Q&A's with Spoon and Bright Eyes

When I first saw Britt Daniel, he had me at the first swig from his beer bottle. Or maybe it was his fifth. All I know is Spoon was the opener at a CMJ show back in 1996, and when I walked in I saw a rock star blaring something cool out of his mouth. And once he got the chance he ran stage-left for his Rolling Rock, flipped a gulp down his throat with a flick of his wrist, then ran back to the mic to send the rest of that cool shit flying out into the room. I ran down to the merch table to find out how much they were charging for the tape of Spoon's Telephono, then went to Generation Records the next day to buy it for a few dollars cheaper. (Back in '96, I was very poor and still bought tapes.)

Telephono was way too Pixies to be loved full-on, but it was crammed with so much cool shit you couldn't help but let it into your home. Lines that belong nowhere but inside a rock 'n' roll song. Squeals of "And I don't wanna miss such an American scene!" Propositions like, "So put your notebook down/And take off your dress." And a whole bunch of other lines that you couldn't even understand, like the English language wasn't quite cool enough so Daniel started pulling syllables out of words and switching up letters so the words could bump off his tongue with better time.

"Yeah, sometimes it can be that way," says Daniel. "It still has to be a good image. Has to be something good behind it. But yeah, the rhythm of the words is a huge part of how I write, it seems like. It's hard for me to be less structured about that and for it to feel right."

The words sound like they couldn't be sung by anyone but him. Primarily because his voice is, well, adenoidal. T's are D's. And it just sounds like his mouth is always hanging open. A mouthbreather. But in a good way.

"Lots of times I'm just trying to sing the way people actually talk. But I don't know if that always happens. Like, a lot of times the way people actually talk, and then if they were to sing those same words, they'll sing it very differently. They'll sing it, like, enunciating the N's of every word. Whereas, when you actually speak, I don't think that you do. You're saying the word so fast that you don't. I don't know, it just feels right to me."

Their second LP, and debut with Elektra, was A Series of Sneaks. Another full-on rock record full of cool lines about nothing, but their sound was now much bigger. It was riskier and no longer derivative of anybody. No one bought it, because there was no one to sell it. Their A&R guy left Elektra and their record didn't receive so much as a promotional nudge from the label. They were dropped soon after.

I'm surprised to learn early on in the interview that in the summer of '99, Daniel was temping in New York City and considering ditching music to go back to school. I was doing office work in the summer of '99. Spoon had by that time released two full-lengths that I was still pulling off the shelf on a regular basis, and Daniel had written one of my favorite songs ever ("Waiting for the Kid to Come Out"). And it's disarming to think I might have had to tell that song's composer when he could take his lunch break.

"We'd finished, basically, an early version of Girls Can Tell and sent it out. As soon as we finished it I moved to New York. And the idea was to send it out, see what happens." Nothing happened for quite a while. Daniel was leaning toward getting a degree in "something that would make money. I've already got one worthless degree" (Radio, TV, Film). Eventually, though, the band decided to return to Austin to finish the album and try sending it out again.

Girls Can Tell was released by Merge in 2000. The rock was tempered with some piano and whatnot, but, more surprising, Daniel was making himself understood. Up to then, the closest he'd come to singing a love song was on Sneaks' "Advance Cassette": "Don't tell me/I've lost you/ Advance Cassette! Oh no!/I just can't believe it," whatever the hell that means. But on Girls Can Tell he's got chicks walking out, he's begging them to come back and he's watching them "walking out alone and it's Saturday night." Perhaps his worry over the decisions he'd made might account for the air of loss in the album. Women walk out. Dads used to know how a man should dress. And the human resources clerk "says it could have been good by now."

Daniel's turn for the more literal in his songwriting he attributes to his late-bloomer discovery of the Kinks in 1999. "And I wanted to write some songs that were sort of more direct like that. I've always liked Bruce Springsteen or Jonathan Richman. People like that that can really speak about something very direct and personal. And I just never really tried it before."

Despite the wistful sentiment, it was Spoon's warmest record. And their most well-received to date. But a few weeks ago, Spoon dropped their best record, Kill the Moonlight (Merge). This one doesn't just go bigger or prettier or more or less literal. This one is their sound. And it's a sound that can no longer be pinned down quite so easily.

"I think maybe the songs turned out the way they did," says Daniel, "because I went and specifically tried to write a whole album in a matter of I guess six weeks or something." He sublet a place in Connecticut where he had no friends or distractions. "And that kind of concentrated, working-on-it-every-day songwriting I had never done before."

