SONGS OF FAITH AND DEVOTION
For JOSH T PEARSON, the road to redemption has been a rocky one. A passionate and humorous songwriter, the former Lift To Experience leader might wait a decade to finish a song – or fire a band member by sending him a boot in the mail. Jaan Uhelzski visits him in Austin, Texas, to hear of his religious epiphanies, LSD love stories and warnings on the perils of AI. “I don’t want to seem like some crazy person,” he says. “God forbid.”
Sitting in his home in a converted art studio in south Austin, texas, Josh t Pearson is spinning one of his spirited tales. More specifically, he is telling us about an epiphany he experienced a few years ago. this was in August 2016, when Pearson found himself adrift in France, unsure of where his life – or his career – were heading.
Pearson, the son of a Pentecostal minister, was having a crisis of faith. “I was 41 years old and staying in my friend’s son’s room in Paris, just a drifter,” says Pearson. “I had finally finished the words to a bunch of songs I’d started back in 2005, 2006. But I realised that no-one would ever hear them and I was pretty sad about that. It was like painting what you feel is your masterpiece and then realising that no-one will ever see it. I started blubbing to a God I don’t believe exists any more, saying, ‘God, I’m sorry I fucked up somehow. This can’t be right.’”
The process of how he got there – and, critically, what happened next – are part of a longer saga concerning Pearson’s own personal redemption. as the creative force behind psychedelic space rockers Lift To Experience, Pearson’s had been a turbulent, often draining experience – they produced one startling LP, The
Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, then combusted. after a decade of near silence, Pearson emerged with a solo LP, 2011’s Last Of The Country
Gentlemen – a wracked document of the breakup of his marriage – only to vanish again. He seems perpetually to be disappearing into, or returning from, one wilderness or another; some of them are personal, some creative, some of his own devising. “Growing up in the way I did with certain deficiencies, there were stupid goals in my own head I needed to accomplish,” he continues. “Like turning up in a country without knowing anyone and just surviving,
“I’ve been running for a long time, avoiding things” JOSH T PEARSON
not knowing a single soul – just get there, hustling to make it, live a few years. Real exploring stuff. But I’ve had to go this way. The inner journey.”
Typically, a conversation with Pearson unfolds in this manner. Everything seems motivated by his loss or – or search for – faith. “Josh is a singular artist, there is no-one like him,” says Mark Lanegan. “His music is equal parts mysterious, perplexing, moving, humorous and beautiful. He gives you glimpses into a universe only he inhabits, and this one is better for it.”
There is, though, another side to Pearson – as his friend and collaborator Warren Ellis explains. “My family and I stayed with him in Texas. My kids still talk about how much fun he was, taking them to see the haunted university at night and firing a shotgun over his house. He took us to a cemetery to see the grave of Blind Lemon Jefferson; when we arrived he produced a small brush and proceeded to clean the headstone and arrange things in an orderly manner. He had a snake in the fridge he was going to make into a belt. My kids would have stayed a week if we didn’t need to be in Las Vegas the next day.”
When we meet Pearson, it’s the coldest day in Texas in seven years. The last time the mercury hovered below the zero mark here was roughly the same time that Pearson released Last Of The Country Gentlemen. We are here now, though, to discuss his latest solo record, The Straight Hits!, a project that came into focus for Pearson that day in Paris. “I’d finished the words to these really transcendent, great melodies,” he says. “Such deep, intense lyrics didn’t do any good for the common man. So there I was, disappointed and crying. Then the thought came to me that I should write something less heavy. See if I can beat the time it takes me to record an album; one that didn’t take 10-plus years to make. So I sat down and wrote this LP in three days.” Rather than just creative alacrity, what The Straight Hits! seems to document is a sense of well-being and a lightness of spirit for Pearson; a new-found contentment that seemed to have eluded him in the past few years. “I’ve been running for a long time, avoiding things,” he nods. “But I don’t feel like I’m running any more. I want to be more stationary. When I think about all those years, in the end it was a walk in the wilderness. Did I ever think about when it would be over? It lasted as long as it lasted.”
