” — I think having space to allow for that is an important thing.
J Spaceman & John Coxon’s Music for Williams Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton is out now.
As told to Annie Fell.