From the first seconds of play you can tell you're hearing a Spoon record unlike any other. "Small Stakes," the opening track, has been stripped of all guitar and is just Daniel's echo spewing out overtop a perfect keyboard line with a tambourine off to the side. Way at the end of the track, there's a little shimmer of something that could be a guitar, and it's right where Spoon would let a guitar fly in and blow shit up. But it's just a tease. We don't even get a drum until the "Mow Mow Mow" fadeout.

"I personally like to be surprised and challenged when I hear a band's new record, or when I hear any music at all," says Daniel. "I think smart people like to be challenged by music. And I never assume that the people who listen to our records are anything other than very smart people."

The record has a tough row to hoe: the first two tracks are just too fucking good to follow. "The Way We Get By," the second and most single-ready track on the record, is the kind of song you want to dance to with big wide pants on. It's a piano and some handclaps and a chant. And it makes you wish there was a dancefloor nearby that you could cross on your tiptoes.

When I ask Daniel what the record is about, a hefty pause passes before he offers, "Needing to make a connection to somebody."

It's a record full of ruts. Wage slaves and overgrown punks who "get high in back seats of cars." Kids getting beat up every day after school and girls "fixed up outside and broke within." The songs are populated with people stuck in their tracks, looking around to see if anyone wants to give them a push or at least hang out and get high for a bit as long as nothing's going on.

I ask if he ever feels hemmed in by the usual guitar-bass-drums thing. "There are times when I felt like, you know, maybe I'll write a song on guitar and it just doesn't seem special enough," he says. "It just seems too predictable. So that's why the guitar ends up going out a lot of times. When you think about rock and roll, I mean, guitar is the thing that almost defines it. And it just seems like I've heard it so much."

"Ideally, I want every single song to be amazing," he adds. "That's what I'm shooting for. And it just doesn't feel amazing when I feel like it feels a little bit predictable. Predictable, to me, it's like the antithesis of good music."

"Unpredictable" is a good word for the record. Much more appropriate than "departure," which often implies "we do a lot of shit with laptops now." They've messed about, going so far on one track as to lay a vocal over a beatbox loop, without losing their sound. There are songs that could've been on Girls Can Tell or even Telephono. And there are songs that could only have been on Kill the Moonlight. Far from losing their sound, they've come closer than ever to perfecting it.

Spoon plays Sat., Sept. 21, and Sun., Sept. 22, at Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 533-2111.

Bright Eyes

Ihonestly had no intention of chickenhawking indie rock's songwriter of the moment. It was an eye-contact thing. I came to talk about his phenomenal new record, Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (Saddle Creek), not to flirt man-boyishly. It wouldn't have been illegal, because Conor Oberst is around 22 already. Old enough to drink himself into someone's bed even. So had anything happened, it wouldn't really have been chickenhawking. It just would have felt like it.

Old enough to drink, yes, but he looks young enough to ride the bench at Little League. He's a tiny young man with choppy hair that can stripe down over his eyes if he feels the sudden need to brood. And he has a soft, thin speaking voice that betrays a hesitance to pin anything down. But it was the eye contact that made me think we might kiss, there on the couch sectionals of his publicist's conference room. Just a gentle, three-second touch of the lips, and then maybe some weeping.

Not that fucking need be ruled out entirely. But based on his work as the singer-songwriter in command of the Omaha band Bright Eyes, Oberst digs weeping way more than fucking. His ideal woman has always been an absent one, preferably tragically deceased or at least presumed so. Fevers and Mirrors, his last album, was a collection of ornate, elegiac songs that just wallowed in loss. He'd whisper about wearing a necklace made from "beads of sweat, on a string of my regrets" and the closest to hope he could get was feeling "so close to dying that I can finally start living." A beautiful record, it was thick with misery and the kind of dense, surreal imagery that betrayed an effort to maybe obfuscate the sightline of the songwriter. Not surprising, since Oberst was barely 20 when that record, his third, came out, and everyone wanted to know what the hell had happened in this kid's life to make him so damn miserable and so damn good at conveying his desire to open up wrists.

"Ya know, obviously a lot of stuff is biographical," says Oberst. "But I don't think it should matter, and it would even, in my mind, detract from maybe the listener's enjoyment of the music. Because to me, you wanna find a connection to it. A common ground with your life, in order for it to mean something to you."

Teens who've discovered Bright Eyes must cling to that connection the way they would a rope pulling them from quicksand or dangling from a light fixture and wrapped up tight around their necks. Oberst has gotten his share of "You saved my life" mail. "Yeah, there's a good bit of that," he says. "And it's cool. Sometimes I don't know what to say to somebody. Other than thank-you. It sounds kind of stupid when people come up and kind of offer themselves or this experience up to you and all you can really do is kind of smile and maybe give 'em a hug or something and be like, 'It's cool man.' It's a little uncomfortable, but, ya know, music got me through tons of things in my life. Just listening to music. So I'm happy if I can do that for anybody else."

