Spoon — “The Underdog”

Today, Rob explains how even after five successful studio albums, Spoon still felt vengeful enough to write the most triumphant song about being the underdog. He reflects on how Spoon's major label dropped the Austin rockers and became the opposite of a muse for the band, shaping their swaggery image. Finally, he is joined by music critic Ryan Dombal who greatly appreciates the snobbery of Spoon and the rockstar frontman energy of Britt Daniels. (00:00) Intro: The three phases of major-label rock stardom (21:23) This week’s song: “The Underdog” by Spoon (25:39) Britt Daniel’s origins and ‘Telefono’ (34:56) How Spoon got dropped from Elektra Records (40:48) Spoon’s evolution as the 21st century's most consistent band (56:44) “The Underdog,” the ultimate mouth-horn song (01:02:28) Interview with Ryan Dombal (01:33:02) Outro Host: Rob Harvilla Producers: Olivia Crerie, Julianna Ress, Chris Sutton, and Justin Sayles Guest: Ryan Dombal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/60songsthatexplainthe90s/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@60songsthatexplainthe90s?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  Hello friends. A quick note to say that 60 Songs is now available on YouTube. We made it. Success. That was easy. You can now watch full episodes of this show on YouTube and you can also check out our new social media accounts on Instagram and TikTok, all using the name 60 Songs that explain the 90s. We have heard your cries of despair and confusion and we have therefore embraced various popular online platforms. So watch us on YouTube. Check us out on TikTok and Instagram. I'm on Blue Sky and Twitter still under the name Harvilla, H A R V I L L A, but maybe stay out of it. I don't know. We'll put all the links for these in the episode description as well.

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  Thanks for listening and/or watching and we'll see you on the internet.

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  There are historically three phases to major label rock stardom. Phase one, the young, scrappy, unsullied rock band attracts attention.

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  They went and cut a record. The record hit the charts and someone in the newspaper said it was art. That's how rock and roll works, my friends. That's how rock criticism works. Also, here we have a song called Shake and Pop, released in 1978 by Nick Lowe, L O W E, a young, brash, dapper, subversive and incomprehensibly rad English gentleman. The god-tier singer and songwriter and producer Nick Lowe, whose 1978 debut solo album is called Jesus of Cool. Phenomenal album title. Get out of town.

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  Every instrument here, every member of the band on this song Shake and Pop thinks they're the star of the band. I love it so much. The guitar player is like, I'm the star. The bassist is like, no, I'm the star.

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  Meanwhile, the drummer is just whacking the snare drum indiscriminately. I'm the star.

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  This song's got a fascinating combination of total band cohesion and zero band cohesion. Shake and Pop sounds like these goofballs will be breaking up violently in the next 90 seconds. Better sign them fast. Major label rock stardom. Phase two, the vultures descend.

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  We have a late-breaking challenger for star of the band. The keyboard player is like, no, I'm the star. Meanwhile, these fellows have attracted major label interest. CBS are gonna pay a great big advance. CBS used to be a big record label. It confuses me every time. This is gonna go great. This is gonna be awesome. This band's gonna love signing to a major label. Nick Lowe is best known for writing and first releasing a modest little tune called parentheses, what's so funny about close parentheses? Peace, love and understanding. The only thing cooler than rock songs with parentheses in the title

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  is when the title starts with a parentheses. Nick's original version with his old pub rock band Brinsley Schwartz comes out in 1974. From the parentheses on down, you cannot quite tell if Nick is joking. You're 98% sure he's sincere, but the song doesn't work without the 2% chance that he's mocking the very concept of peace, love and understanding. You need that 2% chance that he's taking the piss. That's a popular English expression.

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  Also, I love it when singers harmonize on the word harmony. There's a K-pop Demon Hunter song where they harmonize on the word harmony and sometimes it makes me cry. So then Elvis Costello covers that song. Not the K-pop Demon Hunter song, the other one. You can find the Elvis Costello version of what's so funny about peace, love and understanding on his 1979 album Armed Forces, produced by Nick Lowe. And Elvis makes the song eternally famous. Then in 1992, the jazz soul singer Curtis Stigers covers Peace, Love and Understanding on the Bodyguard soundtrack,

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  which sells 30 billion copies, thanks to Whitney Houston. And now Nick Lowe is a zillionaire. Nick's getting annual songwriting royalty checks higher than the GDP of Poland. I chose Poland at random. That doesn't happen very often. That exact wildly lucrative sequence of events. You know what does happen often? Major label rock stardom. Phase three, oh wow, this sucks.

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  They cut another record. It never was a hit and someone in the newspaper said it was shit. That's also sometimes how rock and roll and rock criticism works, my friends. I love how caustic, but somehow how suave Nick Lowe sounds as he recounts the now thoroughly sullied and defeated band dispersing in a disorderly fashion. The drummer is a bookie. The singer is a whore. The bass player's selling clothes he never would have wore. Incredible. Major label rock stardom is not for the faint of heart or the large of brain. Don't do it, kids. As noted philosopher Steve Albini once put it,

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  some of your friends are probably already this fucked. Nick Lowe's got a wild, rad, elegantly chaotic, aspirational type career. Powerpot fans know him best for his lively 1979 hit Cruel to be Kind. Sopranos fans know him best for his somber 1994 tune, The Beast in Me, which plays at the end of the pilot episode of The Sopranos when the camera pans across Tony's empty pool because the ducks are gone. And then in 2001, Nick Lowe puts out an equally phenomenal solo album called The Convincer, except he's no longer the Jesus of Cool era rude, subversive,

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  bomb-throwing meta pub rocker guy. Now he's a ludicrously debonair crooner type, fixing to charm the pants off everybody at bingo night. Yeah, this album is called The Convincer. On the album cover, an astoundingly blue-eyed Nick Lowe is tending to a cigarette and rocking an immaculately tailored suit and tie and fitted shirt, one tousled lock of white hair across his forehead. Holy crap. Lock up your mothers. Track one on The Convincer is called Homewrecker. He can fix her.

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  That three, four count in is vitally important to me. All of a sudden, a little studio patter, a quick peek behind the curtain before Nick's plutonium-strength charisma kicks in. I interviewed Nick Lowe in 2018 in his hotel room in Cleveland while he was on tour and he made a hotel room in Cleveland feel like a hotel room in Paris, right? And Nick says to me, quote, "People who know how to play rock and roll, this is going to sound a bit po-faced, but it's quite hard to find people who know how to do it properly. I know it's a bit of a cliche, but the roll part of the rock and roll,

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  that's the intriguing bit to me. Otherwise, it's just rock and rock isn't very interesting to me." End quote. Meanwhile, as Nick Lowe is evolving from rude young man to rudely handsome older man, many fine 90s alternative rock bands are acquainting themselves with the pros and cons of major label rock stardom.

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  One perk of major label rock stardom is maybe they put your song on the radio and MTV. Here we have "Popular," the 1996 debut single from Nada Surf, a young, scrappy, unsullied New York City rock band, signed to esteemed major label Elektra Records. Nada Surf frontman Matthew Koz sounds like he's angrily reading a one-star Yelp review of high school out loud. Not any particular high school, just a one-star Yelp review of the idea of high school. Now, offhand, I can't

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  imagine anything that was more my shit as a high school senior in 1996 than a grumpy, bitterly ironic, power-pop-ish, Weezer-adjacent jam about standoffish popular girls, produced by Rick Ocasek from the Cars. "My Mom Says I'm a Catch." That's a great line. And indeed, I dug "Popular" quite a bit whenever it came on the radio, but I did not quite dig "Popular" enough to go drop $18 on Nada Surf's 1996 debut album called "High Low." But that, of course, is exactly what Elektra Records needed me to do. Uh-oh. This does not bode well

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  for the next Nada Surf album.

