(Credit: Autumn de Wilde)
“I would choose ‘Stranger Than Fiction’ because he doesn’t get naked in the street and he gets the girl in the end,” says Daniel, who now lives in Portland, Ore.
That’s Spoon for you: deceptively simple, a bit guarded and slightly romantic. Thanks to Daniel’s distinctive, mildly ashy voice and seemingly endless stash of tight, efficient melodies, the quartet has become a critics’ darling and the second Merge Records artist to appear on “Saturday Night Live” in 2007 (the first was the Arcade Fire). In July, Spoon delivered its sixth album, “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” which Daniel considers “the most consistently great record we’ve done.”
From Portland, Daniel told us about what it means to make it and his troublemaking past.
The band seems to have hit its stride. Do you feel like you’ve finally “made it”?
Yeah, I feel like we’ve made it, but I might have a low standard for what making it means. I kinda feel like we made it in 2002 when I didn’t have to have a job anymore and I felt like things were kinda working. For once, putting out a record wasn’t a dismal failure. But every record’s gotten a little bit bigger even since then. We make it more and more. It’s cool.
So anything that exceeds dismal failure counts as success?
Exactly. That’s making it. On the other hand, I doubt that Fergie would consider that we’ve made it. But she’s living in another world, man. To her, I’m sure selling 180,000 records, which our new one has done so far, would be a disappointment. It’s all relative. To me it feels great. I get to do this thing; I’m in the record-making club. It’s what I always wanted to do.
You seem really proud of “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.” Is there anything you wish you would have done differently?
I’m not really at that point where I can tell what I would have liked to have done differently. I haven’t listened to it closely for a while. But when we finished it I had been listening to it a heck of a lot and I felt really proud of it. And I felt like the songs that actually were personal expressed how I felt right then and there. It felt like musically it was kind of the most consistently great record we’ve done. That’s open for interpretation. Some people will love [Spoon’s first album] “Telephono” best. They’re just wrong.
The new record has a song called “You Got Yr Cherry Bomb.” Were you much of a prankster when you were younger?
I sort of was a prankster. A sometimes mean-spirited prankster. Being in middle school you’re just mean to people. People were mean to me. I’d come home and my house would be [toilet-papered] and there’d be mean things written on my driveway and that upset me and that hurt my feelings. And then I’d go out and I’d do it to somebody else. Which I did not even think about how illogical and fucked up that was. I like being a prankster these days, and I don’t do it in a mean-spirited way.
What’s the worst trouble you ever got into at school?
Some kid was knocking Frankie Goes to Hollywood and making fun of me and my musical taste. I never really got in fights, but if somebody was knocking me, I’d just be like, “Well, fuck off.” Or, “You’re an idiot.” But somebody was knocking my music and I knocked him into a trashcan. And I got taken down to the principal’s office and got whipped.
Did the principal just say, “Relax”?
[Laughs] That would have been good. I wish he was hip enough to have done that. He did not say, “Relax.” He said, “You stand there while I whip you.” We got whipped!
Physically?
Yes! They called them licks. But you were whipped with a belt.
Did you go to private school?
No. That’s just what it’s like in Texas, man. I don’t know if it’s still like that, but it was like that when I was growing up.
