Spiritualized - Broken Heart

"Though I have a broken heart. I'm too busy to be heartbroken."

Album: Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space [3rd album]
Recorded: London, England
Genre: Rock, Gospel
Album Release: June 16th 1997
Length: 3.55
Producer: Jason Pierce
Vocalist: Jason Pierce [age 31]
Label: Dedicated Records

Official Audio


Live on Jools Holland

Charts, Streams & Sales

UK (albums): #4
UK (albums): Certified gold in January 1998
Spotify: 39,000,000 +
YouTube Music: 2,400,000 +
NME Best Albums of 1997: #1
Pitchforks Best Albums of the 90's: #55
Select Magazine Best Albums of 1997: #2
Vox Magazine Best Albums of 1997: #2

Credits

Strings (Balanescu Quartet)

Details

• Pierce's then girlfriend Kate Radley (above, left) joined the band in 1992. At that point the group hadn't made any albums. She played keyboards.
• The albums tracks were initially built using a 24 track Atari sequencer, creating a persistent spine that the live band could play on top of.
  
  

  

  An Atari sequencer
  

  
  
• Jason Pierce's girlfriend and bandmate, Kate Radley left him in 1995. Kate didn't only leave, she left in secret, to get married to Richard Ashcroft. Spiritualized would open for Ashcrofts band, The Verve, just four days later. While Radley had left the relationship, unequivocally, with a thud, she wouldn't leave the band until 1997. Sounds like a complicated two years. She would finally go after the release of this lush, haunting, uplifting, aching album.
  
  Pierce, who had sole creative control over Spiritualized, maintains that the heartbroken love songs on the record were written before the pair split and that the lyrics were largely an empathetic imagining of him in someone elses shoes. Someone who just so happened to be going through an emotional experience near identical to his own. It seems hard to believe though Pierce is adamant. People do split up everyday but you can practically hear his heart break on 'Cool Waves' and 'Broken Heart'. Maybe it was his subconscious telling him something.
  
  'Broken Heart' is about keeping yourself busy as a way of dealing with loss. Pierce references his struggles with drugs and alcohol with lines like "I'm wasted all the time. I've got to drink you right out of my mind."
  
  I don't blame Jason Pierce for wanting to keep things out of the papers. A musician who puts his heart and soul into his music is one thing but you don't have to spell it out for the press. The listeners can hear the music, feel it and that's enough. The funny thing is though, the break up gifted Pierce with the best music of his career. You can hear the heartbreak in every word on certain songs. On 'Cool Waves' alone he says "love you" nine times. While the album does have this agonised beauty it's not all it has. There is also gospel and psychedelia, otherwise known as religion and drugs. Pierce was addicted to heroin at the time and some people speculate that's what he was crying out for but I don't buy it. The record can, in parts, be an almost transcendental experience and it's love not drugs that gives you that.
  
  
• "People always ask me if they're autobiographical, and I guess if I wanted to write anything autobiographical I'd write an autobiography. But I'm not. They're written larger than life. I've always wanted to deal with extremes, with high highs and low lows. I'm not writing little vignettes of life, not that that's a bad thing." (Jason Pierce talking to dropd.com in 1997)
  
  
• Pierce was proud of 'Ladies in Gentleman' in general and 'Broken Heart' in particular telling dropd.com "I was really happy making that record! I was really proud of what we were doing, and right from the outset people were trying to tell me how I was feeling during the making of the record, assuming that I must have been in some kind of state. No, it was the exact opposite. For the past two years I've felt on top of everything. Because I write things like 'Broken Heart'... I'm not so cynical as to say it was only an exercise in literature, but there's a certain amount of pride that comes from being able to say 'yeah, that's it!'"
  
  

Lyrics