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  They cut another record. It never was a hit. That song, energetic, hooky, propulsive, splendid. That song is called "Hyperspace," and it appears on Nada Surf's modest but feisty second album, called "The Proximity Effect," and released by Elektra Records in 1998 in Europe. Uh-oh. The "Proximity Effect" does not have any radio-friendly tunes that might get as popular as "Popular." And so Elektra Records declines to release the album at all in America. It does come out eventually. And Nada Surf get dropped. So the dudes in Nada

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  Surf get day jobs. Not the drummer is a bookie-type day jobs, normal, respectable day jobs, web designer, record store employee, et cetera. But as a successful, enduring rock band, Nada Surf are toast, right? They can see it all, and they're okay. They wish there was another way. And it turns out there is another way: not a major label.

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  In 2002, Nada Surf released their third album, called "Let Go," on prestigious Seattle independent label Barsuk Records, best known for putting out early indie pop albums by Death Cab for Cutie and Rilo Kylie and whatnot. That song, soaring, yearning, heartbroken, defiantly hopeful. That song is called "Inside of Love," and it will eventually soundtrack soaring, yearning episodes of "One Tree Hill" and "How I Met Your Mother." Do Nada Surf put out more fine albums and eventually land a song on Grey's Anatomy? You bet they do. Nada Surf have quietly, modestly survived. Nada Surf have

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  expertly transitioned from raucous, mid-'90s buzzbin, ironic, alt-rock band to thoughtful, early-2000s, Garden State Extended Universe, super sincere indie rock band. That's hard to do. "Popular" is a great and alarmingly memorable song that is nonetheless so strange and grouchy and novel that it has major novelty hit energy. It felt like a career-ending hit song. When rock critics write about Nada Surf in the 2000s, you get headlines like "A Band Just Now Recovering From Success," that's the New York Times in 2003, or

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  "Nada Surf: Life After the One-Hit Wonder," that's Time Magazine in 2012. In that Time article, Nada Surf frontman Matthew Koz says, quote, "We've tried playing 'Popular' at concerts now. If we don't play it, someone is grumpy. If we do play it, someone else is grumpy. We can't win," end quote. Speaking of grumpy, dig the wildly appealing rasp in this dude's voice as he literally sings the words "Who sucked out the feeling?"

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  Here we have "Sucked Out," the 1996 breakout single from Superdrag, a young, scrappy, unsullied Knoxville, Tennessee, rock band, led by singer-songwriter John Davis and signed to esteemed major label Elektra Records. Holy shit, it's Elektra again. Nada Surf and Superdrag toured together and everything. "Sucked Out" is an insidiously catchy, major-label hit song about how being a major-label band totally sucks. "This was my dream, played out rockin' routine." Note the past tense there. I loved "Sucked Out," which appears on the 1996

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  Superdrag album, Regretfully Yours, but regretfully, I did not buy that CD for $18 either, which does not bode well for the next Superdrag album.

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  They cut another record. It never was a hit. The next Superdrag album is released in 1998 and is called "Head Trip in Every Key," and it rules, actually. That song is called "Do the Vampire." Note the ferocious defiance. Note what you might interpret as the willful disinterest in major-label-type shenanigans. "We don't want to know what's really going on." "Head Trip in Every Key" is recorded at fabled LA studio Sound City with producer Jerry Finn, best known for his extensive work with Green Day and Blink-182. We got ambition on this record. We got a bigger budget. We want to go 100% analog in

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  an increasingly digital world. We want a rhyme-alternative station with bankrupt vibration. We got a sitar and a Mellotron and a theremin and some horns and some strings and no-hit songs. And so Elektra drops the band, and good fucking riddance. You know what might restore Superdrag's previously sucked-out feeling? You know what this band needs? Not a major label.

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  "I want rock and roll, but I don't want to deal with the hassle. I know what I know, but I don't want to feel like an asshole." "I want rock and roll, but I don't want to deal with the hassle." Superdrag signed with the modest, splendid Portland, Oregon indie label Arena Rock Recording Company, and they put out their next album in the year 2000, an album called "In the Valley of Dying Stars." Talking to Vice in 2014, John Davis says, quote, "That's the one where it just makes me proud that we lost our deal. We went back to putting records out on an indie label, got back

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  in our van, kept doing us, because we weren't going to let the dude that wrote the Vitamin C record tell us what our band was supposed to sound like. And if we had knuckled under and been like, yeah, we'll make it more like Third Eye Blind, then we would still be in the same boat today, sitting in cubicles, but we would have had to live with that. I'd rather not have to live with that and at least know that we stayed true," end quote. Vitamin C is the lady who sang

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  the graduation song. You know, "As we go on, we remember all the times we had to get..." There's a time and place for that song, commencement ceremonies, mostly, but I do take John's point, that Vitamin C is not his vibe. Anyway, this Superdrag song is called "Keep It Close to Me."

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  That's such an exhilarating moment live when the bass and drums finally kick in. It's supposed to be brr, brr, brr. Someone on a podcast said it was art. I saw Superdrag play Keep It Close To Me live in late 2000 at Bernie's Bagels and Distillery, a tiny, seedy basement club in Columbus, Ohio, famous for noisy rock music and beer and bagels. Low ceilings, though. Any tall people in the band, you had to be careful not to jump around onstage because you might whack your head on the pipes overhead. And John Davis

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  rolls into Bernie's with a whole rack of guitars, like six to eight to 10 guitars, like he's in ACDC, like he's playing a sold-out football stadium. It's like bringing a fog machine into a storage unit. But Superdrag kicked ass that day, my friends. Superdrag treated that bagel shop basement like it was a football stadium. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. And if the record industry demeans you and discards you and turns you into the underdog, well, that's when you make them fear the underdog.

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  My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 47th episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, Cole and the 2000s. And this week, we are discussing "The Underdog" by Spoon from their 2007 album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Yes, Spoon, the Austin, Texas, rock band that used to be on Elektra Records and now they're not. Right off the rip, I gotta tell you, "The Underdog" is a truly fantastic mouth horn song. You know what I mean? Mouth horn, when you go

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  A first-ballot mouth horn Hall of Fame song, right here. You'll see.

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  What did I tell you?

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  And then the best part, you gotta switch it up just a little bit, right? Here you go.

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  Fantastic. Try it yourself. Give it a shot during the ad break.

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  Okay.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Unbelievable. Okay, real quick, do you know the band The Mountain Goats? High IQ and even higher EQ indie rock legends. EQ stands for emotional quotient, I think. If it doesn't, just pretend it does. The Mountain Goats, who've been around since the mid 90s, based in Durham, North Carolina, and now led by the brilliant songwriter and author John Darniel. A while back, John was gracious enough to come on this show to talk about Linkin Park. In July 2026, The Mountain Goats put out an extra rad new single about a nameless fictional 90s rock band trying to make it big by touring with a real-life famous

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  90s rock band. The song starts with the label vultures descending.

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  Three years on the local circuit, played twice at the county fair. And the second time, Ben, our friend who worked the business, and said a guy from a label was there. There were two more like him at the next show, staring us down like hawks.

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  CBS is gonna pay a great big advance. And if you adjusted these lyrics slightly, or even if you kept all the lyrics but adjusted the delivery slightly, the chorus and the title of this Mountain Goat song could work as a punchline, as a rude, mean joke, at the expense of both the fictional underdog 90s rock band John is singing about and the real-life famous 90s rock band that gives this song its title. But as much as I love sardonic, merciless, Nick Lowe-type black humor, we do not need rude, "the bass player's selling clothes he never would have wore" energy here. Trying to make it big and major

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  label rock and roll is hard, man. And so what we need is peace, love, and understanding.

