"Keeps your mind on the page"

I feel okay about breaking cover on this, since I know for a fact that every other person on the planet has acquired a "pre-release" of the new Spoon album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. So it's okay for me to go ahead and point out that the second track, "The Ghost of You Lingers," is just completely unfair. It's unfair to any other song that any other band has put out this year. Hell, it's unfair to every other song on the album it appears on, which is something, since Ga⁵ is a damn fine collection of songs. But "Ghost," though...it brings it. It brings the chips. It brings the dip. And it brings the soul-crushing ennui of knowing you'll never create something so meaningful, yourself. Ever. Well, unless you have kids. I guess kids can work. But "Ghost" won't ever crash your car after a heated family argument, so: one point for Spoon.

It's sad, in a strange way, that the album is getting so much pre-release hype. Spoon feels like one of those bands that everybody secretly knows is their own private house band of the mind. Spoon "belongs" to each of us a little more than most popular bands do. Am I wrong? Maybe, I don't know. I know I'm a relative late-comer to the band--the catalog prior to Kill the Moonlight is still a bit of a blur to me--but what I've got of theirs, I like, and I like it in a way you can't possibly match, because they're sort of secretly my band. Mine. They play for me, each time I plop my headphones onto my head. As much as I want you to like them, too--and as much as I think many more people are going to come out of this year liking them, as well--I don't really want to share them with you.

It's a little bit weird. I know. But still.

One thing I do know is that there's a small number of truly excellent writing discs in my collection. I can listen to most anything when I write, but there's only a couple albums that will always make me work hard every time I listen to them, start to finish. Sleater-Kinney's One Beat does that to me. I think I can credit my recent resurgence on the fiction-producing front to that album above all else in life. (The Woods as a follow-up makes for an excellent second-wind album. You know this makes sense.) Goodbye Enemy Airship the Landlord is Dead by Do Make Say Think can usually shove me off the cliff and into the zone. A couple others. And Spoon's Gimme Fiction. If they can't be my band, then that can be my disc. It's the yum.

(Really, though: steal it from me sometime, and try to listen to "Sister Jack" without feeling a little bit less discouraged. You can't. It's anti-ennui.)