They almost called it a day back in 2016, but with founder Bruce Soord bringing in creative partner Gavin Harrison The Pineapple Thief are still feeling rejuvenated and regenerated.
The vast majority of people would do anything for an easy life. Bruce Soord, frontman and founder of progressive rock powerhouse The Pineapple Thief, is not one of them. The band recently completed their fourteenth studio album, It Leads To This, a wonderfully complex, thought-provoking and atmospheric work. And while drummer Gavin Harrison’s response to finishing it is to be simply “relieved”, it’s dawning on Soord that he now needs to learn how to play these intricate songs live for The Pineapple Thief’s upcoming shows.
“I’m normally the least rehearsed one and I get into a lot of trouble,” he says. “Especially with the guitars, because I tune them into weird tunings, and I play them once. Then a year or two years later I’m like: ‘How did I do that?’ Then it’s like learning it from scratch again.”
It’s little wonder that it’s such a big task. It Leads To This had a long gestation period, the lockdown of 2020 providing the luxury of time in which to write, with no other work commitments. By the time life started to resemble normality again, Soord and Harrison – who, because they live so far apart (Soord in Somerset, Harrison in London) usually work alone in their home studios, and send song sketches to each other remotely – decided to get together in person to bounce ideas off one another in real time.
“It’s quite easy to record your guitars and vocals in your own little room,” adds Soord. “So you end up doing quite a lot remotely. But this was really back to old school, sat in the same room. It definitely was very different. Some of the best songs came out from those sessions. Travelling all the way to Gav’s house, and then knowing that we had four or five days, you kind of felt like you had to make it work. It really focused the mind.”
“It was a very intense, very productive way of writing,” adds Harrison. “When you write with someone, you get pushed into doing things that are outside of your comfort zone. If you just stay in your comfort zone all the time, you keep writing the same type of songs over and over again. So it’s great to have a writing partner that will push you into somewhere you wouldn’t normally go. I think with any artist, you love it when it doesn’t sound like typically you. I love it. The songs on this record are quite new for us, they were pushed into a different corner than the things that we explored in the previous two albums. This is a different record for us.”
It’s certainly the heaviest TPT have ever gone musically. It’s also, thematically, the result of some deep thought on Soord’s part. Influenced by literature, history, current events and more, he’s taken b