OccaSIonaLLy, as Pearson talks, he pulls at a serape blanket wrapped tightly round his shoulders. Even discounting the temperature outside, the room is unnaturally drafty. Bleached bones line the walls, stacked neatly on wooden shelves. a pair of huge antlers have been fixed on a stuffed rabbit that is mounted above the door frame, while a cow’s pelvis bone on one wall has “no Gods, no Masters” scrawled across it in black Sharpie. Pearson has been living here for 10 months now. Located in an industrial strip on austin’s south side, the windows are covered over with newspaper – presumably because this part of town isn’t zoned for residential dwelling. Various power tools are scatted about the place, along with books on carpentry and construction. “Right now I’m working construction in austin,” he confirms. “I could’ve been better served doing other things, I guess. But I like construction. I don’t have to put my soul on the line, like I do when I write. The pen is the heaviest tool out there. Far heavier than any jigsaw or any power tool.”
other than a few clothes, a box for his Stetsons, some books, a computer, guitars and amps, most of what Pearson owns is in his messy brown 2005 Ford pick-up truck or his small house in Tehuacana, Texas, located about 140 miles north of here. He bought the property in 2001 after Lift To Experience signed a publishing deal. He has lived there intermittently for the last 17 years, although for the last five years or so he found himself spending more and more time in austin. “I’d come down, dance, and couch surf for two weeks, then go back to the country for two weeks to work on songs.”
It was during one of these sojourns that he met Katerina Kiranos, an artist/musician, who he credits with bringing renewed focus to his life. “I’d taken acid the night I met Kat,” he recalls. “I saw her across the room at the club and there were beams of light shooting from her face. no-one else’s, just hers. all these bright lights. I went right over to her and didn’t leave her side all night. I think I proposed that night, too.” Within a week, he had moved to austin. With Kiranos, he has
“I moved to the middle of nowhere Texas and went a little nuts”
found some kind of peace in the city; although even with a career spanning nearly 20 years, he remains a relatively anonymous figure. “I am not burdened with being recognised on the street or have anyone give two shits about the music I make,” he says. “I play here about once a year. I played here a few months ago and there were 80 people, including friends. So the fact you’re asking questions…” he pauses. “I’m grateful.”
To an extent, Pearson’s situation is of his own devising. He has restricted the amount of music he has released because, he claims, he didn’t want to become “part of the system. Once you’re a part of it, it becomes your owner. You give up privileges, and I needed to explore other opportunities first. A few years ago, it felt I’d turned a corner. You know, it is hard when you have something immediate and relevant but no-one ever hears it. I’ve written hundreds of songs in the last few years – really good stuff – that will never be heard. As with any artist or craftsman, you write and throw away, write and throw away. But I’m finally in a place where I’m OK. I want to put out records. I’m ready.”
BEAu Bedford, leader with the Texas Gentlemen, the outfit that back Pearson when he plays his solo shows round Austin, remembers the first time he heard Lift To Experience. “I was 14,” he says. “Josh was a mythological character with all these bigger themes that there’s no way I could’ve wrapped my head around as a child. But the Texas-Jerusalem
Crossroads album had so much significance in making Texas a mythological place to me. I remember thinking in my adulthood, ‘I can move to LA, I can move to New York. Great business opportunities! But I was born in Texas and I will die in Texas.’ Coming to terms with that was such a sweet surrender, really.”
Pearson originally conceived an ambitious trilogy of LPs for Lift. But shortly after the release of The TexasJerusalem Crossroads, the wife of bassist Josh ‘The Bear’ Browning died. The band took time off to mourn, to plan next steps. They briefly reformed before Pearson sacked Andy Young, Lift’s drummer, by sending him a boot in the post. “I apparently thought it was a lot funnier than he did,” says Pearson. “And I did think it was pretty funny.” Young subsequently sold the offending item of footwear on eBay for $210.36; Pearson has its pair in a box at home.
