Spoon: Going Ga-Ga

Spoon can’t stay put, musically or otherwise. Just months after releasing their biggest album yet, 2005’s more rock-oriented Gimme Fiction, singer/guitarist Britt Daniel split the indie rock band’s Austin, TX home for the City of Roses. When he returned to the Lone Star State with some new songs to play for drummer Jim Eno (the band’s only other stable member in their decade-plus career), the pair realized they had one of their most diverse albums to date on their hands. From a cover version of a Natural History song (from a record that never came out) to the poppy, vaguely Kinks-influenced “The Underdog,” their sixth album, the lovingly titled Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge), reflects the changes the band has gone through. The playfully coy Daniel and the salt-of-the-earth Eno recently phoned us to tell us why.

Why did you move to Portland?

Daniel: I was dating a girl in Austin… let’s see, is that the right word? I was going out with this girl in Austin. There was this girl that was my girlfriend in Austin. I had a girlfriend and she moved to Portland. So I visited her up there a few times and I was just like, “I want to come up here…” When I first started going there, it felt like a really dark, dirty—but in a great way—kind of place and I later found out there’s a lot more to it than that. There’s also a really pretty downtown. There’s just great sides to it all around.

How do you feel that affected Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga?

Daniel: It was exciting. It’s always exciting to have the feel of a new place. Also it was the first time I’d been working on a record in a long time where I wasn’t just living in an efficiency apartment in Austin, sweating my ass off. I can’t point to how specifically, but it definitely was a good move at a time when I just felt excited.

In what ways have you progressed since Gimme Fiction?

Daniel: Just kind of approaching everything we do from recording to traveling to shows with the angle of “How is this going to be fun for us?” instead of it feeling more like work. [Laughs] Having a little success makes that a little bit easier… I feel like we go and do a show, it’s just a blast. It’s a party. And I didn’t always feel like it was a party.

Eno: I just continue to think that Britt is writing better and better songs as we put out more records, which is very exciting for me. I think he’s singing better, and some of the ideas that we used on this record I just think are more towards the Kill the Moonlight

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What were you listening to when you were writing this album?

Daniel: King Tubby. Simon and Garfunkel. The Clash. The Solaris soundtrack. There are some King Tubby elements in ["Eddie’s Ragga"] and there are probably some in “Don’t You Evah,” too. Just the sort of delay, feedback kind of stuff, but we’re hardly the first band to appropriate that. That kind of stuff was on my mind. Just the sort of dirty, organic nature of his recordings—[I] wanted to kind of go with that more than anything.

How did “Don’t You Evah” come together?

Daniel: Well, the way that it happened was when I was working on Gimme Fiction and Max [Tepper] was working on the last Natural History record, which never came out. We were in touch a lot and we were talking about the songwriting process… and he sent me a few Natural History songs that were in progress for me to just come up with parts to, and “Don’t You Evah” was one of those. And for about a week and a half, that was my favorite song in the world, and I would play it all the time and came up with these snaps and claps for it that I thought were really cool. But that record never came out and I’m always looking for ideas—songs to play and covers to do live and I thought this one, maybe we should actually record it, because for one thing it’s not something people know a lot.

How did Britt handle coming back to do the album?

Eno: He was in Austin for about five months of the year sleeping on a futon upstairs in my studio. So basically working 12 hours and then sleeping here, so I think he was going a little stir crazy. We got him a hotel room after a little while. Just a little change of scenery. We tend to spend a lot of time on a record. It was tough, Britt not being able to go home. We would do three weeks and have just [a] one week or less break, so it was rough.

It seems like you took more risks recording this one.

Daniel: I just want it to feel like a fun record—a vibey record. That’s why we left in the [dialogue] thing about “Jim, record this” [on "Don’t You Evah"]. That was never intended to go on the record while I was doing it. You listen to that in the playback a few times and you’re like, “Huh, that’s kind of cool. Wouldn’t it be nutty if we just left that on there?” It’s one of those things that you just kind of feel like it would be fun for people to listen to… but it feels like the wrong thing to do at the same time. I like using those kind of ideas.

