On September 5th, PINES, the new project led by Josh Hight, will release its first EP, titled In His Wake (ORDER). Also a photographer and filmmaker, Hight was born in Detroit, but is currently UK-based, and was formerly a member of the Post-Punk band The Detachment Kit, and also had his own solo project called Irons. The road that led up to the creation of the EP built on a fortuitous meeting and a new friendship between Hight and musician and Producer Richard Norris (The Grid), which gradually developed into collaboration and the creation of this new music.
Norris, who has previously worked with artists like Joe Strummer, Sun Ra, and many more, brought different, but amenable perspectives to the music, helping Hight expand and stretch his new songs away from a dense, heavier sound into the rhythm-anchored but airy Psych Rock elements we find on In His Wake. Additionally, the EP, which arrives from Semaphore Records on 10” LP vinyl, digital download, and streaming, attracted some excellent guests, including Andy Bell (Ride, Oasis) on guitar, Emmett Kelly (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, The Cairo Gang, The Hard Quartet) on guitar and bass, and Dottie Cochran of Deary providing vocals.
Today, Glide is offering an exclusive premiere of the new EP.
To coincide with the premiere and release, I spoke with Josh Hight about the gradual unfolding of the project, the personal elements in these songs, and where he thinks the sound of this initial EP might take PINES.
Does it feel momentous to have the first EP coming out soon from a new project?
It’s been in the works for a while, so, yes. But also, putting something out into the ether and letting the public know, is starting to become a reality, so I’m a little bit nervous, but excited, at the same time.
Do you see this music as something that you’d like to be played live? I know that you’ve got a physical release, so it’s getting out into the world in more than digital format.
It comes out on ten-inch vinyl. I’ve always played live music. That’s something I love doing. I love performing, specifically these more melancholic, slower, more meditative songs in public. It’s like a chant. I’m putting together a little band to play some of these songs. I just don’t have very many songs other than this yet, since it’s a brand new band, and a brand new identity for me. I’m kind of trying to catch myself up, figure out a band, and figure out a live set. I might do it with small backing support, and go from there. I feel that it needs to happen organically, and feel correct. I don’t really need to do it, but I want to do it, so I want it to feel enjoyable and enriching, and not like a job.
Listen to an exclusive premiere of the new EP…
I can definitely see it happening under the right circumstances, like a small to medium venue, with an atmospheric set-up, and an event in itself, rather than a tour. I think people would be into this music presented in that way.
I also have guests on this record, and I think it could exist in a couple iterations. It would be great to play with a full band. When I was doing solo-ish gigs a few years ago, I’d do performances in a lot of iterations, sometimes with a full band, sometimes just me with a guitar, and that kept things fresh.
You’ve already done so much live playing in your life, it’s not like you’ve missed out on that aspect!
I definitely haven’t missed out, and I have the ups and downs of touring behind me. When you play live music, it needs to feel right so that people will enjoy it, rather than just ticking that box.
I think it’s really interesting that this whole project wasn’t exactly planned, and you didn’t have preconceptions attached to it. I know you work in a number of art fields and have other creative work that you do, so it wasn’t a driving need to do another project. Is it correct that this just came about through gradual collaboration with Richard?
It did, yes. I met Richard, maybe two or three years ago in London, and both of us live in Lewes, on the Southwest Coast. When we met, we really connected quite quickly, and it turned out that we lived really close to each other. It was really interesting to hear about his past. Catching someone up on such a large body of creative work, when you meet them as an adult, is rare. So it was nice to have a quick, new friend. We started working together really quickly, since I was working on a mini-film, and then there was a fashion show and I needed to commission music off the back of the visuals that I was doing, and I had Richard do it.
He said, “We should make more music together.” He didn’t know that I played music, really, he just liked the way that I was able to work with him, and describe sounds, and be creative. We’re both kind of open to the idea of “surrender.” Then I played him some music, and he put it together, and said, “Wow, these are really good! Now you’re in a band, and you’re in charge.” We just gradually started working together, from our two offices. It was really nice.
Did you write music together? At what stage did he hear material?
I wrote all the songs and the lyrics. Richard was really instrumental in spreading them out. I have a tendency to show up with things that are like a squashed, reverberated box. I like really drenched, wet effects on everything. He really opened that up. He’s a genius in the studio, and with Production, and he really made them sound rich. Richard played some bass, and did some drum programming, and keys. At first, we had the intention of writing the songs together, but they started to become really personal in the stuff I was showing up with. So he did really take a conscious backseat and say, “These should be your songs.” Again, it was something that just kind of found me.
I feel like the tracks do seem really stretched out and airy, so that’s interesting that you brought them in, initially, with density to them. One of the qualities is a kind of weightless feeling, not to say that the tracks don’t have substance. Was there a specific point where you realized that this was going to be a project, and this was going to be released?
