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Another Kind of Gospel

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Like Aretha Franklin, rock singer/composer Pierce Turner, who plays Wednesday at Club Lingerie, traces his music to the church. But Turner’s roots aren’t in Southern gospel but a Catholic cathedral of Wexford, Ireland.

“I would literally get transported to heaven in church,” enthuses Turner, 33, in a brogue still thick after 11 years of living in New York. “Being an Irish Catholic is culturally a major thing and has a major influence. Musically you’re raised with Catholic Church music, which tends to be a lot of Bach and Mozart and Faure, Gregorian chants, a lot of stuff sung in Latin. That gives you a feel for a certain type of Romantic melody and Baroque style.”

The influence was emotional as well as musical. In several songs on his affecting yet playful new album, “The Sky and the Ground” (the follow-up to last year’s Philip Glass-produced “It’s Only a Long Way Across”), Turner expresses longing for the simplicity and grace promised by the shelter of the church of his youth.

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“I lost both my parents in the last two years and it was a very intense thing,” he says, noting that the self-critical nature of his songs is also influenced by Irish writer Brendan Behan. “The whole thing seemed to be too much going on, and I wanted to be very simple again, be a plumber or something. The moment didn’t last long really, but it was one of those things where I wished I had a more normal life. But my whole thing about songwriting is I take those fleeting glimpses and exaggerate them to the max.”

Near the end of the new album, Turner uses the hymm “Faith for Our Fathers” to re-create the lost feeling of grace.

“As a boy making my confirmation at age 12, I was one of 2,000 boy sopranos in church,” he recalls. “We took off and flew around the world, with the incense burning and the bishop on the altar. It was heavy stuff.”

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