photo credit: Oliver Halfin

***

There was a moment on Spoon’s 2019 tour that spoke to them. They’d been on the road supporting their ninth studio album, Hot Thoughts and a greatest-hits record when they discovered they were playing songs better than the studio versions they’d created just a short while ago. Like, way better. 

“As cool as that was, it was also frustrating,” recalls Spoon frontman Britt Daniel. “We knew we were doing the best shows we had ever done, [with] the best version of the band we ever had—we played so well together. The idea was to get together and say, ‘Let’s play the songs as a band.’ The idea was to get together in a room.’” 

And with that epiphany, the plan was set. When the Hot Thoughts tour was over, Daniel moved to Austin—the city where Spoon began nearly 30 years ago and drummer Jim Eno has lived for decades—from Los Angeles. Soon after, keyboardist Alex Fischel also relocated from Los Angeles to the Texas capital and the group decided to hunker down in Austin to record their 10th LP in the most live-sounding way possible.

It had been a long time since the band had worked this way. For 2014’s They Want My Soul, Daniel wrote a majority of the songs alone in Portland, Ore., where he was living at the time. The band tapped producer Dave Fridmann—who is known for his sonic-shaping work with The Flaming Lips and MGMT—and decided to record at his famed Tarbox Road Studio in a rural section of upstate New York.   “We wanted to make a real rock[1]and-roll record that sounds like a band playing,” Daniel says of the conversations that eventually led to their 2022 LP, Lucifer.

“We wanted to do a record in a city, where we could experience a city, experience the music of the city and use that as a starting point for the energy of the record.”

***

One night early in the Lucifer sessions, Daniel and Fischel went out and hit the town. They stopped by the East Austin venue Stay Gold to see local band Sweet Spirit’s frontwoman Sabrina Ellis perform a solo show. It turned into one of those nights that just became a time to get some music out. At around two in the morning, (or maybe it was three), they started writing one of Lucifer’s quieter moments, the ballad “Astral Jacket.”

“That mood of it being the end of the night, and playing that up, became the goal,” Daniel says. “The song came together for the first time. [Fischel] was on a Wurlitzer and I was on a classical guitar. With that frame of mind, the song kinda worked.” 

Spontaneous moments like that helped fuel Lucifer and were only really made possible by the band’s decision to be together in the same town. It’s a bit of a throwback to Spoon’s early days, when a band member could just call up one of their friends when they had an idea and, 30 minutes later, they could be working it out, together, in person. That spirit was a guiding force for what Spoon wanted to do with Lucifer—utilize the connection they had as musicians and let that dictate how the sound would go. Capturing that vibe in the studio would be the end goal.

For much of early 2020, they were recording and jamming, often with little expectations. Sometimes those little expectations turned into bigger discoveries. At one point during one jam session, they dusted off a song called “Held,” a song Bill Callahan originally recorded under the stage name Smog. Spoon actually played the cut live for a brief period in the 2000s, before it faded from the setlist. Daniel brought it back just to feel its groove again one day and it stuck.

“It felt great and, very quickly, it went from, ‘Let’s do this for fun’ to ‘We can actually put this on the record,’” he says. “It seemed crazy but it just felt so good that we could do something like that. It became that song that, whenever we felt lost, or we had a bad day, we’d throw this one on and it pointed the way for how the record should sound.”

That’s another feature of Spoon that helps fuel their songwriting these days: No song is ever dead. One of the most potent tracks on Lucifer, the charging, anthemic number “Wild,” initially started with a writing session in 2015 with Jack Antonoff, before being shelved. Daniel dusted it off during the Lucifer sessions and finally got the lyrics right, which had been his primary hang-up for years. Likewise, the song “Satellite” had already been in Spoon’s live rotation for some time, and they had previously tried to record it for Hot Thoughts, but couldn’t get it just right. For the Lucifer sessions, the code was finally cracked.

“I think I just know,” Daniel says of how he can finally realize a song is done. “I think that’s what makes certain artists good. You can get very dedicated to an idea that’s going nowhere. I pride myself on not doing that.” 

There’s also a notion of experimentation that’s been a fundamental part of the band’s studio work for years, even though the final numbers sound, at times, like very polished rock songs. To get to that point, there’s an openness in the studio for playing around with how they record certain instruments, or how they set up microphones to capture a sound. 

