Spoon’s Britt Daniel tinkered with hanging it up after a brief, unpleasant encounter with a major label in the late 1990s. It ended with the band getting dropped, and Daniel adrift.
“I always knew I’d make music,” he says. “I just didn’t know if anyone would want to put it out. That was depressing.”
But the Austin, Texas, band persisted. The band’s latest, “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” is on pace to sell more than 160,000 copies.
“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 co-founder 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 31/2 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.
“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.”
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Spoon
When: 8 p.m. Friday
Where: Riviera, 4746 N. Racine Ave.
