THU., JULY 05, 2007
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About the Album: Spoon's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
by Britt Daniel
For eleven years running, Spoon has been kicking stubbornly at the foundations of the pop song. Their latest, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, continues that noble tradition. Meticulously crafted and lovingly produced, the record finds Britt Daniel & Co. dismantling and re-assembling songs over and over again, tinkering with the framework and stripping compositions back to the bare essentials. eMusic's Managing Editor J. Edward Keyes caught up with Britt Daniel at his home in Oregon, where he offered insight into Ga Ga's carefully considered construction.
On the songwriting process:
Usually the way it works, I’ll come up with what I consider the song: chords, vocal melodies and lyrics. I’ll bring it to the band, and then we figure out how it’s going to be played. I remember at one point early on I decided, “I’ve had it with rhythm guitar” — especially distorted rhythm guitar. It just takes up so much space on a track. That’s what our whole first record was about: distorted rhythm guitar. Once you take that out, the song feels more spacious. It becomes more about the bass and the drums. When we did “Sister Jack” on the last record, that was distorted rhythm guitar and it did feel like [makes recoiling noise].
On the title:
The title came from the piano part on “The Ghost of You Lingers.” I’d done a demo for the song, but didn’t have any words for it yet, so I thought “What am I going to call this song?” So I called it "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.” After a while, it started to bring to mind to me the ideas of repetitiveness, and also a sort of Dada aspect. Plus, it’s just a bizarre, funny title.
On “Don’t Make Me a Target”:
This song is essentially about talking to the Big Guy in charge, asking Him to not make things any worse. I came up with it a while back, when I was writing songs for Gimme Fiction. I came up with that descending guitar riff and thought, “I’ve heard this before” — but I could never figure out where I’d heard it. Eventually I figured, “Well, maybe it is mine.” We practiced it quite a bit before Gimme Fiction, but we could never really work out an arrangement we liked, so we decided to set it aside for a year. There’s something about setting a song aside for that long — when you come back, you can hear exactly what you were doing wrong. I knew there was a good song here, there were just some little tricks with getting from verse to chorus and chorus to verse that we weren’t really doing so well. There were a lot of questions about how many words to throw in there, how long the wait should be before the chorus, things like that. When Jim [Eno, drummer and co-producer] recorded the song, he played the whole drum part minus the toms. Then he went back and recorded the toms with a totally different miking technique; so the drums are nice and crisp for most of the song, but when he hits those toms it sounds like he’s in a tunnel.
The problem is that the very next day, the whole album leaked, so that kind of killed that plan.
On “The Ghost of You Lingers”:
The story behind this song is that we were about to start recording and all of a sudden I started feeling like “Holy shit, we are not ready.” So instead of going down to Austin to record, I rented this house in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, somewhere there’d be no internet and you had to drive like 20 minutes to get to a town. It was a pretty creepy place, and that’s where I came up with this one.
It was our choice to make this the first song leaked to the blogs. When there’s a band that’s been around for a while and I hear them doing something I’ve never heard them do before, that kind of excites me. It gets me way more intrigued than, say, hearing a song that sounds exactly like the record before. That was the thinking here: put something out there that will make even people that know us say, “Hey, this is exciting.” The problem is that the very next day, the whole album leaked, so that kind of killed that plan.
That main riff is not just a piano — there’s a lot of instruments in there playing the same chord at the same time. On the demo it was just piano, but when we started doing it we tried it about 15 different ways, pulling different sounds in and out each time. We just kept doing that till we found the way that sounded coolest.
I know it’s not going to be everybody’s favorite song, but it’s probably my favorite song on the record. Not because it’s weird, but because it has the most creepy and most emotional feeling. Being that emotionally direct — it’s not as hard for me as it used to be. It used to not feel natural to me at all, but as I grew up I realized, “I like it when other people do that, so why not open up a little?” It’s OK to express vulnerability, you know? That was not something foremost in my mind when this band started. Back then, it was more about being tough — it was such a façade. I admire people who are able to be so vulnerable at such a young age. I’m amazed when somebody like Conor [Oberst] can do it really well.
