When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time driving around El Paso in my friend Bianca’s Corolla. We were in her car because I didn’t have one, and she was driving because I didn’t yet know how. We did standard Texas teenager things, like spending a weird amount of time in the Sonic parking lot. On the weekends, Bianca drove us outside the city, where the streets gave way to desert, and we’d park and wait for friends with cars more terrain-friendly than hers to pick us up and drive us over the dunes until we found the bonfire everyone was gathered around. I remember how at night the sand looked almost like water, and I remember how distinctly young I felt looking out at it.
In Bianca’s car, we played a tight rotation of bands. We liked the Strokes, and we really liked Spoon. Something about the quick drums and Britt Daniel’s pleading (he always sounds like he’s trying to convince you of something) made the band feel like just the right mix of cool and earnest—a balance we were awkwardly attempting to strike daily. Eventually we got to the older stuff, but at first, it was 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga on repeat. We learned all the improvised outros and audio dubs you could never find on lyric sites, and we wrote our favorite lines in the borders of notes we sent one another in class. Most of Spoon’s songs were penned to an unnamed “you,” easy enough to project onto anyone we had something to say to. Alternatively, we were the “you,” and the songs were written just for us.
Daniel grew up in Temple before moving to Austin, where he attended the University of Texas and met the band’s cofounder and drummer, Jim Eno. Tucked into our dusty corner of the state, Bianca and I weren’t initially struck by any of that. But after I left El Paso for UT in 2010 and found myself “nineteen and still in school waiting on a light on the corner by Sound Exchange,” as in 2001’s “Anything You Want,” I started to see the Austin that Spoon had long since laid claim to lyrically.
That same year, Spoon went on tour for its 2010 album Transference, and a $14 ticket secured Bianca attendance at an intimate show in El Paso’s long since gone Club 101: a small, storied venue where bigger bands often played shows to crowds of forty people or less, because, well, no one else showed up. Later, on a call in my dorm room, Bianca recounted Daniel hanging around on the floor after the show, mingling with the crowd. She told him how much we loved his band but that I couldn’t be there that night, and he signed her ticket, “Amanda where are you??”
By the time They Want My Soul came out, in 2014, I was a couple years recovered from adolescence but still vulnerable to what Spoon was offering: the same signature lyricism (both abstract and somehow personally resonant), a familiar sound that was alternately fun and booming and sentimental, and something new—a synth-y undercurrent. A modernity. A youthfulness! (It wasn’t until I was older and a coworker, confused by Spoon and, more specifically, my fandom, leaned over to ask, “Are you listening to those dads?” that I realized the band’s music wasn’t as obviously applicable to the lives of two teenage girls as I’d felt at sixteen.) They Want My Soul was—not drastically, but still notably—different.
The band had done the unthinkable and parted ways with indie royalty Merge, the label that had seen it through the success of its last five records. Spoon had been a band for more than twenty years at that point, had taken the longest break between records it had ever taken (still only a measly four years), and had added a shiny new member to the group: Alex Fischel, on keys, the source of said synth-y new sound. Songs like “Inside Out” and “Do You” didn’t sound wildly different from what Spoon had been putting out for years (there are only so many ways to distinguish your sound when your front man has such distinctly yearning vocals). Still, they sounded fresh. It seemed as though the band was making a pointed choice to skirt obsolescence—a return to the beat-forward productions of “Stay Don’t Go” and “I Turn My Camera On” that first got people listening, but with a vibe-y new laziness.
Last week, ten years after the initial release, Spoon reissued the album, tacking on a handful of alternate versions and unedited demos. The new tracks seem beside the point, although a fan can, even passively, enjoy how they illuminate the evolution of the production process—how a song exists before it makes it anywhere near the sound system of your friend’s Corolla, and how it comes out as something different in the end. Instead, reissuing They Want My Soul—for many fans, likely not a top-three Spoon album—serves as a gentle nudge to remind anyone listening that the band has been doing this, well and seemingly with ease, for a long time.
For me, the message of They Want My Soul has always been clear: even after the kind of run of successful albums most bands only dream of, Spoon still works.
Late last year, I was at Matt’s El Rancho, in Austin, with friends when Daniel walked in and sat at a table nearby. I stared and texted Bianca, “Britt Daniel is eating enchiladas alone at the restaurant I’m at.”
“Do people recognize him?!” she asked. From what I could tell, not at all. He finished his meal undisturbed, alternately scrolling his phone and tapping his foot. The sighting hit on some of the charm of Spoon as I see it: a good band that made it big enough for a rerelease, but not so huge that it needed to stray too far from the streets and venues where it first cut its teeth. Ten years of that is cause enough for recognition. “I’m sure he’d be happy if you told him you love his music. You and me,” Bianca texted. “He’ll remember me.”
