The Spoon song featuring a character from the band’s past
For much of the band’s fanbase, They Want My Soul represented a peak for Austin indie rockers Spoon. Britt Daniel and company had come a long way since their debut, 1996’s Telephono. With a full and stable lineup at their disposal, the band regrouped after a nearly half-decade-long hiatus to assemble some of their best material up to that point.
Much of the album’s sound was pushed by producer David Fridmann. “His sound is kind of all over it,” Daniel told The Line of Best Fit in 2014. “He has a really unique manner about him, a really cool perspective; he kind of maxes everything out. We’ve never worked with somebody like that before – somebody with such a strong sense of their own style.”
Perhaps it’s the album’s title track, ‘They Want My Soul’, that best represents the album’s aesthetic. Complete with references to duplicitous street preachers, card sharks, and palm readers, ‘They Want My Soul’ is harried, frenetic, and strangely cool in a way that only Spoon can conjure up.
“I wrote the melody to ‘They Want My Soul’ a long time ago, and I thought it was quite good,” Daniel told Pitchfork. “But then I realised that it was basically a ripoff of this Toni Braxton song [‘You’re Makin’ Me High’], so I set it aside for years.”
But the song’s melody wasn’t the only recycled element that found its way into ‘They Want My Soul’. One character after Daniel’s soul in the song is Jonathan Fisk. After referencing “educated folk singers”, Daniel points out that “Jonathan Fisk still wants my soul”. While some listeners may have only jumped on board recently with albums like Lucifer on the Sofa, observant fans will recognise that name as a Spoon song, ‘Jonathan Fisk’, from the band’s 2002 album Kill The Moonlight.
“Well, Jonathan Fisk was a character in a song from Kill the Moonlight,” Daniel told NPR around the album’s release. “And it was based on a guy who used to beat me up as I was walking home from middle school. And so when I’m writing this song – this new song, ‘They Want My Soul’, about, you could say soul-suckers in general – he was one of the people that came up. It’s a song about religious pretenders, manipulators, educated folk singers, people that bring me down. And Jonathan Fisk was one of them, for sure.”
Check out ‘They Want My Soul’ down below.
