 Britt
Daniel
Flirting with the Muse*
By Trevor Wallace
(*Euterpe,
the muse of lyrical song. Not to be confused with Calliope,
muse of epic song and poetry and mother to that most unfortunate
of mythical figures, Orpheus.)
“Its
easier to drink on an empty stomach/Than eat on a broken heart,”
Britt Daniel laments in “Figures of Art” off Spoon’s
debut for Merge Records, Love Ways. Truer words have rarely
been spoken, let alone put to music. But such is the nature
of the band’s music, and, more specifically, Daniel’s
songwriting. The blunt emotional trauma of heartache and loss
reverberate through Spoon’s catalog like ripples on
a lonely sylvan pond, laced with hope and disdain as the sun
breaks through the trees to turn the pool into a shimmering
jewel in the rough.
Contradictory, a trifle lofty, and possibly pretentious, but
it’s often hard to put a finger on just exactly where
Daniel is coming from. A haunting melody here, a jagged guitar
break there, piano riffs and homemade tape loops all serve
as a backdrop for lyrics ranging from the aforementioned heartbreak
to drinking and drug use to the clothes Britt likes to wear
and how he believes those around him should act. Not that
he’s preaching, mind you, he just “longs for the
days/they used to say/ma’am and yes sir” (“Fitted
Shirt,” Girls Can Tell).
A friendly bed-headed blonde of the tall and lanky variety,
Daniel cuts a pose tailor-made to get the college girlies
all hot and bothered. And while some may credit Spoon’s
success to the physical attributes of its singer, are (almost)
five albums and a near-decade of success so easily explained
away? Was Spoon invited to Carson Daly and Conan O’Brien
as well as the Austin City Limits Festival (where they played
twice—one set of Spoon material, the other as Bright
Eyes band) simply because the singer is cute? Listen to one
the band’s records, and decide for yourself if this
is the case.
 THE
MAN, THE MYTH, COSLOY’S LEGEND
Born in Galveston and raised for the most part in Temple,
Britt was young when he first realized music was what he wanted
to do. “When I was six or seven, I [started] playing
my dad’s records on my own,” Daniel explains around
a mouthful of taco at Julio’s in Hyde Park. “I
would just stare at those vinyl sleeves, and I always thought
it would be the greatest if I could make one of these things.”
“I
really got into the Bee Gees at first—and I’ve
since come back to them. There’s some Bee Gees I like
a lot,” he elaborates. “My dad was really into
the Beatles, but he was more of a McCartney guy. I think he
had one Lennon solo album, but he had all the McCartney ones.”
Now listen to “Jealousy” on Loveways. The chorus
hearkens to the Fab Four’s “Baby’s in Black,”
a Lennon tune, sure, but the influence is still strongly felt.
Initially picking up the guitar as a teenager, Daniel finally
wound up in Austin in the early ‘90s and wasted no time
in putting together a band. By 1994, Daniel and drummer Jim
Eno had the core of the band solidified. Within a year, Daniel
had met two people who would prove instrumental to the band’s
success. The first was former Reiver’s frontman, John
Croslin. “I’d heard his name, read his name a
million times. I had no idea what he looked like, because
by the time I moved to Austin, the Reivers were just about
to be finished. So I met him at a party,” Daniel reminisces.
“He said he had just bought an eight-track, a huge one-inch
eight, and we should come over and try some stuff out. That
sounded like a great idea—we were flattered.”
The ultimate result of the Croslin sessions was Telefono,
Spoon’s inaugural album and the beginning of their relationship
with Matador records (a previous EP recorded on an answering
machine had already been self-released). “Apparently
Gerard [Cosloy], one of the founders [of Matador], saw us
at an anti-SXSW show we played in ‘94. We played the
anti- show because they wouldn’t accept us at the regular
SXSW. It was at the Blue Flamingo. I think he’s the
kinda guy that likes going to drag queen bars,” Britt
laughs, describing his first contact with the person that
would get Spoon off the ground. “He just went in to
see what was going on.
“I
heard that weekend from Jeff Tartikoff (one-time manager of
both Daniel Johnston and Jad Fair) that one of the presidents
of Matador was at the show and liked it. I was shocked because
I’d just started hearing about Matador. They were putting
out a bunch of great records.
“After
that I sent the EP we put out on vinyl and stayed in touch.
