The Right Trajectory For Spoon

“We sold all the tickets,” the singer deadpanned.

Yes, literally. Probe a little and you’ll catch some pride that this was accomplished without advertising, despite advice that they needed it.

The propulsive rock band from Austin, Texas, is a rarity in today’s music business – an act that hones its craft over many years and picks up more and more dedicated fans as it goes along. Seventeen years after Daniel and drummer Jim Eno got together, the arrow keeps pointing up.

The band’s 2001 album, Girls Can Tell, sold 100,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The next two discs registered 157,000 and 220,000 sales. The 2007 album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, sold 325,000 copies and earned Spoon a gig on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” The new disc, Transference, is just starting out.

“So many bands lose their heads when one day they’re playing to 40 people and two weeks later they’re playing to 2,000,” said bass player Rob Pope. “That just shakes things up a little too much. You kind of lose your perspective of how to be a band at that point. For us, since I’ve been in the band, the work ethic has always been pretty high and that’s translated into the band’s upward trajectory.”

For Daniel, the difference is desire.

“It seems like a lot of people, and a lot of people who make great records, are in bands for the time being – `This is something I’m going to do for a while, this is a hoot, and I’m going to get on with my life,'” he said. “I wanted to do this for my life.”

The band’s taut sound is dominated by Daniel’s guitar and nervous-energy songs, and Eno’s creative rhythms. More than most bands today, Spoon is dominated by that rhythmic intensity. “It is pretty crazy that this has been together for so long,” Eno said. “There’s a consistency to a Spoon record that I don’t think you get with a lot of other bands.”

That consistency also lets Spoon explore other ideas, like the horns on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, without fans feeling like they’ve happened upon an entirely different band.

Spoon has an interesting personal dynamic, too. Daniel writes and sings the songs, making him clearly the leader, and both he and Eno are the band’s veteran core. They seem almost like big brothers to Pope and Eric Harvey, who both joined within the past five years. Pope has a puppy-dog energy. Harvey seems to be a member as much for his keyboard and guitar skills – Spoon could have had anybody and chose someone who’d never been in a band – as for being the kind of guy you wouldn’t mind hanging out with backstage every night for a few months.

Austin was once home base for everyone; now only Eno calls it home. Daniel lives in Portland, Ore.

After four discs working with producer Mike McCarthy, Transference is Spoon’s first experience producing a disc on their own. McCarthy wasn’t available when Spoon wanted to work, so they pressed onward. McCarthy is a talented producer but a difficult personality, Daniel said.

“I just wanted to see if we could do it in a different way, not only to see what happened creatively, but it was taxing on our soul to be in a studio for five months straight with him,” Daniel said. “This time it was a lot easier.”

While growing, sales of Spoon discs are relatively modest. Exposure often comes in different ways. Thinking he was approving a science project, Daniel said “OK” when someone from Japan asked to use Spoon’s music as a soundtrack to some videos featuring Keepon, a robot invented to engage autistic youngsters. He was surprised later when a friend told him to watch the videos on YouTube: The Keepon dancing to Spoon’s “I Turn My Camera On” proved the band’s music could swing instead of pound.

The video has been clicked on more than 2.2 million times.

Bruce Springsteen said a few years back that except for U2, he doesn’t know any rock band where he knows the name of every member. That’s as much a reflection that this is an era where rock no longer dominates, and the industry itself is imploding. It’s hard to escape the sense that if Spoon had been working 35 years ago, they’d be huge, with magazine covers and stadium shows. Casual fans would know the names Daniel, Eno, Pope and Harvey.

Daniel said he doesn’t regret the era he’s in. One bout of true rock star treatment – a group of fans in Indianapolis who wanted to follow him around simply because he was Britt Daniel – left him cold.

“Maybe for a week,” Pope said, “if I could go back to the ’70s just to see what it was like.”

“We’d never see him again,” Eno said.