The folklore that built up around Lift in the years since they broke up in 2001 remained potent. In 2016, the band reformed to play the Meltdown Festival and a string of shows at South By South West the following year. “Did I feel vindicated by the shows?” Pearson wonders. “Mostly the reunion shows were like seeing yourself on the street 20 years earlier and shaking hands and giving yourself a hug. But vindicated? There were 2,000 people there, tops. That’s awesome – but it’s not like it’s My Bloody Valentine. I’m grateful, but Lift is like a niche of a niche, a boutique of a boutique.
“What I miss,” he says after a pause, “are the levels we could get to in that band spiritually. I can get there now, but it’s hard without drums and volume.”
“It was heartbreaking when the bottom fell out of Lift,” says Young, who also plays on The Straight Hits!. “Over time, the more I realise that there were so many things against us continuing. I don’t think that most bands wouldn’t have survived one of the horrible things that happened to us, but we had a multitude. We could’ve gotten past a member with a substance abuse problem or a clash of egos, or even a death maybe. But all of those things put together? It was unsurvivable for a bunch of early-twentysomethings.”
“We just fell apart,” admits Pearson. “We didn’t know what we were doing. We were kids. No help. You couldn’t Google stuff. It wasn’t even like someone could give you a thumbs up on MySpace and you’d feel better about your day. America didn’t care. And I didn’t wanna do that much work again on something if no-one cared. So I moved out to the middle of nowhere Texas and went a little nuts for a couple of years. I wouldn’t leave the house for a month, and never the village. That’s the real trip. I wouldn’t recommend it. Had to fight tooth and nail for the mind to come back. It wouldn’t have been like a cute Brian Wilson story with your own private doctor. It would have been me at the state-run funny farm with no outcome toward recovery. That or end on the street, which now that I think about it, I guess I did.”
When it finally came, Pearson’s follow-up was the melancholic The Last Of The Country Gentlemen, seven emotionally devastating songs that marked the end of his three-year marriage to fashion photographer Claudia Grassl. “Even now, I can hardly do those songs,” he says. “I’ve only recently been able to play ’em. I started doing a Monday-night gig with a buddy at a bar on the south side of Austin. It’s like playing covers now, like inhabiting a character. It’s a part of me, and I can channel it for a second, but hopefully it’ll never be as deep a pain as it was.”
OuTSIDE Pearson’s apartment, an ice storm rages; part sleet, part snow. “I feel the cold more now that I don’t have a beard,” he laughs. Shorn off more than a year ago, Pearson is something of a dandy now – rail thin, his hair cropped close to his scalp, wearing a black leather fringed jacket, a cotton T-shirt, looking cold in a pair of pale-blue ostrich-skin boots. Shivering aside, he is rarely still for more than a few minutes. His hands pick at imaginary lint, he flexes his fingers, leaps out of his chair to pick up a book to look for a quote or take a drink of an acid-green smoothie.
As Pearson sees it, The Straight Hits! represents a breakthrough. It’s not just the speed with which he wrote the songs – although, undeniably, that helped. “The longest it’s taken me is a decade to write a song, but some I’ve worked on for longer and never finished,” he says. “I write every day. I worked on …Hits! to give my mind a break from personal writing. As an exercise.
“I had certain parameters to go by,” he explains. “There were five. The songs all had to have a verse, a chorus and a bridge. Sixteen lines or less. I tend to go on, as you know. Four words or less in the title. The word ‘Straight’ in the title. The fifth would be, ‘Submit to the song above all else.’ That was it. Quickly, those were the five pillars of Straight Hits.”
It’s telling that his favourite song on the LP, “A Love Song (Set Me Straight)”, is the only one that wandered outside these carefully constructed parameters. And it’s the only one that has anything at all in common with any of his earlier work. “To tell the truth, I’m not really good at obeying the rules,” he grins. “Even my own. The unofficial sixth rule is, break the rules.”