Once we finished Telefono, we sent Gerard a tape of that.
I don’t think he wanted to…I think he was kinda
sitting on it. But we started getting offers from major labels
so that kinda got him in gear.” And even though the
band is no longer on Cosloy’s label, he still does a
lot of stuff for the band, mainly creating a near-mythical
aura about Daniel in press releases and the industry rumor
mill.
According to Cosloy, Spoon is banned from Wyoming. “He
just made that one up. He’s still running with that.
He was responding to someone on a bulletin board, and he mentioned
that the governor’s wife had something to do with it.”
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes
to the tall tales surrounding Britt. There was the dangling
from a hotel balcony. “I wasn’t dangling. I was
just kind of walking around on the edge,” he explains,
quelling that gossip.
In more Cosloy hyperbole, it seems Daniel was recently nearly
electrocuted to death. Smiling and shaking his head, he says,
“I was fixing a TV. Those things carry a charge even
when they’re not plugged in. I wasn’t aware of
that, so I probably shouldn’t have been trying to fix
it. After I shocked myself something severe, I e-mailed my
good friend Sean in New York and was commenting on how stupid
it was. So he posted something sarcastic on the Spoon discussion
list about Britt Daniel executing himself, and everybody was…
I started getting calls from relatives, actually, which was
insane. So when Gerard was writing our most recent bio, he
included that.”
And as for the story involving the transportation of underage
girls across a state line at the encouragement of an overly
adventurous road manager, perhaps its best to let some things
go down in the annals of rock and roll mythdom. Why even give
him a chance to debunk it?
CHASING
DARWIN
With the release of Telefono, Spoon gained international attention
and immediate backlash. “A Pixies clone band,”
said some. “Spoon don’t do anything for me. They
leave me cold,” whined others, but that didn’t
stop Daniel and Co. from charging headlong to Elektra Records—where
they were signed, released A Series of Sneaks, and were immediately
dropped. “That’s it. We got dropped. Basically,
we were dealt a shady hand by our A & R guy who promised
us he was going to stay. We didn’t want to sign to the
label if he wouldn’t promise he was gonna stay, because
we knew there would be trouble. I mean the people in the college
radio department loved us, the art department loved us, but
other than that it was our A&R guy and noone else who
was going to make things happen. He left for another label,
and we got dropped that week.”
Undaunted and encouraged by higher quality songwriting, they
no longer sounded like the flavor of the week. Britt’s
songwriting was improving at an exponential rate. The band
found a home at Superchunk’s label, Merge Records. Their
debut for that label was Love Ways, a self-referring five-song
thematic opus where the lyrics from one song are twisted and
reused for another and approaches melodies familiar then pulls
a U-turn and hits a new, thus far undiscovered hook. And with
each record, Spoon experiments just a bit further. By the
time Girls Can Tell was released in 2001, the band was making
use of guest musicians playing such disparate instruments
as marimba, vibes, harpsichord and viola.
While it’s true that Daniel’s influences are no
longer worn on his sleeve, their presence is still certainly
felt, showcasing his taste in music, especially that of art
rock and post-punk. Spoon is, after all, essentially named
for a Can song. “Advance Cassette” (Series of
Sneaks), while sounding disturbingly like Memphis’ Grifters,
highlights Daniel’s Jonathon Richman-like nasal howl.
Or listen to “This Book is a Movie” (Girls Can
Tell). One of the only Spoon instumentals, the song opens
like a lost track from Wire’s Chairs Missing and ends
in a very Marquee Moon rave-up, á la Television. From
Wire to Television—whether viewed from a musical or
appliance standpoint, it makes perfect sense. And there’s
always the Suicide-esque “Small Stakes” on the
most recent record, Kill the Moonlight.
Not that all of Daniel’s influences are so arty and
obscure. Take “Someone Something” off the most
recent album. Catchy and piano driven, the song lies somewhere
between Badfinger and Summerteeth-era Wilco. Moonlight also
contains some of the band’s most experimental material
to date in the form of “Stay Don’t Go,”
“Paper Tiger” and “Back to the Life.”
Each employs loops and samples; the band makes use of laughter,
coughing and “human beatboxing” as the core of
each song. In fact, the latter could easily stand up next
to anything done by Gorillaz.