It was fairly early on, but we were both pretty busy with our own things, so when we did get together, there were these concentrated moments. The first song that we really worked on was “Uriel”, which is the last song on the EP. We kind of looked at each other and said, “Wow, this sounds like it’s a thing. This is really cool!” Then things changed, and when I started writing more songs, and they sounded less band-sounding, it kind of crept up on us what it was going to be, what it could be.
We had someone who was interested in putting the record out, which was based on Richard and some of the projects he’d been doing, but they hadn’t heard anything yet. I think we’d met once. But once the material started to come together, the label, Semaphore, were really taken by it. I think they were expecting a Noise project from us, and that’s not what it is!
Right, this is not ambient music, and this is not so experimental to the degree that there’s no song structure to it. This is somewhere in between categories.
I like short songs, so we tried to keep them short. We were conscious of cutting things back and trying to talk about what we wanted to hear. We didn’t want anything to sound overly ostentatious, we wanted the songs to have an honesty to them, and we didn’t want to do too many takes. We wanted to keep it more old school, in our minds.
You mention the personal aspect of the songs. Is this the most personal songwriting that you’ve done?
I think these songs are maybe more personal in that they are larger areas of my life that are covered. They are not love or breakup songs, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I think that’s a really easy feeling to go to. I’ve written songs like that before, like coming to terms with who I was, relationships, and that type of thing. This is more about my relationship with the world, and the people that are in it, and what it feels like to be a human. It’s about losing people in your life, being confused, and I think growing old is a big part of it, too. We don’t feel old, but we look back, and we realize, “Oh shit, I’m getting older!” Especially when people die. There’s a lot of that on this EP.
I agree that people don’t feel old, and it can be a problem. Something that’s coming up a lot is that older generations aren’t acknowledging aging the way they need to. Or in our lives, we relativize it, by looking back and saying, “Wow, I was so young!” When what we mean, but don’t say, is that we are now so old.
Yes, I have that issue in my life, too! It’s strange, when I was younger, in my 20s, I did not like it. I felt like everything was either in front of me, or behind me. I feel like that era was drenched in drama. I really couldn’t wait to be older. And now, I feel a lot like I felt this, but minus the desire to grow old! [Laughs] I’m in my 40s and I love it.
I think some people are better suited to being older than others, like it’s more in keeping with their personality.
Totally. I’m a young-spirited person, but I did a lot of things in my youth that got them out of my system. Now I know a lot of people in mid-life who didn’t do enough in their youth, and now they are in crisis moder, doing too much. It’s complicated!
It seems like making art is one of the ways to address all that, since it holds such a mirror to life, and often things you didn’t know would come out in art, come art. It does seem like an opportunity to do that.
I agree. With art, you’re either digging in, or you’re digging out. You’re carving out space to exist with something that isn’t so personal, or you’re going inward. But my work and my world is very much “me” and it always, somehow turns into that. My photography, and my music, and my film, is very deeply part of who I am and whatever I’m going through at the time. Or, it’s used as catharsis to deal with what has happened in the past.
When you were writing these tracks, were you already in a mode of writing music regularly, or was that quite a switch for you to be back making music?
It was quite a switch. I had this drumbeat on my phone and this guitar part for Uriel that sounded like The Jesus and Mary Chain or something. And I really loved it, but that was all I had. I thought, “That’s something to start with.” I had this idea of writing something that was kind of an early 90s Goth adjacent-sound, because that’s something I’m really close to, and it just did not come out that way.
It’s funny the way that you write sometimes, it can’t change, and it is what it is. You can’t force something on it. And there are also the limitations of playing. I can only play the guitar a certain way, and I sing a certain way, so you’ve kind of got your box. I like that. I like that people sound the way that they are going to sound through restriction.
Yes, and it’s what you can get out of your head into some form, in the end. I think it’s interesting that you mention Goth music because there are some heavier elements here, particularly in the underlying structures of the songs. They are kind of an anchoring element. It might be part of the DNA.
It absolutely is. We talked a lot about The Cure, and the album Faith, when we first started talking about making music together. The kind of coldness that record has, but it’s so important to me. It lives with me constantly, I love it so much. I really like how it felt like a foggy day, or the morning after something horrible happened. It feels like something, and I like that.
That’s really enlightening in comparison to this EP. With that music, and with this, there’s emotion, but there’s enough distance to comment on it. It creates a tension between the emotion pulling you in, and the distance that’s pulling you back. It’s interesting that “Uriel” was the first track created because I think it creates the sound, too, and that feeling. Do you think you’ll work more with this sound in future?
I’d be excited to write the bookends to this, and write two EPs that sit nicely together. I like it when artists do that. And I have quite a few more songs that could be those songs. They are evolutions, but they also work with the same sonic structures. I’m really interested in doing something that a lot of my favorite 90s bands would do, which would be to have a remix album with really left-field artists, or people that they love, but who don’t necessarily make sense in terms of the kinds of music that they make. I’d love to work with people, and give some things away, and see what comes back.
