Bruce Soord ________
Four years after his solo debut, Bruce Soord is back with his second album, All This Will Be Yours. The Pineapple Thief frontman was inspired by the birth of his daughter last year, but the music isn’t without its dark side…
The Pineapple Thief frontman spreads his wings with solo album number two.
Bruce Soord is late. Approximately three years late. Some time after the release of his self-titled debut in the autumn of 2015 and this year’s All This Will Be Yours, Soord had promised the Kscope label a second solo album.
“I just wanted the cash,” he laughs. “I did remember thinking, ‘Shit, I’d better get this album finished because the label paid me for it years ago.’ I was very late and I’d spent all the money as well! Luckily, they didn’t send the men in suits down to find me, not that I imagine Kscope have many men in suits…”
Soord is home in Yeovil after what must have felt like a life-changing 12 months or so: a new and unexpected baby, an Indian summer of success for his band The Pineapple Thief, and a new solo album to promote too. Soord, for all the brooding melancholia in his music, not least his latest record, is a charming, occasionally chirpy interviewee, landed happily in life, even among the chaos of a new baby and a band on the rise, plateauing some 20 years after he first made music under The Pineapple Thief name.
“Musically speaking,” he says, “I just feel so much more mature as a songwriter and artist. A lot of that has had to do with Magnolia [The Pineapple Thief’s 2014 album] – the world changed for me in how seriously I take my craft and the business of being an artist, and that’s what I’ve worked on for the last four years and that’s paid off. I’ve become a much better mixing engineer too, and my songwriting, playing, my voice has become a much more usable instrument. I listen back to the early stuff and I’m like,
‘Oh god, I sound like I’m nine years old.’
“And then you’ve got the life stuff: I’ve got 12-year-old twins, and then we had a bit of a surprise with the baby girl,
Robin, who was born last October. When my wife, Liz, found out that she was pregnant, we were like, ‘You’re kidding me?!’ We’d just started off-loading our kids to secondary school and relaxing and another turned up! But when she was born, it was the kick up the ass that we needed; we were getting into sleeping in, drinking too much, so I was quite surprised how much it reinvigorated me, it gave me a lust for life again.”
Which might explain why Robin was the seeding and starting point for Soord’s long-awaited second solo album. Three months after her birth, and after a brief but fruitful series of sessions working up new Pineapple Thief material with drummer Gavin Harrison, Soord wrote his first song for the album, The Secrets I Know; occasionally writing and recording with Robin sleeping in the studio next to him.
“It’s not extraordinary,” says Soord, “but it’s still a big deal and it shakes things up and suddenly I’m in the studio with this newborn baby asleep, right, what shall I write about?
I’ve still got a little playpen in the studio, which is fine as long as I don’t record anything, otherwise I get rattles and shakers and screams and all sorts of noise in the background. That might be the next album…”
All This Will Be Yours is an elegiac, brittle and beautiful record. It has echoes, naturally, of the day job with The Pineapple Thief, but is also reminiscent in parts of Steven Wilson when he began to push the artistic envelope with his solo work. There is sonorous melody, there are passages of what sound like regret; there is even, pleasingly, little dashes of dance and trip hop. It’s a glorious racket that fades and rallies and then drops away again, undulating on thrumming acoustic guitars, splashes of piano and gentle, percussive loops. That said, Soord couldn’t quite stomach the record once he’d finished it.
“Now we’re such a collaborative band, I think that writing relationship has given us this late run of success, so I’m now really happy with giving away control.”
“I blame The Pineapple Thief!” There’s that laugh again. “When I did the first solo album, I was still very much The Pineapple Thief. But now we’re such a collaborative band, I think that writing relationship has given us this late run of success, so I’m now really happy with giving away control, which wasn’t always the case. With the solo record I was on my own in the studio. Which can sometimes be a horrible thing, you and your ideas, no one to bounce off, I remember finishing it and saying to my wife, ‘I don’t know if this album is any good or not, I don’t know if I like it or not.’”
Though what Soord did know was that, unlike The Pineapple Thief, he knew exactly where he wanted his second solo album to go, sonically, lyrically and thematically. He talks about The Pineapple Thief throwing all their ideas together and letting their songs grow organically. Swapping ideas and how cutting the feedback from his bandmates can be: “Steve [Kitch], our keyboard player, is the most brutal, which I like, even if I hate him sometimes! So when it comes back it’s honest and I know in my heart that what’s been said is true.”
