Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

Certain Songs #2437: Spoon – “The Underdog”

September 1, 2022 by Jim Connelly

Album: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Year: 2007

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Like a lot of Spoon’s greatest songs, the bouncy, infectious single “The Underdog” covers a lot of ground with a few instruments. In this case, it’s bass, drums, acoustic guitar and — of course — an expertly-deployed horn section.

That horn section — Jason Freese on sax, Ron Blake on trumpet and Francicso Torres on trombone — is there from the opening, but kinda muted, not yet giving away how important they’re gonna be to the song. So at first you focus on the rolling, tumbling opening, led by drummer Jim Eno, who then mostly drops out, leaving Britt Daniel to sing the opening verse over his own acoustic guitar, some percussion and eventually bassist Rob Pope.

Certain Songs #2436: Spoon – “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb”

August 31, 2022 by Jim Connelly

Album: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Year: 2007

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Way back last week, I wrote about how “Take The Fifth” was definitely influenced by Elvis Costello’s soul-drenched Get Happy!!!, and that’s probably one of the reference points for the horn-driven stomper “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb,” as well.

But there’s a huge difference: “Take The Fifth” was also stripped-down, and “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” is anything but, so I’m going to say that in this case Daniel went straight to Motown for this joyous piece of soul, and so it’s all decorated up rather than stripped own.

Certain Songs #2435: Spoon – “Don’t Make Me A Target”

August 30, 2022 by Jim Connelly

Album: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Year: 2007

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It says here that 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was the height of Spoon’s commercial success and critical acclaim. Of course, I might just be saying that because it’s my favorite Spoon album, but at the very least, it was their first top ten album in both the Billboard Album charts and the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics poll, coming in at #10 and #7 respectively.