More about: Spoon

As you’ll no doubt be aware, the pandemic has pushed a lot of things back. Some movies are still to hit the screens after all this time, live shows of all kinds are perpetually postponed or rescheduled, and the issues with vinyl manufacturers (albeit not entirely related to COVID) are causing huge delays in album releases. 

Yet some artists used the delay to their advantage. One of America’s most well-regarded rock bands, Spoon hit the studio shortly after frontman and founder Britt Daniel had spent longer than anticipated working on their Greatest Hits collection, 2019’s Everything Hits At Once: "I thought; ‘compiling a record? How much time could that involve?’ Well, it ended up involving a bit more time that I thought! We recorded some songs for it and just the promotion of it took a really long time," he tells Gigwise. "I did go listen to all the records straight through. I don’t know if I’ve ever done that. It was revealing!"

"We were hopefully all set to complete the [new] record in 2019. We’d just come off this massive tour with Beck. We spent the whole summer doing that and then once we really got started, COVID happened." So the delay was down to the pandemic? "It was a few things at once. We were working on it for a long time. We toured a lot on [previous album] Hot Thoughts and there were a number of things that made this one drag out; one was that we ended up doing this Greatest Hits project. We thought we were probably almost done, then COVID hit and I wrote a lot more songs because I was alone. I knew that some of those songs had to replace some of the songs we had recorded because they were just better. But we couldn’t get together for another six months so I just kept writing."

I know what you’re thinking; it’s another lockdown album. For better or worse, music fans will be hearing about the pandemic long after the general public have moved on (hopefully). It seems reasonable to surmise that Daniel was inspired by the unprecedented situation the world found itself in. Not so, he tells us: "I think there’s one that’s reflective of that era, but mostly it was just [about] getting better songs. I find that’s often true; the longer I’m in that writing phase, the richer the songs get. The ones that I first started writing after the long break when I was touring, I’d get excited about them but at this point I don’t want to hear them anymore. They got better as they went."

When asked about the common reason for delay for an album release, i.e. to accompany the album with a tour, Daniel downplays the notion; "It really was about getting the record finished. That was the main thing that held it up. [Touring] didn’t really come into play."

Lucifer On The Sofa, the band’s tenth album, sees the five-piece return to more straightforward rock music. Indeed, it has been described as their ‘purest' rock ‘n’ roll album ("I keep getting that quote thrown at me! I’m wondering if it’s in a bio or I said it! I guess it is. We’ve made some rock ‘n’ roll records but this is up there. I guess Gimme Fiction was along the same lines") with a gestation that came from a reaction to the electronic-flecked Hot Thoughts.

"We were definitely reacting against Hot Thoughts a bit. When we went out touring the record, we’d never played the Hot Thoughts songs live. When we started, with the elements of humanity that the five people playing them together….they started developing and got better and better. We looked at that and said, ‘let’s just make the record a different way this time. Let’s sort all that stuff ahead of time.’ It just felt we were on a roll, the way we were playing was really strong and we wanted to play to those strengths. We wanted to make more of a human record, less produced."

A ’back-to-basics’ approach, if you’ll forgive the cliché, grew organically, and was a methodology Spoon hadn’t adopted for some time, as Daniel explains: "It’s not new, that’s the way it used to be but that was the first time we thought like that for a while. When we first started, recording time was precious, studio time was very expensive so everything had to be planned out in advance. We went back to that method and I think you end up with a different type of record, different sound of the record and it lends itself to a different world." It was also the first album recorded with recent additions to the band: Alex Fishel and Gerardo Larios. Both have added to the band’s sound: "We never had a guitar solo like the solo on ‘The Hardest Cut’. That’s Gerardo. They just bring some strengths that we didn’t have before."