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  And there was love in the air, and all the money was there, and we were going on tour.

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  With Candlebox.

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  That Mountain Goat song is called Candlebox. Candlebox are a famous 90s rock band from Seattle who unfairly took a bunch of shit from other cooler Seattle rock bands. Shame on you if you don't know who Candlebox is. You know the Candlebox song "Far Behind"?

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  You can try doing mouth horn to famous guitar riffs, but I don't recommend it. Okay, let me ask you something. Does this guy sound like Ryan Gosling to you? She was smoking up all the cigarettes and putting them out in his hands. She said that, "You think this hurts now, kid? Well, just wait till later, man." Every time I hear "just wait till later, man," I picture Ryan Gosling, specifically Ryan Gosling in that movie The Nice Guys, the sleazy goofball action buddy comedy from 2016 with Russell Crowe. It's a fantastic movie. When Ryan Gosling's in a shootout

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  and he takes cover behind the car that's on a revolving platform, so then Ryan immediately loses his cover and he almost gets shot, it's incredible. Okay, here we have a song called "Nefarious," an early offering from the Austin, Texas, rock band Spoon, led by one Britt Daniel, B-R-I-T-T, a young, brash, dapper, subversive, and incomprehensibly rad Texan gentleman. Britt Daniel was born in 1971 in Galveston, Texas, and raised in Temple, Texas, about an hour north of Austin. He's going to college at the University of Texas at Austin. Musically, he's into a lot of English post-punk and new wave, New

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  Order, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Art of Noise, things of that nature. But he loves Prince, too. And you don't hear much Prince in early Spoon, but Prince is gonna be a big deal later. Also, here at the dawn of the 90s, Britt is noticing that all the scruffy, subversive, and super cool American bands he loves, Guided by Voices, Yola Tengo, Pavement, also Liz Phair, they've all got the same logo on the back covers of their albums. They're all on the same indie record label, Matador Records out of New York City, the hallowed American institution, Matador Records. So now Britt's been starting a bunch of bands

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  that try and fail to make it big. And here in Austin, his latest band is called Spoon. Britt Daniel wore sunglasses onstage a lot in the early Spoon era because he thought it looked cool. He's not wrong. This is fucking torture to me. It's fucking torture.

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  But mostly, the vast appeal of nefarious comes down to Brit's weird, tough guy sunglasses indoors accent. As he goes, "This is fucking torture to me." This song first appears on Spoon's debut EP, released on a tiny Austin label in 1994 and called nefarious. This song is then rerecorded for Spoon's full-length debut album, released in 1996 on American indie rock institution Matador Records and called Telefono. Spoon will spend much of their 30 years and counting career jumping between Matador Records and Merge Records,

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  Merge being another hallowed American indie rock institution based in Durham, North Carolina. The Mountain Goats were on Merge for a long time. Usually on this program, the specific record labels don't matter much, but this time they do. It's the mid 90s, and alternative rock is still big business, and we got Superdrag and Nada Surf songs on the radio, but young, unsullied Spoon are instinctively wary of that major label universe. There's a great book called Our Noise, The Story of Merge Records: The Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small in Oral History, published in 2009 by the journalist John Cook

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  alongside Mac McCaw and Laura Balance of Merge Records and Superchunk fame. Shout out Superchunk, speaking of scruffy, subversive, and super cool American bands. And in that Our Noise book, Britt Daniel says, quote, "I knew there was something not to be trusted about the major label system, but I wasn't really sure what. They just seemed to either make a band really huge in a really cheesy way, or else not be able to succeed. And I didn't really want to come out huge with our first record. It kind of scared me." End quote. Hey, so great news. Spoon do not come out huge on their first record.

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  This very early era of Spoon, we got Britt Daniel on guitar and lead vocals. We got Jim Eno, he's on drums, and he'll stick around forever. And we got Andy McGuire, she's on bass and backing vocals. And she won't be around for very long. Spoon made a video for the later version of nefarious in which all three members of the band are wearing sunglasses as they play the song in a living room while two people make out on the couch. I say with great affection that this video appears to have cost $10 total, and that includes the breath mints budget for the people on the couch.

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  What's good? What's not so good? I love that accent. And now, a word about the Pixies. The Boston rock band and hallowed American institution, the Pixies. Where is my mind? And so forth. Quiet verses and loud choruses. Ultra harsh, ultra melodicism. The alluring vocal interplay between a screamy, ranty frontman guy and an angelic, sing-songy, incomprehensibly rad bassist lady. Early Spoon sound a lot like the Pixies. Okay, you read that a lot in coverage of early Spoon, but you also objectively hear that a lot

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  in this first Spoon album, Telefono. And as a rock critic, I'm always on guard for lazy, self-perpetuating narratives of this type, when everyone just writes the same thing. Someone in the newspaper says Spoon sound like the Pixies, and now everyone in every newspaper starts saying it. But like, dude, this song is called "Dismember", and I love it, but I'm pretty sure I know why I love it.

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  Yeah, I love this song because Spoon bassist Andy McGuire sings, "Dismember, dismember", in a twinkling nursery rhyme cadence like Kim Deal from the Pixies. Andy McGuire leaves Spoon before this record even comes out in 1996, under very strange, inacrimonious, and confusing he said, she said type circumstances. And meanwhile, Telefono flops. This album sells very poorly, even by Matador Records' non-major label standards. Undaunted, or at least only slightly daunted, Spoon follow this up with a 1997 Matador EP called Soft Effects,

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  which also sells poorly, even by Matador Records' standards. But now Spoon are sounding less and less like some other famous band, and more and more like themselves.

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  This song is called "Waiting for the Kid to Come Out", and the weird sonic details here, the super reverb handclaps, Britt Daniel's frantic overlapping vocals, the uneasy sense that any one element of this song could drop out at any time and maybe never come back. That's the essence of Spoon. That's the mind meld between Britt Daniel's frontman and primary songwriter and Jim Eno, drummer. Lot of people gonna be in this band. Lot of bassists. It's not a super ugly, acrimonious Guns N' Roses band infighting situation usually, but like, yeah. And yet, the center holds. The molten, volatile core of Spoon holds.

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  And that core is Britt and Jim just trying shit as songwriters and as producers. They get weirder and more classic sounding and more popular simultaneously. I love it when that happens, but not quite yet. It is 1997, and Spoon are already kind of sorta a failure. This Matador Records thing ain't working out. And you'd assume that the major label vultures have no reason to still be interested in Spoon. And meanwhile, Spoon are still tremendously wary of the major label vultures. You would assume all that, yes. But it's still technically the mid 90s, and alternative rock is still technically hot shit.

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  And there's one guy who works for our old friend Elektra Records, an A&R man named Ron Lafitte, and Ron loves Spoon. And this early flop aside, Ron is still convinced Spoon can be huge if they've got the right label situation. And there was love in the air, and all the money was there. And so, next thing you know, Spoon have signed with Electra. This is gonna go great.

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  They cut another record. It never was a hit. The second full-length Spoon album is released on Elektra Records in 1998, and it's called "A Series of Sneaks". That song is called "Car Radio", which Britt pronounces like "curadio", one word. It's like he's singing in a foreign language, which in a way, he is. This is the nominal lead single off "A Series of Sneaks", but "Car Radio" will not be a fluke major label alt-rock car radio hit that makes Spoon huge in a really cheesy way, in part because "Car Radio" is only 89 seconds long. This is suboptimal in the esteemed opinion of Elektra Records.

