8. My Bloody ValentineLoveless
When I first heard Loveless I felt sick in my stomach because the bending of the chords was so unique. I imagine it was like hearing jazz for the first time back in the day. I remember reading an article with Kevin Shields and he’d say his trick was he grabbed the tremolo bar one day and never let go.
Growing up with Pentecostal music, we’d sing for an hour before church and it would lead up to similar epiphanies as the Gorecki thing where you’d get looped up with the songs – praise and worship, clapping, cheering. After 20-30 minutes of that it would go into worship stuff where you’re in deep yearning, hands raised, super excited just to proclaim and then the spirit would move and then all of a sudden with speaking and tongues and stuff there’d be eruptions, just freeform melody.
And you listen to some classical stuff and that’s exactly what it does rather than a song but a real epiphany. Hearing that and then hearing Loveless with the sounds on that I thought wouldn’t it be cool if you could combine the two, that’d be exciting.
And then, what if you could take that texture of the shoe gaze-y sound where it was so otherworldly like the voice of God, make that the backdrop and just do it with the guitar and bend the notes where it’s just really fluid and it just vibrates.
I thought let’s add a narrative to that. That would complete what I felt was a mission at a time, to lead people somewhere, having grown up with it and these prophecies that say you’re supposed to lead the children to the promised land. Well, I’m in Texas I guess lead them here and then put that melodic nature in a storyline using the flow, the iambic nature, like a river. I spent a lot of time on those lyrics man (for The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads), when I was working in that barn, living on a farm, pacing back and forth over and over and over, trying to find the right line where the syllables lined up in the flow with where I needed it to fall melodically.
