Spiritualized release new video for “The Mainline Song” taken from one of the best albums of the year.
With their new LP Everything Was Beautiful due out April 22 via Fat Possum, today Spiritualized share a video for the third single to be taken from their already critically-acclaimed forthcoming album. The propulsive rush of “The Mainline Song” was at least partly inspired by the protests in the US happening towards the end of the first Lockdown in 2020.
While some people imploded in the lockdowns and isolation of the epidemic, others were thriving. “I felt like I’d been in training for this my whole life” says J Spaceman. He was referring to his fondness for isolation and when you reframe loneliness as “beautiful solitude” then it isn’t so bad. He would walk through an empty “Roman London” where “even the sirens had stopped singing” and where the world was “full of birdsong and strangeness and no contrails.” He used the birdsong walks to listen and try and make sense of all the music playing in his head. The mixes of his new record, a ninth studio album, weren’t working out yet.
Spaceman plays 16 different instruments on Everything Was Beautiful which was put down at 11 different studios, as well as at his home. He also employed more than 30 musicians and singers including his daughter Poppy, long-time collaborator and friend John Coxon, string and brass sections, choirs and finger bells and chimes from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. So there’s a lot going on.
“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.”
Eventually the mixes got there and Everything Was Beautiful was achieved. The result is some of the most “live” sounding recordings that Spiritualized have released since the Live At The Albert Hall record of 1998, around the time of Ladies & Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space.
The opening track “Always Together With You” is a reworking / supercharging of a track originally released in demo quality in 2014. This new version is a perfect Spiritualized song; a breathtaking, hard-edged, psychedelic pop tune where themes of high romance and space travel collide.
The artwork is designed once again with Mark Farrow. If you buy the vinyl you can pop a pill box out of the sleeve, revealing gold foil underneath, and assemble the Braille-embossed little thing and put it somewhere in the house. The box set has 8 of them. Literally a boxset. It looks more beautiful in the flesh. “Farrow and I were talking about what we should do and we just said, ‘It’s called Everything Is Beautiful, how could you not have a pill?’”
All these layers, all these details, the year-long mixes, the making sense of it all and the lives lived within these lyrics; for somebody so famously unconfident of his own abilities, isn’t this a punishing thing to keep doing? “Yeah, but I like what I do. 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.”
Spiritualized North American Tour:
03/31/22 – Dallas, TX, – Granada Theater tickets
04/01/22 – Austin, TX – Scoot Inn tickets
04/03/22 – Santa Fe, NM – Meow Wolf tickets
04/04/22 – Denver, CO – Ogden Theatre tickets
04/05/22 – Salt Lake City, UT – The Commonwealth Room tickets
04/07/22 – Seattle, WA – Neptune tickets
04/08/22 – Portland, OR – Revolution Hall tickets
04/09/22 – Vancouver, BC – Commodore Ballroom tickets
04/11/22 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore tickets
04/12/22 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore tickets
04/14/22 – Solana Beach, CA – Belly Up Tavern tickets
04/17/22 – Tucson, AZ – Club Congress tickets
04/18/22 – Phoenix, AZ – Crescent Ballroom tickets
04/20/22 – Los Angeles, CA – Fonda Theatre tickets
04/21/22 – Big Sur, CA – Henry Miller Memorial Library tickets
04/22/22 – Indio, CA – Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival
09/08/22 – Washington, DC – 9:30 Club tickets
09/09/22 – Chapel Hill, NC – Cat’s Cradle tickets
09/10/22 – Atlanta, GA – Variety Playhouse tickets
09/11/22 – Pelham, TN – The Caverns tickets
09/13/22 – Milwaukee, WI – Turner Hall Ballroom tickets
09/14/22 – Minneapolis, MN – Fine Line tickets
09/16/22 – Detroit, MI – Saint Andrew’s Hall tickets
09/18/22 – Toronto, ON – The Danforth Music Hall tickets
09/19/22 – Montreal, QC – Corona Theatre tickets
09/20/22 – Boston, MA – Royale tickets
09/22/22 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer tickets
09/23/22 – Jersey City, NJ – White Eagle Music Hall tickets
09/24/22 – New York, NY – Beacon Theatre tickets