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  In that book, Our Noise, Spoon drummer Jim Eno says, quote, "I think it's probably the first time in the history of music that a band was asked to do a radio edit to make a song longer. We didn't want to seem like a bunch of assholes, so we sat in front of a digital editing system for a couple days and did it. We were going to just take 30 seconds from the chorus of a Third Eye Blind song and pop it in. That would have sounded good." End quote. The idea of Third Eye Blind as the platonic ideal of late 90s mainstream alternative rock is very funny to me. Every struggling major label rock band is under intense corporate pressure to sound more like Third Eye Blind.

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  Write more songs about crystal meth. Elektra Records put their immense fearsome major label promotional machine behind Spoon, and they get "Car Radio" in rotation on exactly one radio station. One station. The book doesn't say which radio station exactly. That's too bad. The "A Series of Sneaks" record flops big time, and Spoon's label champion, an A&R man, Ron Lafitte, the guy who whined and dined Spoon and convinced them to sign with Electra in the first place, Ron ghosts the band, and he leaves Electra. And Spoon get dropped the same week that he leaves.

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  That's how major label rock and roll works, my friends. Spoon are an even bigger failure now, and there's only one thing left to do, folks. Sing a couple super mean songs about their former A&R man.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Here we have a jaunty and extra caustic song called Lafitte Don't Fail Me Now, dedicated unambiguously to Mr. Ron Lafitte, Spoon's former A&R guy at Elektra Records. In 1999, on a seven-inch for Saddle Creek Records, speaking of American indie rock institutions, Spoon cut two songs about their former pal Ron. The second song is called "The Agony of Lafitte." It is Ron Lafitte's great misfortune that his last name rhymes with a lot of stuff.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  I'm struck primarily by how direct, how viciously straightforward the Ron Lafitte songs are. "All that I want to know, are you ever honest with anyone?" "It's like I knew two of you, man. The one before and after we shook hands." Spoon lyrics can be quite cryptic. Occasionally, you're 98% sure what or who Britt Daniel is singing about, but even that, it's the 2% uncertainty that matters. Whereas, there is no uncertainty here on these two songs. Spoon are big mad, and justifiably so, but it's over now, right?

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Spoon are toast. Jim Eno and Britt Daniels both get day jobs. Britt's working temp jobs at banks in Manhattan, where he's gotta wear a suit and tie. In that Our Noise book, Britt says, quote, "I didn't think I'd ever be able to make records. Getting dropped as a baby band on a major was like the kiss of death. It felt like things could not get any lower," end quote. And then the next thing you know, Spoon are a huge overnight success.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  This song is called "Everything Hits at Once." It is the first song in the third full-length Spoon album, released on Merge Records in 2001, and called "Girls Can Tell." It's the shockingly elegant use of empty space here. The serene but insistent forward momentum, the startling alliterative opening line, "Don't say a word, the last one's still stinging," the crisp, unfussy, fantastic drums, and the palpable sense that Spoon have mastered the art of playing rock and roll properly by emphasizing the "roll" bit

• 44:25Speaker 01

  over the "rock" bit. That's all wonderfully evident in just those 21 seconds. Girls Can Tell is the first of, by my count, eight consecutive instant classic Spoon albums released between 2001 and 2022. I hope Spoon put a new one out very soon and make it nine consecutive instant classic albums. One of the most reliably stupendous and yet consistently surprising rock bands of the 21st century. Sidebar, first time I heard this record, Girls Can Tell, and this is my first time I heard any Spoon at all, I'd just gotten

• 45:06Speaker 01

  yelled at on the phone. I was living in Ohio, and I interviewed for a job at an alt weekly in Houston, and I got the job, and I accepted the job, but then a week later, I freaked out and flaked out and turned down the job I'd already accepted. I pulled a Lafitte, basically, and then a corporate guy at the chain that owned the Houston paper called me up and yelled at me on the phone. "What the fuck?" were his first words to me, if I recall correctly. I did not enjoy that. I do not enjoy conflict. And after he yelled at me and hung up, I sat there in silence for like 30 seconds, and then I went back to work, and I sort of mindlessly put on an album by a band I'd never heard of that

• 45:47Speaker 01

  became one of my favorite bands ever, and I will always be grateful to Spoon for coming to me in that exact moment of post-Got Yelled At sheepish vulnerability. Anyway, I'm pretty sure the second line of this chorus is, "What we needs is just what we wants." And I gotta say, it's honestly kind of blowing my mind.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's "What we needs is just what we wants." What a bizarrely perfect way to put it. The Tao of Popeye. Spoon start writing the songs on Girls Can Tell before Merge Records even signs the band. In that book, Our Noise, Britt Daniel says, quote, "The pressure was off. I was just writing them for myself. I doubted we'd ever record them. Maybe we'd play them live or something. So I stopped trying to be indie rock cool or play by the rules of what I thought good bands did or post-punk bands were supposed to do. I felt vulnerable, and that was what was starting to come out. And I was doing

• 47:05Speaker 01

  things that I hadn't had the guts to do before. I just felt like, well, if I want to have a piano on a song, I can have a piano on a song. Fuck it. Nobody's going to hear it anyway," end quote. This song's called "Take the Fifth: Dig the Piano."

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Huge, bouncy, laid-back, swaggering, Motown energy to "Take the Fifth," plus the tambourine, dude, the little psh, psh, psh in the deep background. The tambourine makes the whole song. Spoon don't sound like the Pixies anymore. They're into soul music, they're into the kinks, they're into our old friend Elvis Costello. Spoon now sound a lot like our old swaggering, debonair friend Nick Lowe, but more importantly, they sound like Nick Lowe looks.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  My favorite song on this Girls Can Tell album is called "The Fitted Shirt." It's about how Britt Daniel has started dressing for the job he wants, and the job he wants is surprisingly well-dressed, non-major-label rock star, because rock stardom looks and feels a little different here in the early 2000s. You don't necessarily need CBS to pay a great big advance, for one thing.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  I've seen Spoon live eight to 10 times over the past 20-odd years, and I ain't never seen Britt in a t-shirt. That's all I'm saying. On Girls Can Tell, primarily, we got Britt Daniel on vocals, guitars, and keyboards, Jim Eno on drums, Joshua Zarbo on bass, and Mike McCarthy, producing with help from both Britt and Jim. And this arrangement will hold for the next couple great Spoon records, including 2002's "Kill the Moonlight," which includes the first modest hit that makes Spoon kind of a big deal in a not-at-all-cheesy kind of way.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Hey, what did I tell you? There's Britt Daniel in another cool, low-budget video, sauntering down the street in his button-down, fitted shirt. He's also still wearing sunglasses sometimes, but at least this time, he's outside. This song is called "The Way We Get By." The piano is now asserting its dominance. The third line of the opening verse there, I'd never quite fully absorbed. "We get high in backseats of cars. We break into mobile homes. We go to sleep to 'Shake Appeal,' never wake up on our own." Shake Appeal is a song by Iggy and the Stooges from Raw Power, 1973. Lot of handclaps in Shake Appeal.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Every verse of "The Way We Get By" name drops another song by Iggy Pop and/or the Stooges. Rock critics dig Spoon. Man, I don't know why. What strikes me about this record, "Kill the Moonlight," is that immediately upon achieving a modest but durable sort of indie-rock-and-roll prominence, Spoon immediately start deconstructing the very notion of rock and roll. My favorite parts of this record are the studio patter, the weird crosstalk, the peek behind the curtain, the sense that "Kill the Moonlight" is like 85% finished, but it's the unfinished 15% that makes the whole record. I dig this song, "Jonathan Fisk."

