A Loving Spoonful: Britt Daniel Gives You Fiction
by Jon Pruett | 00.00.0000

There's a book called Sometimes A Great Notion, written by Ken Kesey in 1964. Back then, Kesey was the man behind the wheel of the Merry Prankster mobile Furthur and basically helped a lot of neophyte hippies get their freak on. He also wrote One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in 1962. That tale about the true insanity and lies within a mental institution made a lot of sense to a lot of people. The movie made even more sense. Sometimes A Great Notion was the eagerly anticipated follow up. A lot of people bought that book, fewer people finished it. They made a movie out of that one, too. With Paul Newman, even. Just don't go and try to find it. It's basically forgotten.

The point here is, Sometimes A Great Notion was the better book. But it didn't register with anybody. Was that the book’s fault or Kesey’s for not delivering another thinly veiled counter culture analysis? You also have to wonder which book meant more to him: the one that opened the door, or the one dearer to his heart that he got out while the door was open?

Basically, when you're given that short window of access into the collective public consciousness, you have a limited amount of time to squeeze in as much product as you can. In music, this is especially pertinent. Now, granted, Spoon's Kill The Moonlight is not exactly One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. It was basically just a pop record. A pop record that people really connected with and believed in and felt had something that other records didn't have. Which is worth something. For longer term fans, it was a vindication, a finger wagging "I told you so" to the people who had been on (or completely off) the fence about Spoon for years. It was a record you might say, "kicked ass.” Did it open a window? You bet it did. Spoon went from being a secret little punked up indie band with rock tendencies into something slinkier, meatier and something with bite. They stripped their songs down to their basics, added some jittery electronics, threw in same classic pop piano and suddenly these guys are getting the thumbs up all around for keeping rock interesting again. Which they did. "The Way We Get By" was a cool as hell, hand clapping, finger pointing pop song that made no concessions to the indie contingency. It was there to please anybody who listened.

So, what should one make of the group's follow up Gimme Fiction? First off, the easiest thing that Spoon could have done at this moment would have been to follow up Kill The Moonlight with another wiry collection of post punk songs gleaned from the school of Wire's Pink Flag or some glossy, slightly self-aware New Wave pop taken from the Ocasek trash heap. Certainly, the thought of revisiting this path made the creation of the new record a bit more difficult.

“In some ways, I think it was just the same as putting together any other record,” says Britt Daniel, the guitarist, singer, songwriter and essential foundation of Spoon. “I guess there were some moments where I felt more stressed because I knew a lot of people would be listening. But I’ve been doing this a long time and it just felt like this was an important one for some reason. I tried to get away from that frame of mind. When you think about things like that, it’s not helpful, it’s not productive.”

He’s happy to be talking to someone in English. He and the rest of the band have literally just returned from a European press tour which, in addition to giving them a chance to hang out with a global array of interpreters, also saw them perform at the behest of Slint, who just curated this year’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival.
But come on, in the three years since Kill The Moonlight was released, the post punk thing has gone totally out of control. The Good Charlotte guys are just minutes away from talking about how they always liked those A Certain Ratio records. But Britt Daniel is a guy who was schooled at an early age in the ways of classic rock. He’s pretty sure he can name most of the songs in the top 10 between 1978 and 1985. He’s the classic case of the kid alone in his room, “raised on the radio,” as the song goes. He’ll tell you this himself.

“I was obsessed with music, even when I was really young. I never thought that I would drop out of school and do music, but I knew that I wanted to do this. The whole time that I’ve been an adult, it’s been the only thing that I’ve really focused on. It’s been the one thing that I knew I wanted to do. “ But you already guessed as much.
Britt knows that he has a window of time open to him thanks to Kill The Moonlight. People will listen to whatever it is he does next. So, he did what just about everybody in music secretly wants to do. He made a rock record.

“Yeah, it does feel more like a rock record,” he concedes. “But it has some wildness in there. At the same time, it is still a studio album to me. It’s still stylish.”