The other side of the coin is that when you go out there with guns blazing, crying about everything, “woe is me,” you become a bit like the boy who cried wolf. Unfortunately, that’s what I think of most really “expressive” younger songwriters.
On “You’ve Got Yr Cherry Bomb”:
That central image of the "cherry bomb" came naturally. Sometimes lines just come to you while you’re singing, and you’re not sure where they came from. I came up with the cherry bomb being representative of a need to blow out this romantic flame. Breaking up — or being broken up with — can be pretty devastating. This song is saying “You need to blow out that flame, we lost it long ago.” It’s actually a really sad song.
We tried this one I don’t know how many different ways. We recorded it three times, and it was one of those songs we really struggled with. At one point we had a kind of “space rock” arrangement — which is a cool version and the people who heard it were like “Ah, I still like that version better,” but this is the one that seemed to work best for me.
That consistent drum beat that runs through the whole song — Jim’s smart like that. Sometimes what a song needs is just a very steady rhythm. Jim’s got a real musician’s point of view about songs. I don’t mean to slander most drummers, but sometimes the drummer’s way of looking at a song is “get your rocks off.” Jim is more about what’s right for the song. One of the first things I noticed about Jim: we met in a recording studio and, after going through a song once, he remembered where all the stops were. He had a real sense for what was going on in the song, which was a very different experience for me.
I like the idea of the narrator being confused and somehow giving himself away.
On “Don’t You Evah”:
All that talking at the beginning, that was totally organic. It wouldn’t be funny if it was planned. Do you know what the ‘talkback’ is? It’s when the producer — in this case, Jim and Mike [McCarthy, co-producer] — can talk to me while I'm in the studio by pushing a button, and then I can hear what’s going on in the control room. Normally that kind of thing doesn’t go to tape, it just goes to my headphones. Mike was being more grumpy than usual that day, and Jim and I have this running joke where we like to record Mike without him knowing it. So I kept saying “record the talkback,” but I could tell they weren’t listening to me, so I just kept saying, “OK, record the talkback. Can you record the talkback?” I think if we’d run out of tracks on the tape we would have just recorded right over it, but when we listened back to it an hour later we were like, “that’s kind of funny.” Fortunately, I was listening to the playback of the song while I was saying that, so it fits right into the rhythm. Then a little later in the intro I start singing [imitates the rhythm guitar line]; all of that to me is just a representation of what it’s actually like to make a record: you end up with all these different little pieces. I love all that stuff.
On “Eddie’s Raga”:
There’s probably some King Tubby influence showing up in here. This one has the guitar on the 2 and 4 which is more ska-like, and there’s also tons of weird studio noises. The lyrics sort of sound like a story — one of my favorite lines on the record is “It had been so long since we’d been suitably high/ so we did an Airborne and settled in for the night.” The guy in the song is pretty confused if he thinks an Airborne is gonna get him high — it’s like taking Emergen-C in a pill form. You can’t get high off of this unless you get high off of excessive amounts of vitamins. I like the idea of the narrator being confused and somehow giving himself away.
On “The Underdog”:
Jon Brion produced this song. I had met him a couple of times because I’d heard that he’d been coming to our shows. When we were working on this record last summer, Mike was still busy with Trail of Dead and Patty Griffin and we didn’t want to stop recording, so we got Jon involved. It can be really difficult to work with someone who’s not a regular member of the band, but it wasn’t difficult at all with Jon. He’s an exceptional guy who I think is doing exactly what he should be doing with his life. He’s an amazing musician. And even more than that — and that’s a lot — he’s an incredibly positive force. He’s really good at making the “unknown void” of recording a song into something that’s comfortable.