• 51:43Speaker 01

  It's about a kid who bullied Britt Daniel in middle school, and it starts with 20 seconds of skeletal guitar and drums augmented by random studio moaning.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  I also dig this song called "Back to the Life," which starts with 20 seconds of skeletal, echoing handclaps and unhinged laughter.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  It's a good song overall, but yeah, my favorite part of "Back to the Life" is Britt going, "Ah, ha, ha, ha." Spoon are a fount of both expected and unexpected excellence throughout the 2000s and beyond, without ever feeling overexposed or trendy. Spoon emerge in the early 2000s amidst the Strokes and the White Stripes and all that "rock is back" action. Spoon are somehow both gloriously stable and delightfully unstable in the late 2000s amidst Vampire Weekend and Animal Collective and the whole Brooklyn indie renaissance. But Spoon do not rely on any outside force or larger narrative to fuel their stability or instability.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  What did the super-drag guy say again? "We kept doing us." Spoon just keep doing Spoon. Spoon just keep doing increasingly implausible quantities of implausibly high-quality Spoon. Here comes Prince.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  The next Spoon album comes out in 2005 and is called Gimme Fiction. The song is called "I Turn My Camera On." Britt has mastered his falsetto. "And you wasn't polite" is my favorite line in this song. In his ever-so-slightly goofy lasciviousness, Britt on "I Turn My Camera On" has somehow triangulated actual Prince and Dave Chappelle's loving impression of Prince. "I turn my camera on, will kick your ass at pickup basketball and then feed you pancakes." "I turn my camera on" is the most pornographic song to ever soundtrack a Jaguar ad.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  As of two weeks ago, I can confirm that "I Turn My Camera On" still kills live. So does this one.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  This is another Gimme Fiction song called "My Mathematical Mind." It's the slow burn here, the steady escalation. It's the total band cohesion. Every element here is absolutely essential, and nobody's trying to be the star. The rolling piano goes, "Do, do, do, do, and do, do, do, do, do, do, do." The lumpy bassline goes, "Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do." Britt's electric guitar thrashes around and then drops out for long stretches and then miraculously reappears. And Jim Eno on drums just plows forward. He holds this on together. He puts the team on his back.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Jim never does too much until too much is explicitly called for. My Mathematical Mind never lets up, and it never quite loses control. It's a perfectly calibrated, slow-motion detonation. The cymbals blow up last.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  And despite whoever else is in the band, or in the studio, or in the liner notes, what you hear on any given Spoon song, what you learn to focus on and rely on is the unbreakable bond between Britt and Jim. The nimble snarl of Britt's voice and the precise clamor of Jim's drums. The precise clamor of the percussion in general, really. The more, the better. Tambourines, vibraphones, beatboxings, sleigh bells, whatever. Dig this song called "Finer Feelings." Dig how the handclaps and shakers are as crucial an element as the lyrics. And it turns out that the lyrics are pretty goddamn important.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  "Finer Feelings" appears on Spoon's sixth album, released in 2007 and called "Gah, Gah, Gah, Gah, Gah." The shaker especially keeps dropping in and out of the mix on this song. And I am genuinely thrilled each time it reappears, like it's the family of deer that keeps wandering arbitrarily out of and then back into my backyard. But also, yes, sometimes I think that I'll find a love, one that's gonna change my hearts, and I'll find it in commercial appeal, and this heartache will get chased away. Spoon are now four fantastic albums and nearly a decade removed from their disastrous stint on Elektra Records.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Their disastrous stint attempting to conform to a major label's misguided conception of commercial appeal. This record, "Gah, Gah, Gah, Gah, Gah," debuts at number 10 on the Billboard Album Chart, a career high for Spoon. Their next two albums will debut in the top five. By the way, this one's called "Gah, Gah, Gah, Gah, Gah" after the sound this piano makes.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  That song's called "The Ghost of You Lingers." It goes on like that for three and a half minutes, the asymmetrical stack of Britt vocal tracks, as that piano goes, "Gut, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh." A more commercial-appeal-minded band would bury this eerie, unsettled ghost of a song deep on Side B, a deep cut, an afterthought. Here, it's track two. Here, it's the main attraction. At this point, in addition to Britt and Jim, we've got Rob Pope, he of Kansas City emo giants, The Get Up Kids. Rob is on bass now. We got Eric Harvey on pianos and keyboards. But we still got Mike McCarthy helping Britt and Jim with production, with the exception of one song here.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  And that just happens to be the song that goes,

• 59:28Speaker 01

  I'm gonna see you stay. Your pipe and slipper set out for you. I know you think that it ain't too far.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  So here we have The Underdog, in which The Underdog, voiced by Britt Daniel, jauntily and sardonically addresses the powers that be. Which, the powers that be, maybe that's the major label system, or maybe that's, you know, the government. We begin by jauntily pointing out that the powers that be will one day find themselves old and feeble, hence the pipe and slippers. The line, "I know you think that it ain't too far", rattled me a little bit in 2007, and it shakes me vigorously now. Britt's vocal delivery gets pretty loopy, pretty fast. Meanwhile, a strutting, mocking, irresistible little bassline

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  drops down from the ceiling with honestly justifiable, I'm the star type energy.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  The way Britt's vocals feel so assured and so volatile here, the way he seems to lean away from and then abruptly back toward the microphone on the line, "Oh, you cut out the middleman", The Underdog feels alive and imperfect and suspiciously upbeat and positively seething. Talking to the AV Club about this song in 2007, Britt talks about Van Morrison and Paul Simon and Ray Davies of The Kinks, guys with a classic rock feel, but a youthful brawler type vibe. Britt talks about, quote, "Pitting this pretty pissed off lyric against this horn part that sounds like a fiesta", end quote.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  We have almost arrived at the fiesta.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  And then the fiesta arrived.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  The Underdog is co-produced by John Bryan, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, LA scenester and superstar collaborator, with everyone from Fiona Apple to Kanye West. The fiesta ass horn part has a palpable semi-tweed John Bryan bounce to it. And yeah, the fiesta nicely offsets how pissed off Britt Daniel sounds. "Got no regard for the thing that you don't understand", that could be about Elektra Records, sure, though Elektra is pretty far back in the primordial mist at this point. It could also be about George W. Bush, though, yes? In the AV Club, Britt says, quote, "I'm not the underdog,

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  but, well, actually, I guess I've been the underdog. To me, it always felt like I was talking to the big guy, you know, the big guy in the government, and trying to tell him about some things he didn't seem to be aware of. I just think that's a pretty arrogant group of liars we've got up there, and they don't really consider the abilities of their opponents", end quote. That's as direct as Britt gets in interviews in terms of spelling out what his songs are about. In general, I think he prefers to embrace the ambiguity, and so do I. These are my favorite lines in The Underdog. Dig the snapping and knee-slapping percussive action as well.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  I just dig that Britt sings, "The thing that I tell you now, it may not go over well", but he never quite gets around to specifying what the thing is. "If you don't know, you don't know. And if you're not listening, then no one can tell you." That goes for CBS Records and all their descendants. That goes for all other, you know, authority figures. Spoon play The Underdog on Saturday Night Live. It's a live staple. It's among the band's most streamed songs, et cetera. But The Underdog is not a fluke hit or a huge outlier. It stands in for all the great Spoon songs, Spoon cranked out before and have kept cranking out since. Just as important here on this Gaga Gaga Gaga album

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  is a song called "Don't You Ever", which begins with Britt Daniel sassing Jim Eno in the studio. "I'm so glad these dudes have each other, and I'm so grateful that we have them."

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  This isn't complicated. It doesn't seem complicated, the way Spoon do it. All they want is rock and roll. They just don't want to deal with the hassle. And so they don't.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  We are so delighted to speak once again with Ryan Dombal, a writer and critic and editor and video producer and co-founder of the wonderful music and culture website, Hearing Things. Previously, he'd spent 15-plus years as an editor at Pitchfork. Ryan, thanks so much for being here.

