Spiritualized and Fat Possum Records announce today the reissue of Songs on A&E Departure June 21. The latest installment of The Spaceman Reissue program: curated by J Spaceman, Songs on A&E – completed after J Spaceman's near-death hospitalization – is a collection of elegant country-influenced songs that revolve around familiar themes of love, death, hope and hopelessness.
The reissue has been remastered on vinyl by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios and features renewed artwork, including a new album cover. Accompanying the announcement are the official videos for “Soul on Fire” and “You Lie You Cheat.”
Songs on A&E It's a beautiful, chilling record, and it was pretty much the last thing J Spaceman would release. In 2005, with writing and recording underway, Spaceman was rushed to the Royal London Infirmary with double pneumonia. The new album cover for this reissue is a photograph taken while he lay on what his close friends and family feared might be his deathbed. “We thought he was gone.” recalled his bandmate John Coxon at the time.
While spiritualized devotees will be used to hearing the beautiful darkness of Spaceman's words, the fact that he wrote these things before he became ill only serves to make them more impactful. Spaceman's recovery process was difficult. Weighing only 85 pounds and standing 5' 10″, he had to find the physical and creative strength to finish the album, and this not only came in the form of friends and family, but also working on other projects, among which his collaboration with Harmony Korine stands out (he wrote the soundtrack for her film Mister Lonely), and he is playing live again.
His eventual return to the stage came when he played with Spiritualized guitarist Tony Foster at a Daniel Johnston tribute show in London. “I was underweight and frail, and this was a gentle way to get back on stage. It wasn't my show to begin with, and it was a small band, just me on acoustic and Tony on a Fender Rhodes, but it turned out to be really beautiful. “It was originally going to be just the two of us, but we ended up getting the strings and the girls choir, and as it worked out, it led to other things.”
What followed was a series of Acoustic Mainline shows that began with “Sitting on Fire,” a song that would end on Songs on A&E. The album version is one of the most intimate vocal performances he has ever performed. It is another plea to be released: “Set me free / Because I do believe / It will burn in me / For the rest of my life.”
These shows and the life lived before and after hospitalization, all reported Songs on A&E. It sounds like dying and coming back to life; from the bleakest despair to the highest beauty on songs like “Soul On Fire” and the opiate ballads of “Waves Crash In” and “Don't Hold Me Close” (with backing vocals from Harmony's wife, Rachel Korine) . There are also garage songs like “I Gotta Fire” and “You Lie You Cheat”; super raggedy, like a howling 70s Iggy Pop.
“I remember saying at that time”concludes, “That I felt that people who have these types of experiences become more charitable. They change or whatever. But I think I partly went back to being the same disappointing person I was before. And sometimes I still feel the same. But a lot of people worked very hard to get me out of there and I also realized how lucky I was.”
The country element was informed by “The Devil,” a small black 1928 Gibson acoustic that Spaceman had purchased in Cincinnati while the band was touring for the Amazing Grace album. After the songs came out of the guitar, he recorded most of what is heard in Nottingham.
The first stage of the Spaceman Reissue Program included the launch of Lazer-guided melodies (1992), Pure Phase (nineteen ninety five), Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space. (1997) and let it go down (2001) throughout 2021, and celebrated the 20th anniversary of amazing grace with a reissue in early 2024. Spiritualized's most recent album, Everything was beautifulIt was launched in 2022 with great success.
Songs on the A&E reissue tracklist:
1. Harmony 1 (Mellotron)
2. Sweet talk
3. Death takes your violin
4. I have to shoot
5. Soul on fire
6. Harmony 2 (Piano)
7. Sitting on fire
8. Yes, yes
9. You lie, you cheat
10. Harmony 3 (Voice)
11. Baby, I'm just a fool
12. Don't hug me
13. Harmony 4 (The old man…)
14. Waves crash
15. Harmony 5 (accordion)
16. You borrowed your gun
17. Harmony 6 (Glockenspiel)
18. Good night, good night
Spiritualized Live Dates:
Saturday 11 May – Wrexham – FOCUS Festival
Saturday 18 May – Brighton – Brighton Festival
thanks to our partners at www.xsnoize.com