Anyone see a pattern? No? Neither does Britt. Currently in
the studio recording their fifth album tentatively titled
The Beast and Dragon Are Adored, Daniel has no idea how the
record will turn out. “The next one is turning into
more of a ‘song’ record than [Moonlight] but we’ll
see. I thought Moonlight was going to be a real guitar-heavy
album, but it ended up very much not being a guitar heavy
record. It’s fun to do stuff picturing people putting
on the record and surprising them.” And the muse smiles
mischievously.
Despite beginning their career as a way for John Croslin to
figure out his new toy, Spoon now produce and mix their own
stuff. “I have to be involved, or I go crazy,”
Daniel says, true to his slightly control-freakish personality,
to which he willingly confesses. “Mixing is such a huge
part of the way a record sounds. I couldn’t imagine
not being involved. There are some terrific bands, Radiohead
for example, who aren’t around when their stuff gets
mixed. I heard they do that because if they’re all there,
they won’t be able to agree on anything.
“With
that in mind, I guess it makes sense sometimes, but I can’t
keep my hands off. I don’t think Jim could either. We
do all our recording at Jim’s place, so its all hand
made.”
GROWING
UP, CHILLING OUT
Britt Daniel has a reputation about town. A reputation of
arrogance, antisocial behavior, and basically being a downright
asshole. Perhaps this view was deserved at one point, but
no longer is Daniel a brooding, shifty punk. Smiles come more
easily to him, and he is willing to have a genuine conversation
with anyone who approaches him. This may come from “disliking
myself less,” he theorizes. “[Though] I don’t
know that Jim would say I’ve mellowed out.”
“I
think lots of times when people seem unfriendly they’re
actually not liking themselves very much or are really uncomfortable
in their own skin—and that has definitely been the case
with me a lot of my life. I’ve always wanted to be the
kind of person that people think is a great person, you know?
A loving person. And I think I am, but sometimes it just doesn’t….
Maybe I’ve just gotten better at expressing it.”
Perhaps the controlling side of his personality is mellowing
with age, though Daniel himself will never admit to it. “When
I come off stage and Josh (Zarbo, Spoon’s longest-lasting
bass player) doesn’t critique my performance…
Josh is the super professional musician of the band—we
don’t have practices, we have rehearsals. So if I come
off stage and he’s smiling, I know it was a good show.”
Baby steps.
Despite Spoon increasingly becoming more of a group project,
Daniel is still the primary songwriter. “When it come
to the chords and the melodies and the lyrics, I do all that
stuff at home. Then I’ll come in, and we’ll all
kind of negotiate what the beat’s going to be, what
the rhythm section’s going to be like…. Me writing
a song used to mean, ‘OK, we play it, we hit on all
fours.’ Very straightforward, but the longer we play,
the more we want to have things be sparser or trickier. There’s
more R&B to it now than when we started out.”
THE DICHOTOMY OF FANS
Standing shoulder to shoulder in the Parlor listening to Scott
Biram’s swamp-bred caterwauling, this writer looks up
and laughs at the vision before me. Tableau: Youngish punky
kid with blonde spiky hair reminiscent of Billy Idol, studded
choke collar, spiked bracelet and metal belt. His t-shirt:
Spoon – Kill the Moonlight.
“[Spoon
fans] rule,” smiles Britt. “And they seem to have
very good taste in choke collars.”
INTO
THE FUTURE BRIGHTLY
In the midst of recording and on the veritable eve of The
Beast and Dragon Are Adored’s release, Daniel still
finds time to play a solo set in front of packed house at
Beerland Sunday night. Armed with simply a guitar and boom
box, he deconstructs and slaps back together both his own
songs and a particularly tasteful Wire cover with aplomb.
He’s in a good mood, having a blast, and it shows. So
what does the future hold for Spoon?
“I
don’t know. You’d think that I’ve been doing
this for as long as I have that there would be, or probably
should be, a goal because I’m devoting a good deal of
my life to this band. I view it like this: I feel like we’re
having fun and producing good stuff, so we should keep at
it. It’s something that we should keep evaluating. And,
as of the last two to three years it’s been a lot of
fun. It wasn’t always this much fun, and I really like
the records we’ve made since A Series of Sneaks. Or,
rather all the records from Series on I think are really good.”
A slightly existentialist view to be sure, but perhaps that’s
just the way Britt Daniel gets by.
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