Spoon's Britt Daniel Road Ready For Gimme Fiction

It's been about three years since Spoon have toured in Canada and singer-songwriter Britt Daniel is ready to get out of his home-base in Austin, Texas.

"I love touring, it's my favourite part, the most fun part of being in a band," he said, shortly before Spoon hit the road last week. "We did a lot of touring on Kill The Moonlight, it was our most successful record. [Gimme Fiction] has really been done since September, so there's really just been a lot of funny business to take care of."

With that aside, Spoon are heading out to promote what is shaping up to be an even more successful record than Kill The Moonlight. Gimme Fiction was recorded from July to September last year at drummer Jim Eno's studio and co-produced by Trail Of Dead engineer Mike McCarthy.

It's Spoon's most rock effort to date and it's selling like crazy in North America.

"It does feel like more of a rock record, it's just that there's more full band songs," Daniel says. "On Kill The Moonlight, we would strip it down to just a tambourine, strip it down to stomps and claps rather than a full drum set.

"We actually thought about doing some of the same things for the songs on this record, it just didn't work as well. It seemed like the songs lend themselves better to playing in that more traditional rock 'n' roll format."

Momentum couldn't be swinging further in Spoon's favour. Their Toronto show this weekend sold out in a few days and was moved to a bigger venue, where it again sold out a few days later. The famously indie band are on the verge of breaking into the mainstream for the first time in their nearly decade-long history. Considering the quality of their previous albums, you'd think it might have happened sooner, but Daniel isn't grousing.

"It does feel like ever since we started working with Merge every record has gotten a little bit," he says. "This one has been kind of nuts so far. So it's good. It's an upward trajectory. I'm happy that's happening. The most important thing to me is that the records are good and — because so many bands at some point they seem to lose track of what they were doing — I just don't want to lose that."

One of the most striking parts of the new record is its subtext. If you listen carefully, you can hear the band talking in the studio and other little sounds here and there that add a dynamic layer to the tracks. Daniel is just as enamoured with what you can't hear as what you can.

"For me, I find it exciting to be able to hear the sound of the room when you're hitting the drums and to leave in the little things like people whispering before the take or little sound effects that you add in or the percussion parts, turn them up so that they're not just a blip of information, but more so that they're part of the song and stand out and are exciting to the ears."

But then there's the obvious driving force for Spoon — Daniel's voice. Smooth, but gruff, sometimes emotive, other times hollow, it's one of the most compelling sounds in modern music. Gimme Fiction focuses on the frontman even more than usual.

Even over the phone, Daniel's voice, firm and methodical, commands attention.

"I try to put some emotion into it, even if that emotion is a lack of emotion," he says. "Often I like the sound to be like you're in the room, if possible, I'm always telling Mike [McCarthy] that I want some room mics on the vocals, I always say, so I can hear some perspective. He always makes fun of me, [in a snippy voice] 'I know exactly what you want, you want some perspective.' He's very good at making fun of me."

Spoon's greatest virtue, after all these years, is their consistency. None of their Merge Records are even close to bad and while Daniel's voice is a constant, the sound constantly evolves. If Daniel keeps working as hard as he does to make the product fresh for his listeners, Spoon could be in the stratosphere by the time you next hear from them.

"It's a challenge to feel like you're doing something you haven't done before, or to come up with something that's quality because there's a lot of wrong turns you can take in the long process of making a record," he says. "I think if you're smart about it and get the right people to be there to tell you when you're fucking up, it can be done."

Here are Spoon's Canadian dates with The Clientele:
June 5 Toronto, ON @ Opera House
June 17 Vancouver, BC @ Commodore Ballroom