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The band today (clockwise, Jim Eno, Britt Daniel,Rob Pope and Eric Harvey.
A SPOON show doesn’t quite end when the band leaves the stage. The group may be gone — backstage mingling with friends, greeting family, figuring out where the afterparty will be — but a bit of the members’ exacting taste lingers, in the songs the audience hears while clearing out. At most rock concerts this music is chosen by the club management to be as wallpaper-background as possible, impetus just to move along, please. At Spoon shows it is chosen by Spoon. And so after a recent show at the Orpheum Theater here, the crowd, still buzzing from the encore, left to the strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” followed immediately by AC/DC’s “Back in Black” — anthemic to the country, and to rock ’n’ roll.
And a good fit for Spoon, which started out as an emblem of the indie scene in its hometown, Austin, Tex., and now, 17 years later, is as expansive and enduring as a flag. Hanging out backstage after the concert, drinking beer, talking to girls, Britt Daniel, Spoon’s outsize frontman, guitarist and songwriter, explained his choice of recessional. It was inspired, he said, by a video he had seen of Bob Dylan performing in Britain; “God Save the Queen” was the soundtrack as he left the stage. “I always thought it was cool to play something very official afterward,” Mr. Daniel said.
His unflinching, classic vision of what is cool has guided the band since its inception. When Mr. Daniel, now 38, founded Spoon with the drummer Jim Eno, 43, they were part of a wave of fuzzed-out post-punk acts that dominated college radio. Now many of those — the Pixies, Pavement, Guided by Voices — are kaput or working the reunion circuit. But Spoon has kept calm and carried on; its seventh studio album, “Transference,” is due Jan. 19 from the indie Merge Records. The group has survived being dropped by a major label, Elektra; cast changes — the lineup now includes Eric Harvey, 35, on keyboards and Rob Pope, 31, on bass — and shifts in the indie scene, from post-punk to the experimentalism of Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors. Not just survived, succeeded: Spoon’s last record, “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” from 2007, reached the Top 10 on the Billboard 200, selling 46,000 copies in its debut week, more than double its previous album and huge for an indie label. Spoon is an increasingly rare commodity, a career band whose new album is as heavily anticipated as releases from younger blogosphere favorites like Vampire Weekend and Yeasayer.
“They get put in this indie rock category that I don’t think they belong in,” said Scott Geiger, a program director and D.J. at KRBZ, an alternative rock station in Kansas City, Kan. “I just think they’re a really good rock band.” KRBZ has been playing “Written in Reverse,” the first single off “Transference,” in heavy rotation alongside older Spoon songs; Mr. Geiger called the band “a staple.”
“Each album and each tour and each radio spin has gained them new fans,” he said. “In a decade I’ll compare them to an Elvis Costello kind of act. He endured by being able to put out catchy rock songs that mattered to people.”
Spoon’s critical acclaim is almost comically universal. In December the online review aggregator Metacritic named Spoon the best artist of the decade, above acts like Radiohead and the White Stripes. In March the group will headline Radio City Music Hall. Though the band is now spread out around the country — only Mr. Eno is in Austin; Mr. Daniel moved to Portland, Ore. in 2005; Mr. Harvey is in Dallas; and Mr. Pope is “intentionally homeless,” he said — it has a palpable cohesion thanks to Mr. Daniel’s rigorous songwriting and pared-down aesthetic. They wear button-down shirts onstage and have no notable haircuts.
Mr. Daniel, whose musical inspirations run to the Stooges, Lou Reed, Paul Simon and Prince, also rejects the indie label. “To me indie always meant something like not really caring enough to try, or not wanting to appear that you care and so therefore not trying,” he said over dinner in New York a few nights after the Boston show. “And I’ve never liked music like that. I want to see that there is some care in it, or at least some passion.”
His effort is evident onstage, when he winds up sweating through those button-downs. (He wears them offstage too and musses his hair when he’s thinking.) In person Mr. Daniel can be reserved — laconic if we’re being rock ’n’ roll — though not unfriendly or incurious. He described himself as a “blind optimist” about pursuing a music career, the only thing he has wanted to do since he picked up a guitar in high school, but added, “I think it would surprise a lot of people that know me to say that I’m an optimist.”
He mussed his hair. “I can be sort of gloomy,” he continued. “Jim has said that I can turn any compliment towards me around as some sort of negative.”
Being on the road with his band mates is an antidote to that. “That’s my favorite thing,” he said. “It’s the most carefree thing. If I’m left to my own devices, I don’t experience that camaraderie so much. There’s no other time that I can be as happy on a 24-hour basis.”
Spoon’s sound has always built on tension and release, between formality — tightly packed, seemingly elemental arrangements that nod to Motown and punk — and feel-good-ism. Mr. Daniel’s most frequent lyric is some variation on “It’s all right” (“Lou Reed’s favorite line,” he said). His verses can be expressionistic, with oblique meanings: “Who Makes Your Money,” for example, begins, “Japanese John, his slight face fur/Still just as confused, still just as sure.”
What exactly is he singing about? “I don’t know a lot of the times,” he said. “I’m just trying to fit the mood of the song.”