Interview: Bruce Soord, The Pineapple Thief
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photog. Steve Brown
BRUCE SOORD MOVES FORWARD AT ALL COSTS
By Mark Derricutt
Two years after the release of his eponymous solo album, The Pineapple Thief's front-man Bruce Soord has released his second solo album All This Will Be Yours ahead of the bands upcoming new live album Hold Our Fire and their first North American tour. It's been a busy year for Soord and yet we sat down to discuss the new album, the recording and writing process, and the changing landscape of the world.
You've just released the new solo album All This Is Yours; I've been listening to it for the last three or four days and each time I listen to it, I hear more and more in it.
You also have the new The Pineapple Thief - Hold Your Fire live album coming out soon, plus a new tour. So, it's been a busy year for you, hasn't it?
It's good to be busy, but the thing about The Pineapple Thief is that I've got this writing partnership now with Gavin Harrison (Porcupine Three) our drummer, and it's a real collaboration with the rest of the guys as well. The trouble is, Gav also plays with King Crimson. So, he was away for quite a few months this year touring with King Crimson. I didn't want to do anything Pineapple Thief with Gavin out of the picture.
So I thought, "All right, let's do the second solo album." Because, the label; K-Scope, they actually paid me do this record about three years ago, and I promptly spend all the money; didn't deliver the album. So I thought, "Right, I better do it before they..." I mean, they're very nice. They didn't send any collectors to, you know, take my guitars away. But I did, I thought, "Right, let's get it done." So I just decant to my studio for four months and put my head down; shut the door; didn't speak to anyone... and recorded the album. So it's a very different process to working with The Pineapple Thief.
I kind of see that difference in the music. This is very much a solo album in the truest sense, because it's just you on your own, isn't it; playing everything?
It is, yes. I mean I think there's been years when I started The Pineapple Thief in 1999 from--you know--from nothing. In the early days, I had to play everything. The first five or six Pineapple Thief albums were effectively solo albums. I was forced to learn how to play bass, and I was forced to learn how to play all the other instruments... To get really good at working with computers and in studios.
I found myself on my own in the studio being able to do everything. It's quite nice to be able to say, "Right, I want to have this idea in my head," and to just take it there. Which was like I said earlier, it's very, very different to how The Pineapple Thief works. But you're right, it was a very… The definition of a solo album.
I was just relistening to Abducted at Birth, and revisiting some of the old material. Just seeing the progression that the band, and you, have gone through. Lyrically...
I was just thinking, when you listen back to the early stuff, especially... Especially, obviously as a musician and songwriter and you're always trying to better yourself. You know, every record you're trying to think, "Right, I've got to really push myself to make this one better than the last." And whether you can keep doing that, obviously is the key thing. The big thing for me is, my voice as an instrument has become so much different. In the early days, I was really a guitarist that had to sing. But now, you know, the vocal is almost my lead instrument. I really wish I'd taken my voice more seriously in the early days.
When I was relistening to the album, I was kind of thinking your voice was sounding almost Billy Corgan/Smashing Pumpkins kind of… There was a slight kind of a--not really a whiny kind of tone; but it was kind of like a--there's a bit of a vibrato there. And it's a higher register. And, now you're a little bit more... A little bit more deeper; a little bit more nuanced.
Definitely, yeah, it is. I don't know whether it's just the fact that I've got older, or the fact that I've just done a lot more singing. When I did the very first Pineapple Thief album, I was really influenced by Smashing Pumpkins. Probably not one of the fan favourites, but they did an album called Adore and I really, really liked it. I think unashamedly, their first album, I was really impressed by that.
It took me a while to sort of find my own seat, and to become an individual. But yeah, I don't know why my voice is as deep. One of my favorite artists is Beck, and when he did an album called Sea Change, the engineer, Nigel Godrich commented: "Beck's voice has just become so much more deeper and so much more..." You know, such a better instrument than when he sung his earlier things. I guess it just happens. I don't know why, but I'm pleased. You know, I much prefer the sound of my voice now than I do in 1999.
I guess you're also more used to hearing your voice recorded and that as well.
