Born To Strum

Britt Daniel from American indie-rockers Spoon talks all things tone and Telecasters…

- Amit Sharma

“Is there a secret?” ponders Spoon singer/guitarist Britt Daniel when asked how he wrote his band’s most popular indie-rock anthems. Is there, perhaps, a stage of the process that might be unique to him? He takes a moment to think about it.

“I’m not really sure, to be honest. What I usually do is, to put it dramatically, go into some kind of trance. You have to get lost in what you are doing. That’s how I create, getting totally absorbed in chords and then coming up with strong melodies on top of them.”

The Spoon leader also points how, while stockpiling ideas is all well and good, it’s the selection process of what to build on further that helped cement a fruitful career since starting the band in 1993. Without this crucial point in his creative method, perhaps the Texans would never have cracked top 10s on home soil, infecting the airwaves and invading screen audiences via high-profile synchronizations into The Simpsons, Cloverfield and SpiderMan: Homecoming. Quality control, he says, is key…

“We have ditched a lot of things, yes,” he admits when we ask him about the large amount of wastage that inevitably comes with setting the bar so high. “I have tapes and tapes, hard drives and hard drives, all full of ideas that we got to a certain point and then left to move onto something else. I feel like I stick with what comes natural to me. When I listen back to what I’ve written, it has to give me some kind of shivers. If it doesn’t, then it’s time to work on a new song…