You flew to L.A. to work with producer Jon Brion on “The Underdog.” What was he like to work with?

Daniel: He’s a total character. He’s a totally positive energy force. [Laughs] At the risk of sounding very hippie, he’s jut a positive vibe merchant. He’s just a good, excitable and exciting-to-be-around guy.

Eno: The other thing that’s really…a really good quality as a producer that he has is I think he tends not to be incredibly attached to things. [If an idea’s] not fitting the song for whatever reason, he is just like, “OK, cool. No problem. How about this idea? Let’s move onto this thing.” He’s not attached to that thing that we were doing, but he pursues it 100 percent until the decision’s been made. And that’s a really tough quality because once you start working on something and if it’s your idea, it’s like, “Oh no, I want this on the record.” But he is just so incredibly talented and creative that he knows he’s gonna think of something else.

Is that how the horns came in for the intro?

Daniel: It was my idea to put the horns on there, but he knows what horns will do what ranges and he helped modify a part I’d been singing to be the horn part on the fly.

Eno: We were flying out on a Sunday; we were going to record with him on a Monday. Britt and I were talking: “Shouldn’t we come up with a horn part?” We had the horn players scheduled to come in at like four o’clock on this Monday, so Britt talked to Jon. He’s like, “Oh, we’ll just figure it out in the studio.” We like to have things a little more prepared than that when we’re paying professional L.A. horn players to come in. So we went in and about a half-hour before the horn players show up, we’re like, “Should we start talking about horns and stuff?” And Jon’s like, “Oh yeah, cool. What are you thinking?” Jon went over to the piano and started playing some things and Britt would say, “That’s cool,” or “I don’t like that.” And Jon would work on the voicings and come up with something and the horn guys started staggering in and he’s like, “OK, I want trumpet, alto sax and trombone on this… and I want another separate track of just the high trumpet alone and the bari sax and a bari trombone together.” So based on what he and Britt worked out he’s like, “OK, I want you guys to play all these different parts. Let’s do this one first. Here are the parts.” It was amazing… I think that’s why everyone wants to work with him. [Laughs] And the horn players he got were just so into it and so fun and it was a really great time.

What other ideas did he contribute?

Daniel: He’d be working on one aspect of the song and I’d go away in the other room to take a nap for 30 minutes or something and I’d come back and something would be happening to the song that I probably wouldn’t have thought of on my own. And that’s pretty rare, and it was also great. That’s the rarest thing, because usually I feel like that kind of stuff is my responsibility.

You felt you could relinquish control?

Daniel: I felt like I could and it would be with a lot greater rate of success. Like pushing over the piano at the end of the song. That’s what the sound of that is. At some point in the session he expressed frustration with the certain piano that he’d been lugging around from studio to studio. When we started adding noise to the end of “Underdog,” he just went out there with a couple sticks and just miked the sound of him just beating on it. As the beating got bigger and bigger, and the song’s finale got louder and louder and wilder and wilder, too, he just tipped it over right on the beat.

Tying all this destruction together, how did you find the album cover?

Daniel: I just happened upon it. I’d seen [photographer Ugo Mulas’] work before and I’d heard of [sculptor] Lee Bontecou. I wasn’t an expert on either of them. We started out working on having the same guy who did the artwork for the last one doing the artwork for this one and we ended up not being able to see eye-to-eye on where it should go, so I took it upon myself to find an image for the cover and when I saw it, that just kind of stood out to me. It felt like the same mood that I felt about the record, and I don’t know how to explain why, but that’s how I felt when I saw it.

It’s just this guy, Bontecou, looking at all these pieces of debris.

Daniel: Yeah, and they’re weird pieces. Or colorful. They just are.

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