Yeah. You develop this confidence. I think playing live as well had a big part of that. You know? Having to mix live records, you realise, "Oh my God, is that how I sound?" And then you realise things you do that you think that sounds good, but actually no; that doesn't suit the voice and things like that. Also, I went out and had proper singing tuition as well, which is really something that most people probably don't do.
You know, if you ever learned an instrument, you probably get tuition, or whatever. But a lot of people just think you can just pick up a microphone and sing. There is a lot to it… That made a big difference.
I also listen to a lot of power metal, and that kind of stuff. Those singers, they regularly do training, for vocal warmups and all that kind of stuff. So, that's definitely something I am well aware of.
The new album, All This Will Be Yours, it's a very introspective album. I've seen that word just pretty much thrown in every kind of interview or review I've seen. But, lyrically it's all kind of circling thematically around the birth of your third child, I believe.
That's right. I mean, yeah, it was actually our fourth child. I've got two twin boys, and they are 12 years old. But our first child, unfortunately we lost after five days, because he was born very prematurely. So it's our third child that we've got in the house.
It was a really strange time, because my wife has a high risk of an early, of a premature birth. What they basically do is, they stitch the baby in, they put a big stitch in. But, what that means is that when they take the stitch out, the baby will almost definitely just pop out. When I was on tour with the Pineapple Thief, the doctors wanted to take the stitch out before the tour was finished. Luckily, my wife convinced them to leave it a bit longer, so she could come up to the gig. It was one of our biggest gigs we've ever done.
It was the last show wasn't it?
It was the last show, yeah. The last show we did in London, a really big famous venue called Shepherd's Bush Empire. She came up completely pregnant, watched the show. We drove back the same night, and the next day we went into hospital, and the stitch came out, and the baby was born. It was really quite an intense time.
Then, when bringing this daughter into the world... When she was a couple of months old, when all she was doing was sitting in my studio, either asleep, or just smiling and cooing, I would just write songs. I would just have her with me, and I would turn around and she would go to sleep. I'd turn around and pick up my guitar and write about how I was feeling. We'd go for walks, and I would just hit my town... You know, look at that. There's a drug den just a few doors down from me that's very notorious, and I would see the people...
Is that number 156?
One-five-eight, yeah. Exactly that. Yeah. There's a lyric in the album called push past 158. For that I was literally pushing past 158 with the pram. But also metaphorically speaking how, you know, we all turn a blind eye to this house. The community is just so overgrown - it's a problem that we just sweep aside, you know? No one's really dealing with this, and you look at the kids in my neighborhood, and they just haven't met so many kids without a future and just falling into drugs and alcohol. It's very sad. All that's juxtaposed with the birth of my new child. All that I brought into writing the record.
That's kind of cool. We don't really necessarily see it from this side so much, but the whole Brexit and everything going on, I get the feeling lyrically you're kind of like... It's almost as though you're outside of time, and you're seeing the birth of your child growing up, coming into this world, and knowing that things are changing. The lyrics in the first song; “move forward at all cost, I'm already mourning your loss.” I kind of get that sense of, no matter what's happening in the world, we need to move forward. But, because I can actually see what's happening, I can already see that things are going to be lost by the time that you've grown up to appreciate them.
Yeah. I'm obviously, yes, here that we've been dominated by Brexit, but... So I wasn't going to have a political opinion, and the record is certainly not political. But, what has happened in this country is the country has become horribly polarized and divided, and it's made people angry. There's so much anger about, and bitterness. Obviously, we've got this political crisis where everyone wants this massive change. It's either we're going to leave the EU or we're not. And blah blah blah blah blah. For the last three and a half years, this country really has been torn apart, and it's changed people. You can feel in the air how different the atmosphere is, and it's getting worse. Even now. You know, we've just called a general election, and whether that's going to fix it, I don't know.
I was looking down and thinking, "What kind of future do we have?" I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Yeah, it's a very, very worrying time. Obviously not only that, but you're talking about the global climate crisis, and the politics everywhere has become quite, quite strange. You know? But I still think that there's certainly hope. It's not a record of complete despair, so much as “I'm worried about where we're going.” I think that humanity is too strong, and there's too much love in humanity to allow things to go completely off the rails.