Soord, engaging, upbeat and self-deprecating, is hard to square with the man behind the music he makes. Let’s not forget, his latest record started with the celebration of a new life and his band are in the midst of an upward spiral, having played a headline show at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire last year, and are starting their first North American tour this October – and Soord has helped build the band from the ground up. When this writer first interviewed The Pineapple Thief in 2010, which was pretty much Soord in all but name, he had to rush back to the office and his regular job after our interview. In the evening, he’d hurry home again and straight into the studio.
“In hindsight, I have no idea how I did it,” he says, “I’d shoot back after work and be in the studio until late at night and it did put a lot of pressure on my family. I probably sacrificed a lot of time I should have spent with them, so when it got to the point of where I needed to follow my passion, and thought I could make the leap, my wife was like, ‘Yes please, I’ll support you.’ Since then things have gone well. I feel so lucky that I’m making a living.
“You and I talked about us finally headlining the Shepherd’s Bush Empire last year, and we had a joke as a band about it. Years ago we supported Blackfield [in 2011] at the Empire, and we came off and we were like, our plan is to sell out the Empire. We didn’t quite sell it out last time, it was full though and we’re going back next year, but it was packed out. When we found ourselves in the dressing room as headliners, it was like, ‘Shit, we did it.’ None of us saw that coming. You think that we started in 1999 and think how many bands have that real creative launch after their 10th album, you know.”
Which makes the melancholia of All This Will Be Yours all the more extraordinary. Soord, or an approximation thereof, blinking wearily in to each day’s new light before turning wretchedly away, a description that makes him chuckle.
“It is melancholic though, I’ve always been that way,” he says, sounding not in the least bit melancholic at all. “I must just channel all my melancholia into the music and then I’m left with happiness.
“I think as I get older you’re very much more conscious of what’s happening in the world, especially if you’ve got kids growing up. But I was conscious not to go: I’ve had a baby and made a record, because that’s not what it’s about. It was more: I’ve got this new daughter and I’m looking at the world and thinking, ‘What in God’s name is happening?’
“On the title track of the album I sing about pushing past 158. That’s the house two doors down from us – it’s a very notorious drug house. Channel 5 wanted to do a documentary on it. It’s just so sad to see these young kids hooked on heroin. As much as the rest of the neighbours want to get rid of it, I just feel overwhelmingly sad, so that informed the whole record, juxtaposing my fear of what’s going on in the world to bringing in this new child.
“That said, the one positive of reaching 46 is that you care less about things; you’re more positive about the time you do have. On The Secrets I Know, I sing about the new day lighting up my baby’s eyes and I think that’s what I need to do: you should wake up happy and positive and love every moment you’ve got. I’m nowhere near as angry as I was. In my 20s I was awful, I’m glad I came out the other end.”
That said, Soord and his album leaves the listener with a tangible sense of sorrow and longing wrapped up in a lyric that places the protagonist looking back from beyond the grave at his wife and family mourning his loss at his funeral. As understanding and patient as his partner must be, what must she have made of One Day I Will Leave You?
“I was writing that and thinking, ‘Can I really sing this?’ Even for me it was melancholic but cathartic too. I was looking at Robin, and she personifies happiness and loves everything about life, and then I was thinking, ‘This bloody life’, and you have this image of your loved ones being at your funeral, this front row of tragedy and pain, and I thought, ‘That’s what
I’m going to write even though it’s fucking depressing.’
“I also take some light from it. I’m spending time now with my kids and my wife; everything we do will stay with them when I’ve gone, all those memories, as the lyric says, all these perfect moments bound into one, that’s what will happen after I’ve gone, I’ll be with them in that regard, in that way, that’s unquestionable. So I sang it and I thought, ‘God, that was quite intense.’”
Before we hang up, we talk about middle age; how you reach a point in your life and realise there’s more time behind you than what’s left in front of you, how contemplative it can all become. For his part, Soord welcomes the years. As he puts it, without the wealth of age and experience, there would be no second solo album.
“Life is bound to change the way that you approach what you want to share with people,” he says, “You can’t help by be shaped by the things you’ve done because, ultimately, they’re the things you are.”
All This Will Be Yours is out now via Kscope. See www.brucesoord.com for more information.
“You should wake up happy and positive and love every moment you’ve got. I’m nowhere near as angry as I was. In my 20s I was awful, I’m glad I came out the other end.”