On “The Ghost of You Lingers”:
The story behind this song is that we were about to start recording and all of a sudden I started feeling like “Holy shit, we are not ready.” So instead of going down to Austin to record, I rented this house in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, somewhere there’d be no internet and you had to drive like 20 minutes to get to a town. It was a pretty creepy place, and that’s where I came up with this one.
It was our choice to make this the first song leaked to the blogs. When there’s a band that’s been around for a while and I hear them doing something I’ve never heard them do before, that kind of excites me. It gets me way more intrigued than, say, hearing a song that sounds exactly like the record before. That was the thinking here: put something out there that will make even people that know us say, “Hey, this is exciting.” The problem is that the very next day, the whole album leaked, so that kind of killed that plan.
That main riff is not just a piano — there’s a lot of instruments in there playing the same chord at the same time. On the demo it was just piano, but when we started doing it we tried it about 15 different ways, pulling different sounds in and out each time. We just kept doing that till we found the way that sounded coolest.
I know it’s not going to be everybody’s favorite song, but it’s probably my favorite song on the record. Not because it’s weird, but because it has the most creepy and most emotional feeling. Being that emotionally direct — it’s not as hard for me as it used to be. It used to not feel natural to me at all, but as I grew up I realized, “I like it when other people do that, so why not open up a little?” It’s OK to express vulnerability, you know? That was not something foremost in my mind when this band started. Back then, it was more about being tough — it was such a façade. I admire people who are able to be so vulnerable at such a young age. I’m amazed when somebody like Conor [Oberst] can do it really well.
The other side of the coin is that when you go out there with guns blazing, crying about everything, “woe is me,” you become a bit like the boy who cried wolf. Unfortunately, that’s what I think of most really “expressive” younger songwriters.
From the eMusic interview with Britt Daniel:
http://www.emusic.com/features/spotlight/293_200707-ata-spoon.html
On “The Ghost of You Lingers”: The story behind this song is that we were about to start recording and all of a sudden I started feeling like “Holy shit, we are not ready.” So instead of going down to Austin to record, I rented this house in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, somewhere there’d be no internet and you had to drive like 20 minutes to get to a town. It was a pretty creepy place, and that’s where I came up with this one.
It was our choice to make this the first song leaked to the blogs. When there’s a band that’s been around for a while and I hear them doing something I’ve never heard them do before, that kind of excites me. It gets me way more intrigued than, say, hearing a song that sounds exactly like the record before. That was the thinking here: put something out there that will make even people that know us say, “Hey, this is exciting.” The problem is that the very next day, the whole album leaked, so that kind of killed that plan.
That main riff is not just a piano — there’s a lot of instruments in there playing the same chord at the same time. On the demo it was just piano, but when we started doing it we tried it about 15 different ways, pulling different sounds in and out each time. We just kept doing that till we found the way that sounded coolest.
I know it’s not going to be everybody’s favorite song, but it’s probably my favorite song on the record. Not because it’s weird, but because it has the most creepy and most emotional feeling. Being that emotionally direct — it’s not as hard for me as it used to be. It used to not feel natural to me at all, but as I grew up I realized, “I like it when other people do that, so why not open up a little?” It’s OK to express vulnerability, you know? That was not something foremost in my mind when this band started. Back then, it was more about being tough — it was such a façade. I admire people who are able to be so vulnerable at such a young age. I’m amazed when somebody like Conor [Oberst] can do it really well.
The other side of the coin is that when you go out there with guns blazing, crying about everything, “woe is me,” you become a bit like the boy who cried wolf. Unfortunately, that’s what I think of most really “expressive” younger songwriters.