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  Of course. You have referred to Spoon in print as "the most consistent indie rock band of their generation". You've talked about, like, "This is a name you can trust. They won't let you down." Like, Metacritic, I think, did a thing a long time ago about, like, the most consistently highly rated, like, reviewed rock bands of the 2000s, and Spoon are way up there. Like, how are they so reliable and so consistent without ever getting boring? You know, you don't quite know what to expect other than you can expect to not be disappointed. Like, how do you do that?

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  I think part of it is that, like you said, they do have a consistent sound that you can rely on, and it's an eternal sound. It's rock. It's rock and roll. It's guitar music. A lot of people have liked that for quite a few decades at this point. And they've never done a crazy left turn. They've never started wearing, you know, nudie suits that I know of onstage. You know, these things that bands do when they get bored and they've been around for a long time. It's like, well, we gotta do something different just to keep us excited.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  EDM, right.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  Exactly. And it does seem like Spoon are able to stay excited just by being themselves, you know? Like Britt Daniel being himself, that seems like an eternal quest for him. And I think it, you know, to our benefit. And I think it's helped by how a lot of, you know, him as a songwriter is pretty elliptical. There's always something to grab onto or, you know, put your imagination to work while you're listening to Spoon. And I feel like that also helps longevity. There are some proper nouns, like, in their songs, but even so, they remain timeless. So, yeah, I think it is, they just have an out-of-time appeal,

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  and that's why they've stayed so relevant and so good for so long.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it makes me think of, Girls Can Tell was the first record that I heard, and "The Fitted Shirt" was a song that I was really drawn to immediately. And that's sort of a song about, like, you know, I watched my dad growing up. He'd put a suit and tie on over a fitted shirt. Like, and the song is Britt deciding to do that, right? And that's both true, that's sort of literally true in what he wears onstage, but just it established them in my mind immediately, as you say, as a band a little bit out of time, a band that's trying to be classic, you know, harkening back to an era of rock and roll sort of sophistication slash danger. Like, I feel like that was Spoon's thing in my head from the very beginning, was this combination of, like, this classic,

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  sophisticated, button-down sort of approach, but then sort of experimenting with that without ever alienating people who really love that approach.

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you're right. And I half-wore this button-down shirt in honor of this episode and talking about Spoon.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  That's very kind of you. Thank you.

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  Because I'm sadly in a t-shirt most of the time now in my life. But, yeah, and, you know, Britt Daniel, I feel like that's all I've ever seen him in, is in button-down shirts. But the key is that they're never buttoned, you know, to the top. I feel like there's always maybe, I feel like there's always one button, you know, unleashed. One more button undone than I would undo myself, right?

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  I agree. Yes.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  So, yeah, I think you're absolutely right, because they have, he's wearing the button-up shirt, but it's a little bit reckless. And it's the same thing with their sound. It's fairly conventional sound, if you're familiar with rock music at all. But there he is, making these little weird vocal noises, you know, in between lines. And there's the studio chatter that's like, you know, in like a song on almost all of their albums. And, yeah, these little seams that you can see or little moments of restlessness that really cut through the convention that otherwise, you know, you would think of with Spoon if you're just listening to it in passing.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  All right, when did you get into them? Because it was Girls Can Tell for me, like, but I feel like you would hear them differently if you had been with them from the beginning, if you had been there for the 90s, sort of the failed launch of the Matador record and then the Elektra, like, the major label, like, the whole dropped saga. Like, do you hear this band completely different if you missed sort of the struggle, failure 90s era?

• 1:10:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe. I'm like you. I just got into them with Gimme Fiction, which was also after all of the drama with how they were dropped and all that.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  So I didn't really, wasn't really aware of all that when I got into them. But I have, you know, gone back and, and reestablished myself with that lore. And it's pretty amazing indie lore, like 90s indie lore, where, you know, they were dropped a few months after they released their album on Elektra. And then they put out subsequently this two-song single aimed at the A&R guy who had signed them, you know, who had wind and dine them. And then like, they were dropped as well. And listening back to those two songs, I was really struck by how it, it's funny.

• 1:11:06Speaker 03

  Like, the premise is funny. You're writing a, you know, two-song, like, single about your, your A&R guy. I can't really think of another example of that.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Neither can I.

• 1:11:15Speaker 03

  But also, they sound, or, you know, Britt sounds legitimately hurt by this.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  He does.

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  This experience in these songs. And I think that I was touched by that. And I feel like it's really indicative of Britt and Spoon as a whole, as far as they seem to live by this code of integrity. You know, like, one of, like, the hook on one of the songs is like, "Are you honest with anyone?" And that, I feel like Britt probably does like to think that he, I just, he comes across as a guy who is honest with everyone.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  Even, even if that honesty, you might not want to hear.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  It's frightening. Right. Yes.

• 1:11:59Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. So, so, yeah, I, I was struck by that. How they are, they do sound legitimately hurt. And I think that experience also cemented them in their minds. And in reality, as these underdogs, you know, not to, not to belabor the point. But, and, and, and, yeah, they, they just kind of went from there. And I think made the most of that, of that experience. And I think it was this crucible that really formed them and helped them move on in this amazing way.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  I, like you say, there are proper nouns in Spoon songs. But those two songs, the Ron Laffitte songs, and like, Ron Laffitte is a very funny name. Unfortunately, like, it rhymes with stuff like "that really worked to Spoon's benefit" and "to not Ron's benefit." But like, those two songs sort of stand alone how wounded and how direct Britt is. Like, I feel like what I love about Spoon is like, it's not that it's totally oblique. Like, I have a pretty good idea of who or what he's singing about a lot of the time. But there is a directness, there is a super vulnerability and anger to just those two songs of just naming this guy specifically. And as you say, like, "Are you honest with anyone?" is like, that's not a Spoon line necessarily.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  Like, those two songs standalone for me is so direct and wounded. Like, do you think, is what happened to Spoon that bad? You know, like, is, was this like a uniquely terrible situation that warranted an angry series of songs about their A&R guy? Or were they just really great Spoon about, like, using a typical, bad, major-label experience to motivate themselves into the next phase of their careers?

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  I really think it's the latter, because especially coming, especially coming from the 90s, you know, you read about, you read about all these bands. It seemed like every one in 10 bands got a second album, you know, like, on a major label sort of thing. So this was a very typical experience, especially at that moment in time. Yeah, and most bands just walk away wounded and maybe break up or put out a couple albums that no one cares about, and then that's it. But, yeah, they just, they, Spoon did it different. They decided to just put this man, put Ron Laffitte on Front Street.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  On blast.

• 1:14:25Speaker 03

  100%. Yeah, exactly. And I love that they, I love that they did that. I wonder what Ron Laffitte is doing. Like, that could be, that would be a great, you know, 2014 blog post.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  There we go. Let's go back in time and get some clicks.

• 1:14:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This is my, my decades of editing experience.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  You can't turn it off. Yeah.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  So, so, yeah, but I think they, yeah, so they, they, the way they were wronged was not unique, but their reaction to it was very unique. And I think that's very telling of Spoon as well.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. You talked about, there always being on their albums, like, crosstalk, like, studio chatter. Like, I, I'm really drawn to the way that Britt and Jim Eno work together. Like, just, just their little snippets of conversation on these records. But I just, you know, this is a band with a lot of people in it, you know, where Britt is the one absolute content. But Britt and Jim are the core of the band, always. Like, what do you think it is about these two guys? You know, this singer-songwriter and this drummer, you know, they're producers, co-producers on all this stuff. Like, what, what is the synergy between them? Like, what makes these two guys work so well together? You know, and no one else can get close enough to them to be part of the core forever?

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. And I'm, I would guess, I don't know them, I don't know them personally, but reading the tea leaves of their little interactions on the albums, I would guess, again, I'm just thinking, there's one on Gaga Gaga where, I think it's on Gaga Gaga, where Britt is like, "Did you get that, Jim?"

