The inside scoop on Spoon's latest

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Spoon songwriter Britt Daniel unpacks "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" song by song:

1. "Don't Make Me A Target"

"I actually wrote that one when I was writing songs for 'Gimme Fiction.' We tried to get it going back then, and it never quite worked. We set it aside for a year and when we came back to it, we got it. There's something about setting aside a song for that long that lets you see what needs to be done to it."

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2. "The Ghost Of You Lingers"

"That came about from me sitting down at a piano and just hammering. Like a lot of my favorite songs, they start out with me thinking this isn't really going to be a song, I'm just messing around for my own sake and then it becomes something. I couldn't have written a song like that on guitar because I can't really play piano so good. I tend to play on the white keys a lot, and that wouldn't normally happen if I actually knew how to play."

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3. "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb"

"One of those songs about a love that's been lost but one person is still into it even though you're not getting back together. We lost it a long time ago but you, as in the subject of the song, are still into it."

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4. "Don't You Evah"

"That's a cover of an unreleased song by the Natural History (a New York indie rock band). ... I knew there was a hit in waiting there."

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5. Rhthm And Soul"

"The title was an accident. I wrote it out wrong and when it was pointed out to me, I thought we should just leave it."

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6. "Eddie's Ragga"

"That one came out of this jam that (Spoon drummer) Jim (Eno) and (Spoon keyboard player) Eric Harvey and I had with Eddie Robert, (the bass player) from I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. We didn't have a bass player that day and he accidentally played this one little riff. I was like, 'Wait, do that again.' I made a chord progression that used that riff and that was it."

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7. "The Underdog"

"Another political one. I might have had the chorus done around 'Gimme Fiction,' but I really didn't write that song then. I had these chords that felt like a Van Morrison song, and that's why we ended up with horns. It's about having a word with the big guy that never considers the little guy."

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8. "My Little Japanese Cigarette Case"

"No, I do not actually own one. That song is just a total fantasy. I had it around for a long time, just the same chords repeated over and over again and the words just kind of fell into place. Someone told me the song was about drugs, but I honestly never thought about that. I think it's just about someone holding a hand mirror and bringing it to my face."

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9. "Finer Feelings"

"The Memphis Commercial Appeal is the name of the main newspaper in Memphis. I think that's an amazing name. It's just a song about having your hair cut in Memphis and looking for love in the back pages of the Commercial Appeal."

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10. "Black Like Me"

"The title comes from the book by journalist John Howard Griffin (about his six-week experiment passing as African American in the deep South; the book was named after a line from a Langston Hughes poem). I always thought that was a great title, but it just seemed to make sense for that song using 'black' in feeling black on the inside, in the Morrissey sense of the word."

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