The Lovin’ Spoonful

I don’t want you to feel “Jealousy,” really, I don’t. Still, you might be a teensy bit covetous when you find out that I’m going to see Spoon in two weeks in Houston, and this during a non-touring, except for this mini-Texas tour, non-new album year. And if you don’t feel that way, you probably need to brush up on the band’s music!

I like to think that perhaps the universe knew I needed a Spoon fix. The last time I caught a Spoon show was a year and a half ago, an exciting live show field trip to Austin that warranted this as my tongue in cheek FB status update that day: “I have a date tonight!! It’s with the coolest guy, seriously, a really creative rock star type, my age, you get the picture. I think we’ll have a great time – just me, him … and everybody else at the Spoon concert. I guess I’ll probably be in the “audience” and he’ll be on the “stage” (if you want to get all specific about it), but that doesn’t make it any less meaningful, right?”

As we drove home from Austin that night, my friend Corinna said, “I think he made eye contact with you, Erin. A couple of times!” Indeed! I thought so too. I mean, we were standing three rows back from the stage in a very small outdoor club. Meaningful gazes were totally possible. Speaking of, he wore white jeans, very appropriate during the song “I Saw the Light” (from the band’s 2010 album Transference) and its companion tune, “Trouble Comes Running,” which I mention, just so you’ll listen to it. The rest of the band – Jim Eno on drums, Rob Pope on bass, and Eric Harvey on keyboard – dressed appropriately as well, and they knocked the set out of the park in style.

I first saw Spoon back in the late 1990s, though the exact date and club location elude me. Somewhere on Austin’s 6th Street in a place where the stage is on the side of an interior wall, not at the back, as I recall. They were playing songs from the first album, Telephono, released in 1996, like “Waiting for the Kid to Come Out.” This Austin-born band was new to the indie music scene, relatively speaking, but my then boyfriend, who would become my husband, and then later my ex-husband, had been following them from early days and was thrilled to catch this show. He turned to me as the set was about to start and said rather pragmatically, “It’s too bad the lead singer isn’t more handsome, you know? Cause I think they could really be big if they had that ‘look.'”

Ironic, a little, since some fourteen or fifteen years later, I fell in (musical) love with the interesting-looking man on that sideways stage, as much as one can fall in love with a stranger, which is a lot, as it turns out, since this stranger has given many media interviews, recorded many albums, and performed many live shows that people captured on their phones and posted to youtube. I guess that’s not irony, not really, but my love for the band shifted into devotion during a difficult stretch of my life. My husband was gone, but Spoon was there. I was like one of the crazy women who greeted the Beatles upon their arrival in New York City, metaphorically speaking, but I was wearing flat-front green shorts instead of a shirtwaist dress.

And yes, I’m being mostly serious. My joy in Britt Daniel’s incredible musical gifts displaced some of the grief from the dissolution of my marriage into billowy clouds of Spoon music, an aural comfort blanket, albeit one that rocked hard. My kids dig the albums too. They look forward to being old enough to attend a show.

Does my love claim sound a little strange? It does to me too. I mean, can one truly love a rock star without actually meeting said rock star? Had I not lived the experience, I too might doubt, and yet, this band and this singer and these albums, particularly the 2007 Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and its deep heartbreak songs, “The Ghost of You Lingers” and “Black Like Me,” and one special concert the summer after divorce papers were filed, helped buoy my spirits like almost nothing else.

Before the papers were even signed, Spoon’s music was helping me along. One of the rather unpleasant tasks of divorce that had to be dealt with was selling our home. Getting it ready was the hard part, as any home-seller knows. Of course, I didn’t want to paint the walls and replace the flooring. I didn’t want to clean it from top to bottom so that strangers could walk through my halls and wonder how their stuff would look in the front bedroom. Spoon’s “Small Stakes” from Kill the Moonlight (2002) was my go-to housework song during the month we listed and sold our house. I might not have been able to paint all the baseboards without the song.