I had always pictured this song having horns. From the beginning, when this song was just a chorus with nothing else around it, it always felt like a Van Morrison song to me. Later, it started to remind me of a Simon & Garfunkel song, maybe something off of Bridge Over Troubled Water. It always felt to me like a horn chart would really pick the song up. There was this Ray Davies song that was just a B-Side on a Thanksgiving EP that he put out, and there’s this one song ["Yours Truly Confused N10"] that he plays with the Jools Holland Rhythm & Blues Orchestra. In that song, there’s a full horn section, and it sounds like a celebration, just pure happiness. When I heard that, I said, “That’s what I want the horns to sound like — like we’re having a party.”
On the songwriting process:
Usually the way it works, I’ll come up with what I consider the song: chords, vocal melodies and lyrics. I’ll bring it to the band, and then we figure out how it’s going to be played. I remember at one point early on I decided, “I’ve had it with rhythm guitar” — especially distorted rhythm guitar. It just takes up so much space on a track. That’s what our whole first record was about: distorted rhythm guitar. Once you take that out, the song feels more spacious. It becomes more about the bass and the drums. When we did “Sister Jack” on the last record, that was distorted rhythm guitar and it did feel like [makes recoiling noise].
On the title:
The title came from the piano part on “The Ghost of You Lingers.” I’d done a demo for the song, but didn’t have any words for it yet, so I thought “What am I going to call this song?” So I called it "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.” After a while, it started to bring to mind to me the ideas of repetitiveness, and also a sort of Dada aspect. Plus, it’s just a bizarre, funny title.
On “Don’t Make Me a Target”:
This song is essentially about talking to the Big Guy in charge, asking Him to not make things any worse. I came up with it a while back, when I was writing songs for Gimme Fiction. I came up with that descending guitar riff and thought, “I’ve heard this before” — but I could never figure out where I’d heard it. Eventually I figured, “Well, maybe it is mine.” We practiced it quite a bit before Gimme Fiction, but we could never really work out an arrangement we liked, so we decided to set it aside for a year. There’s something about setting a song aside for that long — when you come back, you can hear exactly what you were doing wrong. I knew there was a good song here, there were just some little tricks with getting from verse to chorus and chorus to verse that we weren’t really doing so well. There were a lot of questions about how many words to throw in there, how long the wait should be before the chorus, things like that. When Jim [Eno, drummer and co-producer] recorded the song, he played the whole drum part minus the toms. Then he went back and recorded the toms with a totally different miking technique; so the drums are nice and crisp for most of the song, but when he hits those toms it sounds like he’s in a tunnel.
On “The Ghost of You Lingers”:
The story behind this song is that we were about to start recording and all of a sudden I started feeling like “Holy shit, we are not ready.” So instead of going down to Austin to record, I rented this house in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, somewhere there’d be no internet and you had to drive like 20 minutes to get to a town. It was a pretty creepy place, and that’s where I came up with this one.
It was our choice to make this the first song leaked to the blogs. When there’s a band that’s been around for a while and I hear them doing something I’ve never heard them do before, that kind of excites me. It gets me way more intrigued than, say, hearing a song that sounds exactly like the record before. That was the thinking here: put something out there that will make even people that know us say, “Hey, this is exciting.” The problem is that the very next day, the whole album leaked, so that kind of killed that plan.
That main riff is not just a piano — there’s a lot of instruments in there playing the same chord at the same time. On the demo it was just piano, but when we started doing it we tried it about 15 different ways, pulling different sounds in and out each time. We just kept doing that till we found the way that sounded coolest.
I know it’s not going to be everybody’s favorite song, but it’s probably my favorite song on the record. Not because it’s weird, but because it has the most creepy and most emotional feeling. Being that emotionally direct — it’s not as hard for me as it used to be. It used to not feel natural to me at all, but as I grew up I realized, “I like it when other people do that, so why not open up a little?” It’s OK to express vulnerability, you know? That was not something foremost in my mind when this band started. Back then, it was more about being tough — it was such a façade. I admire people who are able to be so vulnerable at such a young age. I’m amazed when somebody like Conor [Oberst] can do it really well.
The other side of the coin is that when you go out there with guns blazing, crying about everything, “woe is me,” you become a bit like the boy who cried wolf. Unfortunately, that’s what I think of most really “expressive” younger songwriters.
