Here is a little bit his PR sent over: Jason explains. "The idea was to record and put the record out quick, but then I became ill. I had double pneumonia. I had legionnaires' disease or something, so�I was quite ill, it took it out of me."

At his lowest ebb, Jason spent a couple of weeks in intensive care. "I lost weight," he says. "I was in a bad way for a few months. It was a big gap in the making of this record, it was a big thing to get through, and to get over."

Initially, however, the album had seemed almost blessed by a bizarre external twist of fate, part of rock mythology. "We found a guitar in a shop in Cincinnati," Jason recalls, "a 1929 Gibson, absolutely immaculate. It was in a store full of the things, and it just sounded unlike anything else in there. I had no money but I kind of knew that I had to have the guitar, we found the man and took the guitar away, and it almost seemed like it came with the songs attached."

Jason pauses, and laughs. "The songs came really quick after that, within about two weeks or so. This record is the first one where I just sat down and wrote songs on a guitar, usually I just get ideas in my head and put them onto tape. So doing it this way, writing on an acoustic guitar, seemed like something I hadn't really done."

Somewhere between penning the tunes/words, and the point where any of them had been fully prepared for release, Jason's illness kicked in. He wouldn't return to his work-in-progress for the best part of two years. When he finally did, it was difficult to regain the creative impetus:

"It was very hard to reattach myself to the record." he says, "It took a long time, to try and rediscover what my original thought processes were. But it would've been equally hard to just let the songs go, because they're invested with a huge amount of emotion."

Listen To "Soul On Fire" on the band's freshly re-launched Myspace page (www.myspace.com/spiritualized) as well as minute-long preview of "Sweet Talk," another track from the album.