Other tunes blessed me as well. “Anything You Want” from Girls Can Tell (2001) kept me company for hours. Literally for hours. One 2009 spring night, for example, I drove to and from a work meeting sixty miles away with that song on repeat the entire time. The song holds up, let me tell you. “Me and the Bean” liked to hang out in my backyard as well. In fact, the entire “Girls Can Tell” was so profound, I thought of myself as a girl who could tell. Please, cut me a little slack, my old life was dying. On a less silly note, “My Mathematical Mind” from Gimme Fiction (2005) spoke to my interpersonal communication frustrations. “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb,” from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, was a break-up song that didn’t sound like a typical entry in that genre, but still contained the much needed therapeutic benefits. And “Metal Detektor” from A Series of Sneaks (1998) was a lovey-ish song that resonated in my heart without making me dizzy with grief, since one of the qualities of Spoon music that proved beneficial to me was its lack of sentimentality, maudlin posing or gushing orchestration. (Not that I have anything against those traits in other bands. I just didn’t need any such nonsense at the time.) This is a rock and roll band, ladies and gentlemen. The beats are steady, the guitars reverberous (yeah, a sound quality so fantastic I had to invent an adjective to describe it), the keyboard crisp, and the songs and lyrics inventive. “Rock ‘n’ roll is my main concern,” Britt Daniel told the A.V. Club. It shows.

To many of my friends, this next bit is a familiar story, one I love to tell and one my friends pleasantly endure: “Hey guys, remember that time I sent a package of books to Britt Daniel in Portland, Oregon and received a thank you card back?”

Here’s how it goes, this I’m-going-to-write-to-a-rock-star crazy story: I had been so wowed by the live show I caught in July 2009, and so impressed by the story the woman standing next to me at Stubb’s told me (she baked a cheesecake for the band members, had it sent backstage at a Houston show, along with a request for “The Agony of Lafitte,”a tune not frequently featured in the set list rotation, and rejoiced mightily when Britt Daniel ended the show with that song), that I decided I would reach out to this man, one of the brilliant “Figures of Art” in current music. After thoughtfully pondering a cool New Yorker profile of the band, especially the insight that Daniel’s lyrics often focus on the challenges of masculinity, I purchased and packaged Nick Hornby’s About a Boy and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, novels that touch on that same theme, along with a four page letter extolling Spoon’s albums, lyrics and musicianship.

Here’s where the story gets a little clever/weird, take your pick. See, I had no idea where in Portland Mr. Daniel lives. I could not just say, “I Summon You.” But I did know where Jim Eno’s Austin recording studio was located. I packaged the books in a box with Britt Daniel’s name on it, but with the address blank. Then I put that box in a bigger box, addressed to Jim Eno. I took both boxes to the post office and paid for the postage on the smaller box (yes, the postal worker looked at me like I had clearly lost my mind, buying postage for a box without an address, then packing that paid-for box inside another box, and paying for that one too!), then taped it in the box bound for Austin. I included a letter for Mr. Eno too, telling him how much I admired his work on songs like “30 Gallon Tank,” from 1998’s A Series of Sneaks, plus a snazzy drum key as a thank you, and I asked him to drop the book box in the mail, you know, whenever he could get around to it.

And get around to it he did, because some six months later, I got a postcard from Britt Daniel. It was waiting for me in my mailbox, and a rainbow arched beautifully over my front porch and horn-playing angels trumpeted glorious melodies reminiscent of Gimme Fiction‘s “The Beast and Dragon Adored.” I think one of the angels even whispered, “And when you believe, they call it rock and roll.”

Bottom line, this a band that consistently delivers. The recording production values are fantastic and charming (I mean that! They leave in all kinds of fun chatter.). The live performances are as tight as Britt Daniel’s skinny jeans. The albums explore new sounds and deliver unique tunes, a plethora of three minute gems, yet retain the Spoon-ness (driving rhythm, percussive guitar and keyboard, metronomic drums, non-cookie cutter theme motifs, and so forth) that I love. Also, the band members are nice guys, I can just tell. And they are my age, which I like. They are Texans too, with polite manners and tucked-in shirts, and I’m quite sure that Spoon will be one of the bands that next century’s hipsters will listen to in their flying vehicle’s “Car Radio”s. Spoon’s discography is going to stand the test of time.

Note to self: bring a cheesecake to next week’s show… or maybe something with Cinnamon Toast Crunch.