Spoon - Indie-rock's underdogs

I hate interviewing handsome men: being shy, all I can do is blush, fail to look them in the eye while they talk (in fact I stare at the wall), barely manage to say anything, and my mind simply shuts down. Britt Daniel can hardly be called “a handsome man”, but he's tall, very thin, his skin is clear and very fair, and his hair, though messy, is tremendously blond: he really does look like an angel, and for me that makes the situation, if anything, even harder. This is the interview. I can only apologize to you, dear reader: I did what I could…

Is 10 minutes okay?

That's fine.

I hand him a sheet of paper very slowly, as if it were a test. Meanwhile I open my notebook for a few questions.

What is this?

You tell me. (It's a letter that a certain Gerard Cosloy wrote to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation introducing the band)

Ah, it looks like a biography.

Do you know this person?

The person who wrote it? Yes, he's a good friend of ours who works at Matador Records. We've known each other for a long time and he's good with words, he's a very funny guy. You know, for every album we record, we need a "bio" describing it, though I don't know why they insist on calling it a "bio": "bios" are supposed to talk about the band. This is more of a description of the record, or an explanation of where the band stands at that particular moment. Some of that stuff is really boring, and we try to approach it in a slightly less "ordinary" way.

So this letter was never actually sent.

No, I don't think so, but it's definitely very funny.

First of all, congratulations: I heard that "Gimme Fiction" reached number 1 on the Billboard alternative chart.

The Cmj chart. … Maybe we did reach number 1, I don't know. You're probably right.

You're not interested in this stuff?

I am interested, I just don't know all of it. I know we reached number 44 on the Billboard album chart and stayed at number 1 on the Cmj chart - the college radio chart - for several weeks, but I didn't know about the Billboard alternative chart.

Did you expect these results after all these years? At the start of your career you had to fund the release of your records yourselves...

Well, if it comes to that, we paid for this last one entirely ourselves too. It's always the best way, because when you pay for everything yourself, then you bring the record to the label and it still belongs to you: you license it to them for a set number of years. If a major label paid for the record, then it would belong to them. So it's much better this way: if you can afford to fund the making of the record yourself, you should.

"Gimme Fiction" is the happiest record I've heard in quite a while. And yet some people claim it even has dark undertones. I have to be honest, that surprised me.

We never thought of "Gimme Fiction" as a dark record, not at all. While we were making it, that never even crossed my mind.

I think maybe listeners form a certain idea of the record based on the characters in the first two songs.

Every review of the record has described it as a minimalist album, and the first two songs are very, very minimal, but the rest of the songs really aren't that minimal.

I'm almost convinced that the first two songs give the average listener - someone who only plays the album a couple of times - a very specific impression.

On this new record you've opted for a very different sound compared to your previous albums. How did you approach this new sound?

I didn't really do much differently. You can definitely hear that the sound of Jim's studio (drummer Jim Eno is the other official member of Spoon), where we record, gets better with every album. A couple of records ago we went from lo-fi to mid-fi, and now, with "Gimme Fiction", we've moved up to hi-fi. As we were recording it, we didn't do anything too different from the previous albums. It's the characters in the songs that make the album what it is.

So it was a natural change.

Absolutely, very natural.

You didn't think: "Okay, now we're going to play in this particular way."

Not for the album as a whole. Sometimes, while we're rehearsing a song, we try to figure out the best way to play it: quiet with the piano, or aggressive with the drums? We try out a handful of different approaches, but we never sit down and say: "This record is going to go in this direction." That's just not how it works.

Where did you write the album? And how much does the place where you write songs influence them?

It's hard to say, because I don't know how a song would sound different otherwise. I know that when I went to Galveston, Texas, with the sole purpose of writing songs, I wrote a lot, because every day that's all I did, for about twelve hours, and sometimes I felt pretty lonely and depressed. (smiles) That probably affects the song.

And yet your sound is so appealing, and I'm sure that in Europe you could achieve the same success you have in the United States. I'm well aware I probably shouldn't be asking you this, that it's a silly question, but why doesn't it happen?

I don't know. It just doesn't happen…

I think our records can hold their own against anyone making music today. I think they're really good, even better than some others, but most of the time it's not quality that determines how many people will like our record. There are other factors at play. Maybe you should be the one telling me…

I don't know either, you deserve it. Maybe you should license one of your songs to a commercial. It works!

Yeah, maybe we should.

By the way, is it true you licensed a track for the soundtrack of the TV series O.C.?

Yeah, they asked us and I don't know why. That show seems to gravitate toward young so-called "indie" bands. I've never seen it, but they asked if we were okay with it and we said sure. I have no problem with one of our songs showing up on a TV show. We wouldn't have licensed it to the U.S. Army, but TV shows are fine.

I can see you're starting to get tired. We're almost done, here's my last question.

I've always been really intrigued by album covers and titles: I consider them an integral part of a record. Would you mind explaining yours to me? The cover you chose for “Gimme Fiction” is pretty unsettling…

That's true, and maybe that's why a lot of people thought the record was dark. I found this artist (Shane McCabe) who'd done some album covers I liked, so I asked him if he wanted to do something for us. He told me he was thinking about some shots to recreate this bizarre version of "Little Red Riding Hood". I told him I wasn't too sure about it, that I probably wouldn't like it, but he took the photos anyway, and once I saw the shots he'd taken and how he'd developed them, I thought they worked, that they were good.

What about the title?

I thought it was a great title. I've always thought "gimme" was a word that suited rock'n'roll, it's one of my favorites. "C'mon" is another one. I just liked how it sounded: "Gimme Fiction".

Thursday watch the walls instead – it’s Friday, I’m in love…

Milan, Transilvania Live (October 6, 2005 – Thursday).

Ride the wave of great music

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