How Spoon Beat the Devil

Frontman Britt Daniel talks about the impromptu pleasures of his band’s forthcoming 10th album, Lucifer on the Sofa.

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Spoon, from left: Gerardo Larios, Britt Daniel, Alex Fischel, Jim Eno, and Ben Trokan

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.

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