The great Spiritualized are back with new album, Everything Was Beautiful, ready to come out on April 22nd. 2022 via Bella Union. The vibrant and exhilarating new single The Mainline Song was partly inspired by the protests in the US near the end of the first Lockdown in 2020.
"I felt like I'd been in training for this my whole life," J Spaceman says of the lockdowns, describing his time in isolation as "beautiful solitude." He'd go through a deserted "Roman London," where "even the sirens had stopped singing" and the earth was "full of birdsong and strangeness and no contrails."
Spaceman plays Sixteen different instruments on Everything Was Beautiful which was recorded in eleven different studios, and at his own home. Spaceman assembled a team of over thirty musicians and vocalists, including his daughter Poppy, collaborator and friend John Coxon, as well as string and brass sections, choirs, finger bells, and chimes from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, hence the record's rich instrumental profile.
Spaceman unfolds: “There was so much information on it that the slightest move would unbalance it, but going around in circles is important to me. Not like you’re spiraling out of control but you’re going around and around and on each revolution you hold onto the good each time. Sure, you get mistakes as well, but you hold on to some of those too and that’s how you kind of... achieve. Well, you get there.”
The artist goes on, remarking on the torturous trials of a self-doubting creative: “There’s a line from Jonathan Meades that’s about having all the attributes to being an artist. ‘Paranoia, vanity, selfishness, egotism, sycophancy, resentment, moral nullity and more idiot than idiot savant.’ And that's what it feels like, this kind of thing. You’re your own worst enemy and biggest supporter. There's a ‘Of course this is worth it. It's me’ and then this kind of deep doubt of ‘What the fuck is this all about?’ And then ‘Why is it important?’ and then knowing there's no easy answer. But it's there. I know it's there.”
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