Daniel's Boon

It begins with an apology because it has to -- before we can talk about his band's new album, Kill the Moonlight, before we can talk about anything else.

You see, I interviewed Britt Daniel once before, around the time his third album, Girls Can Tell, was released. We had a pretty good conversation. The discussion strayed from its real purpose until it was just a couple of guys talking, not one end of the telephone providing the Qs and the other supplying the As.

And when I wrote it all down (Dallas Observer, "Rhythm and Bruises," February 22, 2001), I called him an asshole. (Actually, if you want to be technical, I said, "complete asshole.") Didn't mean to, or at least, didn't mean for it to come out like that. But there it was. If anyone was an asshole, it was me.

As for Daniel? Nothing could be further from the truth. When I get him on the phone again more recently, he even tries to give me a way out after my apology, an excuse for doing what I did. "I think that you meant to say that people thought I was an asshole." Then he laughs. "So who are these people?"

Daniel obviously knows some people don't understand him. He's always known it. It happened all the time when he was growing up in Temple and some of his middle-school classmates wanted to kick the crap out of him because he didn't listen to Iron Maiden or Judas Priest and that automatically meant he was gay and that was bad. It's happened since he moved to Austin to go to college and even more after he began playing with Spoon almost a decade ago, mainly because he doesn't talk much or doesn't talk about the right things or something like that.

"Sometimes, I think, you know, I kinda give off a bad impression," Daniel says, on the phone from his Austin apartment. "But it's just the way I look, or sometimes I'm shy. You know, shy people kinda get that sometimes. Almost every instance of when people think that someone else is an asshole, almost always, I'd say maybe 80 percent of the time, it's because those people they think are an asshole are actually just uncomfortable or shy or whatever. But maybe I am an asshole. I just don't think that the people that know me well, any of them, would say that I'm an asshole."

You get to know Daniel better after listening to Kill the Moonlight, and of all the things you might say about him then, that's not one of them. You could say he has low expectations (of himself, of life in general) because everything's easier that way: "Me and my friends sell ourselves short but feel very well / We feel fine," he explains on "Small Stakes." Or that he wants "Something to Look Forward To" and "Someone Something" to connect to. Or maybe he's still the kid in Temple getting picked on after class: "Jonathon Fisk speaks with his fists / Can't let me walk home on my own," he sings on "Jonathon Fisk."

He might be all of these things, but it's just as possible that he's none of them. After all, he writes songs, not diary entries, no matter how heartfelt the result may be. Daniel may put his head and heart onto the page, but when he gets into a recording studio, it doesn't matter. Not if it doesn't sound good, not if it doesn't sound like a song that should be on a Spoon record. No matter what Daniel thinks about his songs when he's home writing them, no matter what kind of album he wants to make, he knows, in the end, that he's not the boss. The speakers on the stereo have the last word, and he never questions them.

"We recorded for a week in October, and we listened back to what we had done after recording for a solid week, and we did not like it," Daniel says. "So we scrapped almost all of that. And I went back and wrote some more songs. Some of the songs we just scrapped entirely; some of the songs we just scrapped the recordings and then recorded them over…We go in there with a sort of idea in mind: Okay, this one's gonna be -- like with Girls Can Tell, it was more of a traditional pop record; that's what we wanted to make -- and this time we wanted to make it more rock and maybe a little bit more out there. But, you know, you go in with these ideas, and then you start listening to how it's recorded, and all that goes out the window. You just want to make the song as good as it can be on its own. All that stuff about where I'm coming from" -- he laughs softly -- "doesn't seem to matter when you play it back and you think, 'Oooh, this isn't working.' Then it's just, like, do anything you can to make the song stand up on its own."