“Sometimes we just jam on ideas that come up in the studio, but a lot of it is me writing alone at home—and we try the song out in a dozen different ways,” Daniel says. “I’ll come up with some chords and melodies, and some words I know are good. And we’ll try it like a rock-and-roll band, we’ll try it like Motown, we’ll try it like Fleetwood Mac—where will this lead us? It’s all about getting together and figuring out what can happen with five, four, maybe two people. It can’t happen with just one.” 

“A big part of it, when you start playing songs live, is that you can try a lot of things out,” Eno adds. “Let me speak specifically on the drums: I could try different fills, and different feels and go into certain things based on how I’m feeling that day. Some of those will work, some of those will not. We’ll start incorporating those that do work and, if you think everyone is doing a little bit of that, the song gets more honed in, playing it live. It gets to this space where, now, everyone is doing parts that really support the song. You can really make it better.” 

“When you hear a record that way, you can feel it,” Fischel says. “There’s something intangible about it. You can hear the sweat, you can hear the room. And there’s some magic, for sure.” 

By all accounts, the recording was going great—until the world came to a halt. Daniel says the band was about three[1]quarters of the way done with the album when the pandemic truly hit the United States and Austin, just like every other town, quickly shut down. Ironically, the one thing that they were trying to avoid this time around—isolation—crept back in, literally, overnight. 

With newfound time on his hands, Daniel did what any songwriter would do—he wrote.

“Things slowed way down and I had some time alone and I ended up writing some songs,” he says. “Some songs were too good to not be on the record. So we ended up being a longer way away from being done. But I wouldn’t have come up with a song like ‘Lucifer on the Sofa’ if it wasn’t the time that it was. It opened up a lot of things, having that downtime.”

The band ended up having to take nearly six months off from the album and each other. During that time, Daniel admits he would occasionally listen back to what they had created, but mostly he was focused on just writing new things. 

The result of this return-to-Austin, return-to-rock, paused-and-resumed album is easily a stunning addition to their already stunning catalog. There’s an energy that’s bursting throughout Lucifer that’s noticeable right away on that opening Smog cover, “Held.” It’s angsty and anthemic at times, like on “Wild” and the lead single “The Hardest Cut.” Daniel delves into sentimentality on “My Babe” and “On the Radio,” but the running thread—musically at least—is a passionate case for rock-and-roll as an art form. It recalls the feeling of the albums that originally put Spoon on the map during the great indie-rock boom: 2005’s Gimme Fiction and 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Decades in, Daniel’s vocals somehow also still exude the passionate swagger that’s become a Spoon hallmark. That quality shines throughout Lucifer, along with the sardonic wit that’s always lined the lyrics.

“I knew the new songs, and we had to make way for them,” he says. “So we had to leave some stuff off the record. Some of it will eventually come out, some of it I’ll be happy to never listen to again.”

***

The longevity of Spoon is a testament to a number of things: Daniel and Eno’s enduring musical connection and friendship, a desire to make pure sounding records, and a high bar for when a song is actually ready to be released into the world. They’ve survived lineup tweaks, fading buzz around indie-rock and habitual changes in the way people listen to music. 

“There used to be a lot more music obsession, and I thought that was a good thing,” Daniel says, while describing the biggest difference between the album that put them on the map, 2001’s Girls Can Tell and their latest project. “It was a good place for people’s heads to be at—more than, say, pandemics and confrontational politics. It seems like people were more appreciative about the art of music, and it was less about celebrity.”

Daniel is hopeful that 2022 will bring them back to the road—it’s a place, like Austin, he’s come to think of as feeling like home, a place where anything can still happen.

Ask about the grand future of Spoon, and Daniel doesn’t seem to want to think about it.

“The future of Spoon?” he asks rhetorically. “Yeah, man. I don’t know. I really liked making this record, and I like where we are. I’d like to make a record much faster next time. There were a few things that slowed us down that were out of our control. Is [the next thing] going to be a Spoon record? Do I do my own record? Do I open an ice cream shop? I don’t know. All I know is we’re going to tour a lot and touring is one of my favorite parts. That’s first on the agenda.”