Elsewhere on The Straight Hits!, the songs are rowdy, sometimes loutish, oddly anthemic, careening from cow punk to rock, country, psychobilly and even folk, with a couple of tunes recalling Tav Falco or even The Cramps. But critically, the songs are short. They mark a radical departure from the 10-minute epics he’s done before, both in the complex exhortations of The TexasJerusalem Connection and the lover’s laments of The
Last Of The Country Gentleman. “I felt released and realised that it’s OK now to put stuff out that I thought could do some good for people,” says Pearson. “To spread some joy around. I mean, this record is like a cheap date. You can have a lot of fun on a cheap date.”
He laughs; a surprisingly common occurrence for a man whose temperament often turns to introspection. “Josh is perceived rightly as a person with serious ambitions,” says Matt Pence, who has engineered all of his recordings. “He takes his life and art very seriously, but he also has a strong desire to make people laugh, and sometimes to convey a point he wants to make through humour, rather than directly. I didn’t expect that to be the case, but it’s more often his preferred mode of communication than you might ever expect.” A newcomer to Pearson’s orbit, Ben Hillier was invited to mix On one occasion, he recalls, he witnessed a more intense aspect of Pearson’s personality. “I’ve rarely worked with anyone so devoted to the song, so able to contort their performance to illustrate the meaning,” says Hillier. “For example, I recorded the vocals for ‘Love Song Set Me Straight’ and we had to break sometimes in the middle of takes as Josh was sobbing too much. He was so lost in the emotion of the song that he couldn’t sing it without crying.” It’s late in the day now, and the bad weather outside has abated slightly. Pearson learns forward in his chair, dropping his voice to a whisper. “The reason why the songs on the album have the word ‘straight’ somewhere in the lyrics, that was done purposely,” he explains. “‘Straight’ has the letters ‘AI’ in it. No-one wants to hear songs about robots, obviously, but this is scary stuff. Artificial intelligence could be the biggest threat to humanity. We’re in the middle of creating a new god, and it’s impossible to say if He will be concerned with us at all or if He will see us as the plague that we are; that we’re the cruellest of all the creatures on the planet to be manipulating an inappropriate amount of resources toward serving ourselves. But I have a platform where I can warn people, and it’s really the whole reason I’m doing this album. But I don’t want to seem like some crazy person. God forbid.”
JOSH T Pearson is weighing up the prospective fortunes of The Straight Hits!, frowning with concentration as he pulls on his smoothie. “I don’t know if it will do anything,” he shrugs. “It sounds completely different than anything I’ve ever done, but I’m encouraged that I had the courage to stick it out there. A friend said to me, ‘You’re going to get a lot more attention with those songs than the Lift stuff.’ That staggered me, because I did it in a week. It would be heartbreaking to think that people would think of that stuff more than the other.”
He has, he admits, already moved on mentally to his next project – Country-versy, a politically minded record that he has already recorded. “I was at the American embassy in London during the elections. It was quite something to be there when the ship went down. Everyone was convinced that Hillary would take it, and by the end of the night it was like Night Of
The Living Dead. It made me feel some strange call to help in a way I’d never felt before. A responsibility to my own territory. I think it could do some good out there. I maybe be naïve enough to think it, but music can change peoples lives and minds if done correctly.
“The mission is more outward now,” he continues. “I’m more content. I feel like I got to the top of the mountain, saw what I needed to see. I’m OK if I die tomorrow. I’d like to leave a little more behind just because I think it’ll do good for people. It would be nice to have 10 years where I could put out more of these fun little records. I want to heal the sick, make ’em laugh.”
Does he mean it? To make sure he makes his point, Pearson gets out of his chair and pulls out The Kinks’ 1981 album Give The People What They Want and slaps it down on a nearby table.
“When I lived in London I would have panic attacks,” he says. “Even leaving the house would take 30 minutes. I’d have to wait ’til whatever trigger or synapse connected in my brain and would allow me to go, ‘OK. NOW.’ It used to apply to showing up to class on a certain day, to buying a train ticket. Even playing shows, I couldn’t book a tour three months in advance. It’s not as strong
now. Well, I try not to let it be.” The Straight Hits! is released by Mute on April 13