Within the first minute of Gimme Fiction, you know you're dealing with a record that has some pretty serious intentions. Not serious like, say...The Joshua Tree. This is like Thin Lizzy-style seriousness. That band was equally silly and beautiful and totally powerful—and they would beat the crap out of you if thought otherwise. Britt Daniel is not going to fight you. But he does know how to enter a room. First song, “The Beast And Dragon, Adored,” saunters in with an unassuming way that is slightly self-aware. It’s like when a book starts with a preposition or when a film doesn’t roll the opening credits until five minutes in: you know you’re supposed to strap yourself in right away. Confidence is a rough road to navigate. Think of the film director, Alejandro González Iñárritu whose first film, Amores Perros naturally exploded with brilliance, but whose follow up 21 Grams is totally weighed down by its awareness of its own importance. Having talent and knowing you’re talented don’t result in the same art. Britt and Spoon find a way to navigate this properly, they're confident that they can rock, but they don't exude self importance. They exude more of the idea of the rock n’ roll getaway. The “Coney Island Of Your Mind,” as a song once put it. The title alone brings that on. Gimme Fiction. It’s like, “Fuck everything, let’s rock.”

“I like that explanation,” Britt says. “Somebody else said, ‘Does it mean that because the world is so dark right now, you need to escape to this world of fiction?’ Yeah, sure, okay. Really though, when we were picking out the title, we just wanted to come out with a good title. The way that the Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet is a good title. I don’t really think that Beggar’s Banquet has anything to do with the meaning of the songs therein, but it’s a nice sounding phrase. Sounds tough. That was our criteria too."

Yeah, it does sound tough. It sounds like it’s got muscle, but it isn’t afraid to shake it a little bit for the camera. It drops in a song like “Sister Jack,” which is just jingle-jangle perfection amid these darker, creeping numbers which prowl around the stage behind Daniel’s coolly congested vocals. It’s definitely the work of a band that knows they’re being watched, but not necessarily the work of one that cares about being watched.

“A long time ago, I thought I wanted this record to be a dance record. It clearly didn’t become that,” he says, with a pause. “I remember right before we even started coming up with the songs. I remember saying, ‘Let’s do an album that’s all dance songs.’ I remember specifically saying, ‘Songs like “Rock The Casbah.”’ I just love that song. I think that’s one of the greatest singles. Everybody was like, ‘Sure yeah, let’s do it.’ And we started working and it just didn’t happen. It just doesn’t work that way. If we have an agenda like that, then it’s difficult to make the songs the best that they can be.”
You can see where the record might have gone, listening to tracks like “I Turn My Camera On” or “Was It You,”—the former is more like the Stones doing “Miss You” than it is the Clash, but it points to a band that is still working to define itself, one that is exploring the inner-workings of pop songs and trying to put itself into the modern lexicon of rock music. Spoon is one of a handful of bands that aren’t cursed with having their first record be their best. They aren’t cursed with having all the expectation put on their major label debut (it already happened, they’re over it and back on indie Merge).

“I think about that pattern a lot. It seems to me like I see a lot of bands that have great first records. Maybe even great first and second records and then they just don’t know what to do with themselves. There’s a lot of bands, though, that don’t start out so great and then they hit their stride and they just keep going and going. I would say Wilco is like that, even though I like that first album. But you never could have predicted what they were going to turn into. Radiohead is definitely like that. I think it just has something to do with the kind of musician you are. For me, I’m still excited about the making of records. That’s the most important thing to me. It’s not about getting into a magazine or what drugs I’m doing. It’s not about being fashionable or anything like that. It’s not even about having hits. It’s about the thrill of hearing new music and making new music that is challenging. Music that stands up and that you feel proud about. A lot of musicians are like that. Prince is like that. Paul Simon is like that. A lot of other musicians get into music for other reasons.”

When Britt says, “other reasons,” his disdain is pretty palpable. He isn’t here to play games. He knows that this window isn’t going to be open forever, so he’s going to make the best album he can and he’s going to fill it full of piano, stuttering guitar lines and back-alley narratives about some guy named “Monsieur Valentine.” He’s going to drop an album whose art makes all sorts of vaguely covert references to Little Red Riding Hood and he’s going to let you figure it out. Hell, Britt Daniel going to mention rock and roll by name in the first song.

Gimme Fiction is a better album than Kill The Moonlight. (If you’re keeping track.) The tunes deliver and unravel more and more with each listen. It also has very little to do with indie rock. (We should all be grateful that those names don’t mean anything anymore.) So, let us take the time to thank Mr. Daniel and the members of Spoon for following their rock and roll hearts and delivering an album that doesn’t do what you might want it do. Let’s thank them for getting this album out to us while we still want to listen and let’s just hope that we do. Britt’s window is wide open. He has given you Fiction. Fuck everything, let’s rock.