When The Verve broke up for the second time in 1999, it surprised nobody that their main songwriter, lead singer and occasional rhythm guitarist announced that he would be going solo.
Richard Ashcroft released his first solo album Alone With Everybody the following year on 26 June. It topped the charts in the UK and spawned several hit singles.
His second album Human Conditions nearly repeated the success of its predecessor (UK #3), also having several successful singles. It arrived on 21 October 2002 to a mostly good reception, but a few excessively negative reviews appeared, attacking Ashcroft’s abilities as a songwriter and lyricist. Some called him arrogant and got personal. It honestly did not always seem to be about the music.
Over the years the Human Conditions album has been reappraised by many as one of the great albums of the early 2000s. It has a musical scope that it didn’t get much credit for at the time, and it is definitely a more positive and hopeful album than his previous one. It has a very basic message of serenity that speaks to people straightforwardly. Perhaps it is also now better understood what he tried to do with the album.
“I wanted to be less ambiguous,” Ashcroft says in a recent interview on thevervelive.com. “I didn’t want to be nihilistic, and I wanted to put a record out there that had a sense of hope, a sense of hope because of my tribe, my tiny grain of sand [his son].”
Human Condition was felt by some to be a pretty ambitious (and even pretentious) title, but Ashcroft is quick to bring it down to earth. “It’s not like Human Condition is the Bible,” he says. “It is ten fragments of my own conditions. It’s the condition of someone who has got something beautiful going on in his life, and if I am going to put anything out into the world it has to have some kind of substance.”
Three of the songs on the album were singles. The best track on the album – Nature Is the Law – was not one of them. That may still have been the right decision. Singles need something immediate and catchy about them – not that I understand what that is these days. This is however a different type of song.
Nature Is the Law is the tenth and final track on the album. It is satisfyingly slow-burning and has a huge sense of spirituality about it. After nine tracks of personal perspectives and more internalised exploration, the album ends on this song with an outward look that is so wide that it seems to encompass the entire universe at times. Yet at its core, it is still a very simple acknowledgement that nature is – at the end of the day – what it all comes back to.
Old river and your
Restless wonder and your
Graceful leisure rolling to the sea
How many men have stood like I am
Gazing out and wishing for someone
Some are living and
Some are dead and
Some are hiding, waiting for the sun
Nature is the law, baby
Nature is the law, now baby now
Nature is the law, baby
Nature is the law, now baby now
“I know Nature Is the Law seems like a huge philosophical thing”, says Ashcroft. “It isn’t, it’s just a simple fact that I believe nature is the law. In many ways man tries to straddle nature and tries to impose his will on it, but ultimately nature has the final say.”
The song gently rolls along, just like that old river that it mentions. Its expression is expansive and open-ended, with an orchestral arrangement and – crucially – an amazing choir of harmonies emerging as the song progress. Those incredible, otherworldly harmonies. They are so powerful that they end up defining the song, stealing the show, taking attention from just about everything else that is going on.
Those harmonies were fully written and performed by Brian Wilson.
Yes, we are talking about the Brian Wilson. The musical genius from The Beach Boys. One of the greatest songwriters and musical minds of his (and any) generation.
Wait! What!? How?
“[His involvement] came about through a daydream of mine in the studio,” Ashcroft says. “Dennis Wilson’s record Pacific Ocean Blue was a big influence on me, and I came out of this dream and said ‘Wouldn’t it would be great if Brian Wilson could sing on the track?’ Everybody thought I was a complete twat for thinking that he would. A few days later, someone told me Brian doesn’t know who I am, but he liked the song. He did it in LA while I was in London.”
It turns out that sometimes all you’ve got to do is ask. It also helps to have some creative determination and never give up.
Wilson could have turned it down, but heard something in the track. He was inspired to do something with it and went to work on it. When the track came back, it had an incredible choir of backing vocals. The part shines so brightly that it pretty much ends up defining the entire song, but that is hardly a problem.
Ashcroft is quick to dismiss the notion that he gave instructions to Wilson about what he wanted, simply saying “Grasshopper doesn’t give advice to the master, man.”
Wilson did however pick up on what the track was about and tried to add something that suited it, not just something that sounded nice. “Nature Is the Law is about man’s arrogance, about the endless building of railroads [and the like],” says Ashcroft. “I was hoping to have some sort of Aaron Copeland thing as a coda. So when the tape comes back the next day, Brian’s done one of these chants at the end. He’s got the guys building the railroad, he’s got the chants: “oh ah oh ah!” Different age, different part of the world, different period, somehow a unity.”
The song starts as a band piece, with the drums, bass and guitars laying down a nice bedding for the song alongside an orchestra. The song is already sounding pretty huge. Wilson’s harmonies emerge relatively early, but they are basic. As the song progress, different harmonies show up at various points in the song. Then they start being used simultaneously. They are added together and become something more. Towards the end, it is a choir of harmonies. The beauty lies in how simple they seem, yet how brilliantly it all comes together. They sound incredible while seemingly being relatively straightforward. They are exactly right.
Ashcroft is the first to acknowledge what a big deal it is to get someone like Brian Wilson contributing to one of his songs. “He must get a lot of tapes asking him to sing on songs that sound like the Beach Boys. This song certainly isn’t a Beach Boys pastiche! That deep chant thing at the end was Brian. Basically he just connected with the tune, and went down and did it in a day.”
The song is a great builder of moods, to the point where it feels almost spiritual in nature. Ashcroft happily admits to the sense of spirituality on the album, but plays down the prospect of it also being religious.
“I am still searching and I’m still confused about what God means to me” he says. “I think people find their own personal gods within things that are incredibly complex but on the surface seems simple, like your child’s eyes, making love, watching the sunset, having a cup of tea… They can all induce a sense of a religious feeling within me. […] What I put out into the world now has got to kind of resonate in a positive way, but that’s by no means saying I’m a human being who’s a sorted out individual. That’s the process of writing the music, is trying to sort that out. The mess.”
A song like Nature Is the Law is a perfect album closer. It would not feel right to have the song in any other spot. It is the final word, it sums up a lot of what came before it, and – frankly – it is a song that is hard to follow. With the album played through, the listener can keep reflecting, or start it over again.
Ashcroft sums it up with, “I hope people feel hope at the end of the record. That’s what I want people to leave the record with – having been on an emotional trip, that has left them feeling like they want to play the record again, or like you want to get up in the morning and keep going.”
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