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  Don't you ever.

• 1:16:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. He says like, "Did you get that, Jim?" like, several times. And to me, that's like, this dude is like, annoying, you know, like, yeah, he got it. He's the producer, right? Like, that's his job. Like, you've been working with him for, like, 10 years by that point.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  You can trust him. Right. Yes.

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I would imagine, like, a lot of relationships where the singer, producer, drummer relationships is that Jim Eno can probably just put up with Britt Daniel, like, at his, you know, at his maybe kind of meticulous moments. I feel like that's probably part of it. Jim Eno seems like just a very normal, nice dude. Yeah, exactly. So I think that would probably be a big part of it. And I just really think with any rock band, even, even something as relatively modest as Spoon, like, you don't think of Britt Daniel as this, like, asshole rock star. But he's, he's a frontman.

• 1:17:15Speaker 03

  Like, every, every frontman is gonna have that ego to an extent. And I think part of it is when you're the drummer, producer, just being able to put up, put up with, you know, the, the little intricacies of someone's personality. And, and, yeah, I imagine Britt appreciates that as well.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  Now I'm thinking about some kind of monster. I'm thinking about all the scenes of Metallica in the studio and of Lars and James just yelling at each other. This is, that's a slightly different situation in a few key respects. But I think there's a core dynamic there that maybe carries through. You know, there's an archetypal lead singer, drummer relationship.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  Totally. Yeah. And, and it's funny, you mentioned that, because on one of the Ron Laffitte songs, he said, he mentions a Metallica album that, that Ron Laffitte, like, was supposed to give to him.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Should have given it to him.

• 1:18:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, he really should have. But I feel like Britt is probably very familiar with Metallica's lore and, you know, the lore of so many, he's, you know, he really seems like a student, student of the game, so.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Yes. I, do you like the underdog, Ryan? You know, like, by default, you know, like, it's one of their highest-stream songs. It's one of their highest-charting songs. They played it on Saturday Night Live. Like, it's a calling card. They'll play it during the encore usually. But like, does the underdog work for you as the definitive Spoon hit? Or is the entire point of Spoon that they do not have or need one definitive hit?

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  So I'll answer this, but I also want to just preface it by saying I love, as a fan of this show, of this podcast, I love it when you're talking about the songs, you know, the headlining songs, and then like thirty, thirty-five minutes into the episode, you're like, this is my eighteenth favorite White Stripes song, you know what I mean?

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  That's right. Jimmy Eat World's The Middle, yeah, is not the best song on that record, yes. I, I think I like The Underdog more than you do. That happens all the time, and I'm glad that you appreciate it. But in this instance, it's not my favorite Spoon song, but I do like it as arguably the biggest Spoon song. But yeah, I believe what you said is it's giving Boss tones. Was that what you said to me about the, the horn section doesn't do it for you?

• 1:19:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I thought, all right, so I like The Underdog, like, let me, let me put that out. But listening back again now, I would say it's probably one of my least favorite songs on that album. I'm not skipping it or anything, but it really does stand out to me, like, on that album, and just listening to all of the, you know, their whole discography, like, the horns, you know, John Bryan helped produce this song, and I'm ninety-nine percent sure he was the one who thought to put the horns on it.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  That's a John Bryan horn line, absolutely, yeah.

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  And it, it makes sense because people like horns, it makes a song seem bigger, and you're not going to see that song in all these different movies if those horns aren't on it, probably, or these commercials or whatever. But I just don't think, I don't love the horns on that song, it's corny, it's like corny to me, and it is giving Boss tones a little bit. I was listening to, I just thought of that, this, you know, this round of listening to that song, and I was like, yeah, this is kind of ska, and that is just so weird to me because Spoon is so cool, they're one of my low stars for cool, and ska is the least cool thing.

• 1:21:08Speaker 03

  Still, I don't know, I'm sure there's, there's apologists, you know, there's, there's controversy.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  We've come back around on ska, Ryan, you gotta get ahead of the game, ska is cool now. It's so uncool, it's cool, yes.

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  It's, as someone who was a teenager in the nineties, no, like, no.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  Okay, agree to disagree, I don't know if I agree to disagree, okay.

• 1:21:31Speaker 03

  But just, and also, I was humming along on K-Rock, don't get me wrong, I wasn't like, you know, spitting on my, you know, like bulldozing my, like, Boss tones cassettes or whatever, but.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  Okay, good.

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  But anyway, The Underdog, yeah, not my favorite, but the lyric is, the lyric is incredible, and the lyric is, really sums up Spoon, you know, in so, in so many ways, just like thematically, they are these, this incredible example of underdogs, and they're always kind of punching up, and that is what the song is about, and I love that, and I'll always love that as someone who's, you know, probably considers themselves like an underdog, and has liked a lot of art that is coming from that place, and to make that underdog

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  sentiment seem so triumphant, I do appreciate that, I think it's cool, but I almost feel like they made it too triumphant, so that almost, almost anyone could just listen to this song and wear that label as, as a patch, and it, it rubs me the wrong way a little bit. As a, as a Spoon fan, you know, you're a snob, if you're a big Spoon fan, like, you're kind of a snob, and I, I would say I, I am sort of like that, so, so, yeah, I'm, I feel like, but maybe if it weren't for that song, we wouldn't have gotten all these other albums, you know, who's to say?

• 1:23:13Speaker 03

  But, listening back now, it is not my favorite.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  I, yeah, I'm thinking about Gaga Gaga now, and like, you got your Cherry Bomb, like, finer feelings, like, yes, if I'm ranking songs, which is a very Spoon activity, like, on that album, or a Spoon fan activity, anyway, like, yeah, it's not my favorite either, but I, it's probably necessary to them continuing to have this career, you know, this successful career where they could continue to describe themselves as the underdog, but still, like, you know, get things at commercials and stuff like that, so. It's a necessary evil, if you want to see it that way. What is the best Spoon album, Brian? I cannot, I don't know the answer to this, and I'm hoping that you do.

• 1:23:59Speaker 03

  It's an ever-changing thing, because like you said, they're so consistent, but going back across their discography in preparation for this interview, I have to say, Transference has become number one, and, and, and that sounds like, that sounds like an asshole thing to say, because this is kind of like, you know, this is kind of a dud, you know, I think in the greater consciousness, it was the follow-up to Gaga Gaga, and didn't do well,

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  as well, seemingly by many, many, many factors commercially, but to me, that album is Spoon uncut, you know, it, it is just them at their rawest, and it's kind of ugly, and they're doing their thing, because even though Spoon seems like the kind of band that are just really on their own trip at all times, and would never capitulate to, you know, commercial interest, like, for the underdog, they got John Bryan, that in its way.

• 1:25:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, you know, for something like New York Kiss from They Want My Soul, they got, what is the dude's, for the semisonic dude?

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Oh, did they, that's right, I forgot about that, it's, oh, I should know that guy's name, I'm sorry, sorry, semisonic dude.

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  He helped write the song, and this is after he helped write songs for Adele, and you know, all these other pop stars.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  So I do think that Britt has this inkling, or you know, part of him wants to, wants to see what he can do with this, like, bigger pop history songbook, so, but on Transference, there's none of that, like, really, that, it just, but this, it's not like it's a really weird, I wouldn't even say it's like experimental, it's just raw, like stripped back, you know, I feel like the songs are there, and like, when they play those songs live, to me, they sound just as good as, as Cherry Bomb or all these other huge songs, you know, like something like Trouble Come Running, I don't know, I guess that wasn't a hit, but it's,

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  to me, that could have been on Gaga Gaga.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Sounds like it, yeah.

