Few bands have made a career last more than 10 years. Even more rare is making it past 20 years.
Arguably, putting out your best album after 20 years is almost unheard of. However, Spoon fans will argue they did just that with the release of They Want My Soul in 2014.
After putting out a stellar run of albums in the 2000s from Girls Can Tell to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, in 2010, Spoon released their first album in a decade. But it was met with more of a shrug than indie darling acclaim. Transference has found its audience since then, but at the time it was seen as a disappointment for a band known for knocking it out of the park with every album in the prior decade.
After Transference, Britt Daniel formed a group with Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade and Handsome Furs and Sam Brown of The New Bomb Turks. This supergroup project, Divine Fits, seemed to revitalize something in Daniel, and that new found energy gave the world the next Spoon album.
They Want My Soul wasn’t so much as a return to form (like Lucifer on the Sofa later came to be), but a natural evolution of the band’s sound. They still had their crowd-pleasing singalong jams like “Rent I Pay” and moody rock jams like “Rainy Taxi,” but they also had room for their more experimental sounds like “Inside Out.”
If you ask the average Spoon fan their favorite track on They Want My Soul, it’s doubtful you will hear a consensus pick. There’s a track for every kind of Spoon fan on it. It’s no wonder so many different songs have become concert staples for the band.
For the 10th anniversary, Spoon released a deluxe version of They Want My Soul. It doesn’t come with any unused tracks from the recording process, but fans get a peek at the early demo versions of the songs and hear glimpses of the roads not taken. “Rent I Pay” sounds more like a campfire singalong than the arena jam it eventually becomes. “Inside Out” was close to being an introspective ballad instead of an experimental soundscape odyssey.
Having access to the early versions of these songs helps to appreciate what the album came to be: big. Could Spoon have performed the original versions in a small theater to a crowd of 200 for an intimate night of music? Absolutely. But their sights were much bigger than that.
These are songs meant for thousands with crowds of people who are as eager to sing as the lead singer of the band. You can absolutely enjoy listening to this music by yourself. But like all good rock music, it’s truly meant to be listened to loudly and with a crowd of screaming fans.
Must listens
- “Rent I Pay”
- “Inside Out”
- “Rainy Taxi”
- “Do You”
- “They Want My Soul”
- “I Just Don’t Understand”
- “New York Kiss”
- “Rent I Pay – Home Demo”
- “Inside Out – Home Demo”