Spoon

Why I love Spoon and I'm so bummed about missing their show tonight.

“We’ve stuck around, banging people over the head until they got it,” Daniel says. “We're good and kept doing it, and people are paying attention. Tenacity helps.”

Talent does too. Daniel, drummer and band cofounder Jim Eno and longtime producer Mike McCarthy have forged a distinctive sound, one that links the music of Prince’s “Kiss,” AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” Wire’s “Pink Flag” and the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa.” Those seemingly disparate records share a few common traits: a Spartan minimalism in which every note and word count, taut arrangements that value space and silence, and a belief that if a song can’t say what it needs to say in 3 1/2 minutes, it shouldn’t say it at all.

Spoon holds those values dear. About 30 songs were in various states of completion for “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” but the band eventually whittled them down to 10, which blitz past in 36 minutes. One of the more annoying legacies of the CD era is that bands convinced themselves it was a good idea to put as much as 72 minutes of music on a record, whether the music justified it or not. Most of Spoon’s albums are half that length.

“We stretched our previous record to 41 minutes, but otherwise I like to keep them under 40,” Daniel says. “It’s partly because of people’s attention spans. Who wants to listen to more than 40 minutes of an album at once? But to me it's also about consistency. If all the songs we worked on were like the ones on [Bob Dylan’s] ‘Blonde on Blonde,’ I'd put them out, but they’re not.”

Daniel is his own toughest critic. But his songwriting thrives when he doesn’t overthink it. His best ideas occur when he’s just “exercising my fingers.”

Spoon