On “You’ve Got Yr Cherry Bomb”:
That central image of the "cherry bomb" came naturally. Sometimes lines just come to you while you’re singing, and you’re not sure where they came from. I came up with the cherry bomb being representative of a need to blow out this romantic flame. Breaking up — or being broken up with — can be pretty devastating. This song is saying “You need to blow out that flame, we lost it long ago.” It’s actually a really sad song.
We tried this one I don’t know how many different ways. We recorded it three times, and it was one of those songs we really struggled with. At one point we had a kind of “space rock” arrangement — which is a cool version and the people who heard it were like “Ah, I still like that version better,” but this is the one that seemed to work best for me.
That consistent drum beat that runs through the whole song — Jim’s smart like that. Sometimes what a song needs is just a very steady rhythm. Jim’s got a real musician’s point of view about songs. I don’t mean to slander most drummers, but sometimes the drummer’s way of looking at a song is “get your rocks off.” Jim is more about what’s right for the song. One of the first things I noticed about Jim: we met in a recording studio and, after going through a song once, he remembered where all the stops were. He had a real sense for what was going on in the song, which was a very different experience for me.
On “Don’t You Evah”:
All that talking at the beginning, that was totally organic. It wouldn’t be funny if it was planned. Do you know what the ‘talkback’ is? It’s when the producer — in this case, Jim and Mike [McCarthy, co-producer] — can talk to me while I'm in the studio by pushing a button, and then I can hear what’s going on in the control room. Normally that kind of thing doesn’t go to tape, it just goes to my headphones. Mike was being more grumpy than usual that day, and Jim and I have this running joke where we like to record Mike without him knowing it. So I kept saying “record the talkback,” but I could tell they weren’t listening to me, so I just kept saying, “OK, record the talkback. Can you record the talkback?” I think if we’d run out of tracks on the tape we would have just recorded right over it, but when we listened back to it an hour later we were like, “that’s kind of funny.” Fortunately, I was listening to the playback of the song while I was saying that, so it fits right into the rhythm. Then a little later in the intro I start singing [imitates the rhythm guitar line]; all of that to me is just a representation of what it’s actually like to make a record: you end up with all these different little pieces. I love all that stuff.
On “Eddie’s Raga”:
There’s probably some King Tubby influence showing up in here. This one has the guitar on the 2 and 4 which is more ska-like, and there’s also tons of weird studio noises. The lyrics sort of sound like a story — one of my favorite lines on the record is “It had been so long since we’d been suitably high/ so we did an Airborne and settled in for the night.” The guy in the song is pretty confused if he thinks an Airborne is gonna get him high — it’s like taking Emergen-C in a pill form. You can’t get high off of this unless you get high off of excessive amounts of vitamins. I like the idea of the narrator being confused and somehow giving himself away.
On “The Underdog”:
Jon Brion produced this song. I had met him a couple of times because I’d heard that he’d been coming to our shows. When we were working on this record last summer, Mike was still busy with Trail of Dead and Patty Griffin and we didn’t want to stop recording, so we got Jon involved. It can be really difficult to work with someone who’s not a regular member of the band, but it wasn’t difficult at all with Jon. He’s an exceptional guy who I think is doing exactly what he should be doing with his life. He’s an amazing musician. And even more than that — and that’s a lot — he’s an incredibly positive force. He’s really good at making the “unknown void” of recording a song into something that’s comfortable.
I had always pictured this song having horns. From the beginning, when this song was just a chorus with nothing else around it, it always felt like a Van Morrison song to me. Later, it started to remind me of a Simon & Garfunkel song, maybe something off of Bridge Over Troubled Water. It always felt to me like a horn chart would really pick the song up. There was this Ray Davies song that was just a B-Side on a Thanksgiving EP that he put out, and there’s this one song ["Yours Truly Confused N10"] that he plays with the Jools Holland Rhythm & Blues Orchestra. In that song, there’s a full horn section, and it sounds like a celebration, just pure happiness. When I heard that, I said, “That’s what I want the horns to sound like — like we’re having a party.”
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