So talking about the actual music of the album, when I was reading some things, before the album came out, it was like, "okay, this is a solo album. We don't have Gavin involved…" Like, some artists will do a solo album, but it's still got the band members playing, or contributing. I remember some people were saying, "oh it's not going to have the same kind of intensity, or power, or whatever."
I remember talking to Steven Wilson a while ago, and he was talking about how with his music, the music must be in service to the song. This was in relation to progressive rock, progressive music and stuff. I listened to how you've got a lot of samples, sound recordings from walking around your town. Just all those kinds of ambient noises. And things that fill out the album. When you were writing the songs, were they kind of in your mind?
They were, because my studio is in the roof of my house. I've got a sofa in my studio, and quite often in my writing process I'd pick up the acoustic guitar, sit on the sofa, and I would just see what would come. Quite often, all I could hear was the sound of sirens. It's always the sirens going off in the distance. Times they're shooting up my road, and you just can't get away from them.
That influenced quite... You know that song, I think that's the recurring theme throughout the record. It's that the sound of those ambulance sirens, police sirens, fire sirens. Another time, I think it's the title track called This Will All Be Yours.
I had the window open, I was recording. I set my recorder up because I just recorded this guy walk past, which I included in Our Greatest Threat Apart.
And then this fire truck just shot past, and it just puts it's siren on just as it went past the window, and I was writing, and I thought, "Wow, that is such an amazing sound." Then I just went straight to my studio, put it into the song. Then just wrote around it, and that's what happens in the middle of All This Will Be Yours. I quite enjoyed peeking. Felt like I could take ambiance, to almost make the listener feel like they are with me. You know, they are in my world, my town.
It definitely kind of adds that. There's a lot of space in the album. I've mostly been listening with IEMs, and really loud volume. But it's not overbearing. There's a lot of space, and it just kind of fills everything up, but there's still room.
There was something I noticed on the album, when I was listening to it… it feels as though... I think I may have read this somewhere else after I did some looking on it, but it sounds like the album was recorded in two halves. As though it's like two parts, two sides of an LP. And it's kind of like a gap-less...
Yes, that was the plan. Growing up I was, was really into '70s progressive rock music, and vinyl was a big thing. So you would always have side A and side B. As a kid, when I was at school, everyone was listening to sort of '80s and early '90s stuff. I was listening to '70s.
I just remember at night, I would just put a record on. Part of the process was listening to a whole side, looking for the needle to sort of jump around there on that groove, get out of bed, put the other side on, and slowly drift off with this music. That was what I wanted to achieve with this record. The kind of sense that once you put the record on, you're there on a journey. Obviously I know that not everyone is going to do that. They're not going to just sit down and play the album through. That's the world we live in nowadays. But yeah, that's what I planned, and that's how I wrote and recorded it as well. Almost like I had a tape machine and not a computer with endless possibilities.
Awesome. That sounds like it's succeeded, because I was listening to it and just drifting off, but I was at work so...I think we're running out of time, but I was just going to comment that your Pineapple Thief's about to launch their first North American tour.
That's right. Yeah, we're off in just under three weeks.
Given that we're down here in New Zealand, what's the chances of potentially seeing The Pineapple Thief or a Bruce Soord solo show down here sometime in Australia, or New Zealand?
We would love to. Yes, I'd love to, because I've got some friends from New Zealand who are over here. We were talking about what kind of fans can actually make it to New Zealand. I mean I've seen other bands that I know, Katatonia, Opeth, Steven Wilson, Haken.
Anathema, they came over I think last year, or the year before for the acoustic night. And there was kind of a very laid back, kind of intimate show. It was a really awesome. I was going to say we'll have to hit up K-Scope to send you down, or whatever.
Yes. Well we will, because we talked to Gavin Hasler, which tells us about, Porcupine Tree, how they made it to Australia. I'm not sure if they made it to New Zealand. Obviously it's a long way to come, and then when you're there...
Steven Wilson's been here twice now.
Right, yes, yes. It's definitely do-able. As I said, I've got some friends in New Zealand, and they would be saying that... The thing is that when bands come, then people come out to see them, because unfortunately, New Zealand is quite difficult for a lot of bands to get to. But no, it's definitely on our list. So, if we come to Australia, we've got to come to New Zealand as well.
Definitely. Cool. Well, it's been great talking to you, and it's been great listening to the new album.