Taste of something new from Britt Daniel, Spoon
Spoon is scheduled to perform Saturday, Sept. 30, at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley.
Discussing Spoon with frontman Britt Daniel is a crash course in the history of rock ’n’ roll.
Ask him about the success of “Hot Thoughts,” the band’s ninth album of their celebrated career, and Daniel immediately turns to Prince. As he explains, it was Prince’s death in 2016 that inspired Daniel to revisit his idol’s immense discography during the time that “Hot Thoughts” was recorded.
“He’s the greatest performer I ever saw,” says Daniel.
“The thing I really loved about watching Prince, aside from his technical abilities, was that there always got to be a part in every show where he brought it up to a spiritual level. It was all about love. It was all about everybody there in the room feeling it. I don’t know if there’s anything higher you could subscribe to than that kind of feeling.”
While Daniel has never taken the stage riding a bicycle or donned a pair of purple silk pajamas, his stage persona is, in its own right, striking. To see Spoon live is to witness rock refined to its most concise form. There are no errant notes or dead air. An accomplished guitarist, singer and songwriter, Daniel seems to have developed an algorithm for making catchy and compelling indie rock, which has helped make the Austin-based Spoon a mainstay in the music scene since it formed in 1993.
But with the March release of “Hot Thoughts,” which Spoon will undoubtedly draw from when they perform at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre on Saturday, Sept. 30, Daniel has toyed with the formula that has served his band so well over the years. While the guitar hooks and punchy piano lines are still there, added are a few new tricks, like “Us,” a five-minute jazz odyssey that closes the record.
“We’ve never done anything that sounded remotely like ‘Us,’ ” he says. “Since we finished the record, that’s the song that I’ve put on the most, maybe just because it feels the least like me . ... We like looking for songs that don’t sound like us. We have dropped or changed a lot of songs because they sounded too much like us.”
Discussing the songwriting process, Daniel recalls that while recording “Do You” for the 2014 album “They Want My Soul,” he had to argue with bandmates and his producer to change the song’s beat — which everyone else in the studio loved — out of concern that Spoon might be repeating themselves.
“It was a bouncy type of beat. The best example of it is the Kinks doing ‘Sunny Afternoon’ or ‘Dead End Street.’ I felt like we had done that before,” he says. “It sounded like (previous Spoon songs) ‘Don’t Make Me a Target’ and a little bit like ‘The Way We Get By.’ I got a lot of pushback about telling the guys that I knew we could do better, but we did. We did it a different way and it ended up being that album’s big hit.”
One thing that has been remarkably consistent is the positive reception Spoon seems to amass when they release a new album. According to the review aggregator website Metacritic, Spoon was the best reviewed band from 2000-2009, a decade that saw them release four records.
But Daniel doesn’t take much stock in the critical acclaim the band has had, noting that he regards Spoon’s early work as both a critical and fiscal disappointment.
“The critics didn’t exactly warm to us for a bit. The first two records that came out definitely felt like failures, in terms of sales,” he says.
Daniel adds he doesn’t inherently fear failure. And yet, nearly half a year into touring behind “Hot Thoughts,” he admits he still feels something each night as he strikes the guitar notes that slice like a knife into the album’s title track.
“I’m not living the lyrics every night, but I am in the moment. I am feeling the room and feeling the energy of everybody there,” he says. “I’m the one with the microphone and everybody’s watching. That’s a thrill that I don’t get over.”