With such a passionate fan base, not to mention such an inquisitive press, it would seem inevitable that his writing might be affected. "This new record is the first time that I feel like it's really seeped in and actually affected the music," he says. "Because before that, the idea of an audience was a very abstract thing. It didn't concern me at all. But now it's a reality and you can't really ignore it. And I would love it if it didn't have to play a part in it all, but it does. And it will. And so I'm just kind of still like figuring it out, learning to deal with all that. To keep it in perspective. Some of the songs on the record are even addressing those issues, like for me. In that sense it's just like, what do you do? Write about that then too. You have to."

The new record is less of a concept album than his previous. He plays with different styles, employing an orchestra on one track, a pedal steel guitar on the next. And there are several recurring themes, one of the most prominent being Oberst's doubts as to the necessity of his art. Like his songs are all he has and he's afraid they amount to shit. "That's something I struggle with all the time," he says, "and it pretty much just depends on, on a given day, how I'm feeling. If I can find meaning in it. I'm like that about a lot of things anyway. I always come down to the same conclusion, music is one of the only things that consistently makes me feel good. And so why would I let anything ruin that for me. And doubt is just like, if I spent all my time doubting I just wouldn't get anything done so just go with it."

"So I mean it's cool if you keep quiet but/I like singin'!" he wails on the sparse opening track "The Big Picture." It's an appropriate intro. He's doing less brooding on this album, and more searching outside his self for something concrete. On the folk song "Waste of Paint," he scolds himself: "Hide behind these books I read/While scribbling my poetry/Like art could save a wretch like me... A waste/Of paint/Of tape/Of time." Despite his frustration, he sounds content that all searches for truth must lead back to his songs, and his friends, and his songs again.

"For me," he says, "writing has always kind of served that function to try to obtain whatever scrap of clarity you can gather from the world. Which is for me, it's hard to find that. I just, I guess, it helps to write and to sing. I think that it's definitely fair to say that most of the songs are about that, trying to obtain some kind of awareness of where you fit into everything. I guess people just have different ways of doing that."

The record ascends from feelings of surrender to hope to joy, as on the song "False Advertising." He says he knows what must change, "Fuck my face, fuck my name/they are brief and false advertisements." And by the end of the track, he's inviting everyone in, "We're gonna laugh, we're gonna drink until the morning comes." That's followed by what sounds like a standing ovation both begging for more and cheering him on for finally managing not to bring everyone down.

"I guess I realized that, if you're gonna have any kind of hope or optimism in your life, for me it's something that's gonna have to be self-imposed. A lot of times, singing or writing is maybe the first step for me to like move towards something like that. I feel like there's a lot more optimism on the record. And it was sort of like my own attempt to, like, 'Well if I can sing it, then I can feel it too.'"

Sing the dream of it? I suggest.

"Yeah, and then, it'll, I don't know, maybe it'll rub off on day-to-day life."

Does it?

"I think, definitely, in comparing myself now to a couple years ago. I'm way more able to deal with shit. Keep a pretty good attitude about everything. So that's good."

The record is a big one all around. It's got two titles, 70 minutes, less blurry imagery and more long, rattling folk-rock tracks that are earning Oberst the inevitable Dylan comparisons. The closing track, "Let's Not Shit Ourselves (to Love and to Be Loved)," is the most traditional folk-rock track, with a simple melody that carries his lyrics for nearly 10 minutes. It's also the most hopeful. It sounds like he's just kicked all his doubts and frustrations out from in front of him and he just goes off.

By the end of the interview, I've managed to keep from propositioning the boy. I think he trusts me enough to answer the really tough questions.

Do you drink? I ask.

His eyes light up. "I do."

A lot?

"A lot." He smiles. "I used to drink whiskey a lot. Jameson. But then I got sick and I told my mother I'd never drink whiskey again. So now I drink red wine. Usually cheap red wine, but I like expensive red wine. The few times I've had really expensive wine, I was like wow. Like if I ever had just tons of money to blow, that's what I'd spend it on. Because it's just one of those things just makes life?"

Makes everything all right, I say. Are you on any pills or antidepressants?

"No, I kicked it. I think it's just different for different people. For me, it's just, my head is cloudy enough to begin with. I need to have as much actual concreteness as possible."

Are you in a relationship?

"Um, not?I don't know. There's a girl I like a lot. I don't know if I should call her my girlfriend or not."

Bright Eyes plays Fri., Sept. 20, at Irving Plaza, 17 Irving Pl. (15th St.), 777-6800.