One night in Austin, during the height of quarantine, Britt Daniel opened his mind’s eye and saw the devil. Not a pitchfork-wielding demon from hell, but a slothful Mephistopheles splayed out on the couch. “That character staring at me was really a part of myself,” the 50-year-old frontman says over the phone. “It’s that inability to move forward and get past bitterness or loneliness.”
The figure, with its ash-stained lips and empty stare, became the titular villain of Spoon’s latest album, Lucifer on the Sofa. On the title track, Daniel sings of lingering ghosts—the remnants of a past relationship as well as the vacant silence of pandemic-stricken Austin, a city famous for its bar-lined streets blaring with live music. The song is spare, and Daniel’s musings are met with back-alley saxophones that sound like distant sirens. “It’s a slice of life when I was out walking around in a version of Austin that I had never seen before,” Daniel explains. “A journey song that’s about trying to overcome that worst side of me.”
The new record was written and recorded in Daniel’s home state of Texas both before and amid the COVID-19 outbreak. Spoon first began in Austin in the early ’90s, but Daniel had mostly lived in Portland and Los Angeles since the mid 2000s. In the fall of 2019, the singer and guitarist moved back to the Texas capital, determined to make a simpler, more immediate rock record than 2017’s relatively electronic Hot Thoughts.
Extensive touring behind that album made the band realize they preferred the live versions of those tracks to the recorded ones. So Spoon returned to their core method: rehearse extensively, record with focus. The quintet enlisted producers Mark Rankin (who has worked with everyone from Adele to Iggy Pop), Justin Raisen (Yves Tumor, Kim Gordon), and Dave Fridmann (the psych-rock vet who contributed to the last couple of Spoon records), and aimed to capture the excitement of a band playing together in a room rather than strategically piecing songs together.
Spoon kept to a limited palette of instruments and did their best not to scrub away any happy accidents. The opening cut—a walloping cover of Bill Callahan’s “Held” originally released under his Smog alias in 1999—starts with some offhand studio chatter and warm-up noises, and there’s a moment when Daniel directs his bandmates to “do the fill twice as long” on the fly. These are subtle but effective touches that instantly create a sense of shared camaraderie. It is the sound of a band in action, collaborating in real-time—making music that feels less lonely.
The first single from Lucifer on the Sofa
Britt Daniel: It’s a massive difference. When we started out, every time I came up with a new song, it was either a jam at a rehearsal or me coming up with some sort of shorthand version of what we play at rehearsal, and then we played it in bars and clubs for months—maybe even years—before we recorded it. When you do it that way, the song develops without intention.
There’s this other way of making a record, which is to start with a demo and then work from there—try out this drum beat, this vocal, maybe try different lyrics or a different melody on it. But you’ve always got that single starting point, and you’re kind of locked into that. Great records have been made that way, but as we toured on Hot Thoughts, we discovered, like, “Hey, I wish we had that live version of ‘I Ain’t the One’ before we recorded it, because it’s so much better than the version on the record.” That happened with a few songs. So we said, “Let’s take this energy and make the next record with it—hash out the songs ahead of time so that we’re not always making the better version after it’s been recorded.”
That, and it’s so cheap to record now. It used to be a situation where getting into a recording studio was so expensive and you had to save your dollars to do that. Or maybe you only had a budget for three weeks of recording, so the songs had to be finished going into the studio. But now anyone can make a recording that’s just as high quality as any recording studio at home. When that’s the case, you can always be working on it, always putting the song away for later and saving it as a file and coming back to it.
And that does something to the recording of that song. When you are able to put down endless tapes, you’re essentially saying, “I’ll figure this out later.” Sometimes you can put together something that you wouldn’t have, but it’s not going to be the same as if you were a band that had to get that performance right in that moment.
It’s a song that we did in our sets for probably a year or two in the mid-2000s, but we never recorded it. I loved the song and related to the lyrics about the first time you open yourself up and allow yourself to really succumb. So when we were looking for just songs to jam to I said, “Hey, let’s play ‘Held.’”
I told him about it, yeah. But I haven’t seen him in a long time. I used to run into him in Austin a bit at shows, but it’s been a second. I did reach out to him to send the cover to him before he heard it somewhere. He seemed to like it. He’s not a man of many words. Many great lyrics, but kind of reserved. Maybe especially on email.
When you listen to the song as you’re recording it, occasionally something just stands out as that little accident that has got to stay on there. I just loved that intro. It had that great chatter at the top and it felt like it set a scene. I just loved the way it sounded.
I think there’s a case for that. And people know when music has been made that hasn’t been too fussed over. It’s so easy when people are working on computers these days, you can line everything up and see that when you copy and paste, it’s exactly right. But there’s something about accidents and real performances that makes the hairs on the back of their neck stand up.
It’s a song about me growing up in Temple, Texas and the connection I had to the radio. I had this clock radio and I would listen to it constantly—if I was doing homework, if I was waking up in the morning, especially when it was after lights out at night. I’d have this radio on and I’d feel a lot less lonely. I felt like the people on the radio were talking to me, and that helped. It got me through and it was also just exciting. It was my lifeline to the outside world as a kid stuck in his house.
I totally agree. And it’s also a shared experience; other people are listening to it. There have been times when I’ve tried to figure out if it’s actually exciting in some way, fidelity-wise. Because I swear to God that when I’ve listened to certain songs over the airwaves, it just crackled and felt electric in a way that it didn’t feel if I put it on a CD in the same car.
Maybe, but there’s some differences: Streaming isn’t a group activity. It’s not happening to a lot of people at once.