After having worked with producer Mark Rankin (Adele, Queens Of The Stone Age) for the new songs on the Greatest Hits, Daniel assigned the Englishman the task of producing the new album: "Before I met with him, I knew some of his discography but I didn’t know much about him. We met for about 30 minutes and I thought ‘I like this guy. Let’s have him produce the record, let’s go!’ We never had problems and we never looked back. He’s a chiller, and he reminds me of us, which is probably why I took to him to strongly right away. He’s not a hype man, he’s a music fanatic. A chilled music fanatic."

To describe Lucifer On The Sofa as a ‘return to form’ would be insulting, but it’s certainly a return to familiar terrain for Spoon. Guitars, bass and drums are back front and centre, opening with a thrilling cover of Smog’s ‘Held’, which has the blessing of it’s creator, Bill Callahan, "I sent it to him, he was complimentary. Very few words but he was complimentary. He was very sweet."

"It’s a song we used to play live years ago and it just dropped out of the set-list. Back when we played it, we never recorded it. It came up this time to do the song for fun as we were settling in. We just got together and sometimes when you start you play through some old Spoon songs, or some covers just for fun or to make the mood. I suggested this one, which we hadn’t played in at least ten years, and pretty soon it was, ‘maybe this isn’t just an exercise, maybe we should record this.’ To our surprise it sounded really fucking fantastic. It has the tempo of a first song and from there you can build. Sequencing really matters to us, so by putting this first you can stack things so the tempo goes up for a bit. Then it comes back down!"

Elsewhere on the album, there is the latest in a long line of tracks about the mythical Mr. Jones, a figure who looms large in rock history. ‘The Devil & Mister Jones’ sits comfortably alongside the greats, as Daniel attests: "There’s a canon of great songs about Mr Jones, and I’m aware of a lot of them. It wasn’t a conscious effort, but somehow, I had these words that lent themselves to being about Mr Jones. It was, ‘oh yeah, I’d love to write a song that contributes to that canon,’ but I wanted it to be called something different. We had to figure out what to call it other than ‘Mr Jones.’"

‘On The Radio’ meanwhile, sees Daniel recalling his younger years. "It’s a song that’s about the wonder of the radio. It’s really about my take on the radio when I was a kid. I’m one of those people that still listens to the radio a lot, I have it on at all times in my house. It’s a song about growing up as a kid in a small town in Texas. When you’re a kid you gotta spend some time alone. It meant a lot to me; it was evidence that there was a world going on outside my door and that made me comforted. It alleviated a lot of loneliness."

Best of all is the title track, a searing, brooding number which leaves an impression long after the album has finished. "‘Lucifer On The Sofa' is a song that came really quick and a lot of the words came at once. I wasn’t really judging the words as I was writing them. I was just writing them out, which is a good way do it; you just get a lot out and once you’ve had this moment, then you go back and think about it. When I went back and edited it, I loved this line about Lucifer on the sofa which I figured was about me. It’s a character that I can become in times of stress and anxiety. The song is about me trying to get past that character. I try not to see him very much but he comes around at times."

"That’s what the album art is about. I played all the songs for [the designer] and he did illustrations for every one of them. This one came out as one half black face, one half white face, and it’s speaking to the duality of that character."

Daniel freely admits that the album is inspired by the all-time greats of music: "The Rolling Stones, Credence Clearwater Revival. We listened to a lot of Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin…..I don’t know if that qualifies, but that era of music-making. Led Zeppelin. The Kinks. You can just start with the way they made the records, which is so different to now. Now you have infinite tracks to just try this or this, and you’re figuring everything out in the studio. Their way of doing it was figuring it out as a band, or a song, and then you press record. Something different happens that way. It was a rule we tried to stick to and we did pretty much stick to it".

A tour of the States is pencilled in for the spring, COVID-dependent ("I’m hoping by the time April rolls around it’ll be a little easier. I think that’s just the general rule you gotta follow; you gotta carry on where you can. I’m ready to do it!") which, alongside their fine new album, should see Spoon reassert their status as one of America’s most consistent rock bands. 

Lucifer on the Sofa arrives 11 February via Headz/Matador.

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More about: Spoon