I didn’t get into Spoon until 2004’s Gimme Fiction. I loved and still love that album, it would likely be home on any “Top 10 albums of all time” list you ask me to come up with off-the-cuff, assuming I am able to think of anything at all (as I am not great at remembering things on-the-spot, nor off-the-cuff, since we are hyphenating idioms now). Either way, my love of that album, and subsequent albums Transference and They Want My Soul blinded me to the brilliance of their earlier records, with their paired-back production and understated nuance–oh, crap, I’m already descending into hyperbole.

(You might be asking yourself, “Wait, wasn’t Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga after Gimme Fiction and before Transference?” and you’d be right. Unfortunately I’ve never liked that album, despite–or perhaps because of–it being their true breakout hit album and typically being declared Spoon’s best album. I’m here to set the record straight: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is not Spoon’s best album.)

It wasn’t until 2017 that I finally listened to Girls Can Tell and Kill The Moonlight, their third and fourth albums preceding Gimme Fiction. They are both absolutely divine. In some ways, I am doing them a disservice, by picking this song from them to put on top of a post that is now about them. This song is not the best song on these albums, but it is one of my favorites and, in some ways, is perfectly exemplary of Spoon as a band.

Early Spoon oozes a laid-back coolness that is hard to describe, but this song sort of does it. Spoon is a fitted shirt hung on me–nothing else will fit right, or seem so directly applied. Every beat, every musical flourish in their songs feels like just the right thing, placed at just the right moment in time.

Unfortunately, not every Spoon album, nor every song, is flawless. Sometimes they stumble, and I think their constant flirtation with being big in adult contemporary pop rock kind of annoys me–the entirety of Hot Thoughts being very cringe, like a dad in aviators at a club hitting on a woman young enough to be his daughter. It says a lot that Britt Daniel’s track selection for Spoon’s greatest hits compilation only has the title track from that album.

Hot Thoughts basically killed my interest in the band, and I still haven’t listened to their latest album, 2022’s Lucifer on the Sofa. Why bother, when I can just listen to Girls Can Tell or Kill The Moonlight again? Listening to new Spoon would be like looking slouchy in a thin American Apparel t-shirt, instead of reaching for something tried and true, that fits right, like a fitted shirt.