• 1:26:30Speaker 03

  So, so, yeah, that is, that is my number one album, and I think it's partly because it's a little bit lesser known, but, yeah, I just, that's the one that's played, that I've played, like, on my, my Spoon LP collection, that's the one that I can't get, can't get off the turntable, it's just so listenable to me, and I think part of it is maybe because it doesn't have those highs, you know, it doesn't have that underdog with all these associations.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  Right, right, it's yours, yeah.

• 1:27:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, sure.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  We were talking about, we've both seen Spoon live pretty recently, and they played, like, a fairly deep cut off Transference, Out Go The Lights, which is, like, it, I don't want to say it has Ron Laffitte energy, but like, it's a slower, it's sort of a ballad, like, it's, you can feel almost in Britt's voice that there's more of a personal, more vulnerable tone to this one song, like, you can sort of tell when he means it a little bit more personally, and that song always worked for me on the record, and like, it really struck me live, and he prefaced it, Britt, by saying something like, you know, we haven't played this very much, you know, like, there was a sense that, like, we had never done this song justice live, but like, we figured it out, you know, and it was, it

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  was a really moving sort of high point for that show for me, like, did you have a similar experience with that song? You saw them in Central Park, I think, which is very impressive, but I, yeah, what was your experience of Spoon live now?

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I saw them a few weeks ago in Central Park, it was a free show, beautiful New York City summer night, and it's, I love that you mentioned Out Go The Lights, because I had the same exact experience as you, partly because, like I said, I really like this album, I haven't heard a lot of them, of it played live, ever, and that was cool, but I love this song, like, I, I wrote about this song when it came out, for Pitchfork, like, it's, like, a track, remember track reviews, like, I remember I wrote about this song.

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  Oh, love track reviews, great source of content, yes.

• 1:28:40Speaker 03

  And, yeah, and I just was really taken by it, I think it's one of their most beautiful.

• 1:28:48Speaker 03

  Tracks ever. It is really heartbreaking. And live, I, I was, it was, because when I saw them, it was a real greatest hits sort of set, which is fine, and I, I enjoy that. But this was one of the kind of couple of deep cuts that they went into. And I was really genuinely shocked that they play it. I'm not like, I'm not that guy who's at the show, like writing down the fucking playlist. You know, like, that's not really me. I'm just kind of letting it wash over me.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  But when they played this, I did feel like one of those people. I was like, oh shit. Like, I was the only person. I was like, one of seven people in, you know, in Central Park, who was like, holy shit, they're playing Alco of the Light, you know? So I was so kind of struck that the whole concert, I was, I was behind these, this group of, of young people who were having a good time, but seemed to be on psychedelic drugs the whole time, which is fine, you know, like.

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  I don't know. This is the band for that necessarily. Yeah.

• 1:29:52Speaker 03

  You know, that's what I was thinking. And it was low key bothering me just because they were right in my sightline.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 1:30:01Speaker 03

  And I was, and I, you know, I was thinking about it from the exact way that you said. I was like, this isn't, this doesn't seem right, you know?

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  They got lost on their way to like the Krungbin concert.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  David Guetta, or what? Yeah, okay.

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  Exactly. So for, so the whole time I was just sitting there and like, being, you know, mildly annoyed by this, but for Alco the Lights, I was, I was like, I need to step in front of these folks to, to really enjoy this.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:27Speaker 03

  To really, to really enjoy this song. And, and I did. And it was, it was a, it was a beautiful moment. And I'm glad I did. And, you know, I feel like the people, those folks had a great time, you know, watching that song too. I don't know if they were familiar with it.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  But they didn't get out of it. They didn't get it the way you did. Yeah. They did not mind meld with grit the way you did. The song at a show that makes you walk, move forward, even like five steps, but that's a big moment. That's a real testament to the greatness of a song. If it could make you leave where you were standing and move even a little closer, that is an underrated indicator of a truly great song.

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  Totally. And yeah, it was exactly, I think probably seven steps. So we're not talking like, you know, moving to the front row.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  No, it matters. It totally matters. It's not like you were crowd surfing, but it's still, still a significant move on your part. Just to wrap up, like, we have both interviewed Britt Daniel, you know, which I found like as a terrifying, I just did like a phoner with him, I think in the Gimme Fiction era. And like, even then, like, I've, I've always found him very intimidating, you know, like, it's not like he's a dick or anything, as you say, but like, there's, he's got a wariness to him, you know, he's, he's careful with journalists, he's, he's wary of them, he's not going to give you too much. Like, you've interviewed a lot of people, you know, did you find him to be an especially scary interview?

• 1:31:54Speaker 03

  I'll say no.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:31:56Speaker 03

  I've interviewed a lot of artists of his era. Ilk, Malkmus, Dan Bejar.

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  Even Jeff Tweedy, I kind of put in the similar category. I think I'm drawn to these, I'm drawn to these weirdos, for whatever, for whatever reason. With Britt, I remember I was probably fairly intimidated, but the interview I did was for this series that we did a pitchfork where people would talk about music they loved throughout their life.

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  Five, 10, 15. Yeah.

• 1:32:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that was grounding. And that was a grounding force in the interview. It wasn't like we were just going in, kind of talking about even like your new album. That just seems like so much more open ended. And I also like it when the interviewee has to do a little work for the interview. That's a secret.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  Because they're, yeah, they might be a little bit more invested if they took the 10 minutes to write down, or think about the songs that meant the most to them, you know, like when they were 10 years old. So that's a little secret, another editor tip. But yeah, no, I wasn't that, in, I was, I was probably a little bit intimidated, but trying to think back to it, he was pretty cool about it. I don't remember him being mean or anything. He was actually reading that interview back. He was more open than I think I would assume he would be, talking about his childhood. I don't think he's, I'm sure he's talked about it a little bit here and there, but it's not something he's talking about in every interview.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  All the time. Right.

• 1:33:34Speaker 03

  Right. So, yeah, he was, he was okay, but I feel like he put me at ease. Like, it was in person, which is, which was also nice. You're just like, you're, it's harder to be cantankerous when there's this, you know, nerd with a, with a tape recorder three feet away from you, who's, you know, clearly hanging on your every word. So I think, I think that must be ingratiating to these, to these artists. I would hope so.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:34:07Speaker 03

  I would hope so. But yeah, there was one, he was in a leather jacket. It was, you know, probably a morning, some morning and on Lower East Side and some pretty nice hotel. And he was in leather jacket, can of Coke, and he had his iPhone. And I do remember the iPhone had this like, you know, discreet crack, like on the top right. And I, and it just felt like he, he bought it that way, you know, like Britt Daniel.

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  Oh, he got it used. Okay.

• 1:34:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, or you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Or I just, I just can't imagine like Britt Daniel, like giving a shit about, you know, his iPhone screen. Like, that would be.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  It's very cool. Very cool.

• 1:34:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yep.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  Did you wear a fitted shirt to your interview with Britt?

• 1:34:55Speaker 03

  I don't even think I knew what a fitted shirt was, or like how to acquire one at that time.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  They didn't have those in New York City in the late 2000s. Yeah, I remember. I was there.

• 1:35:07Speaker 03

  But I probably did wear, I would, I would guess I wore a button up and, you know, clean trousers.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  I'm sure, I'm sure he remembers you as fondly as you remember him.

• 1:35:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. Didn't want to look like a slob in front of Britt Daniel.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  Nobody does. Ryan, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for talking.

• 1:35:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  Thanks very much to our guest this week, Ryan Dombal. Thanks to our producers, Juliana Ress, Justin Sayles, Olivia Creary, and Chris Sutton. Animations and graphics by Chris Callaton. Special thanks to Cole Kutchner, and thanks to you for listening. And now let's all go listen to The Underdog by Spoon. See you next week.