Lucifer On The Sofa

“It’s just a rock ’n’ roll record,” Britt Daniel says of Lucifer on the Sofa, his Texas outfit’s 10th LP. “And it’s a record that sounds to me like good times, for the most part.” That description holds true, from the canyon-like groove of “Held” (an opening cover of fellow Austinite Bill Callahan’s 1998 original) to the lightheaded romance of “My Babe,” a song Daniel calls “a declaration of genuine love.” The idea was to make an album like they would have when they first started in the ’90s, when every song had to feel finished before they stepped into a studio. “We were more of a bar band then,” he says. “That’s all we were doing, rehearsing to play gigs at little bars or clubs in Austin. Playing as a band first and working the songs up together was a guiding principle for how the record turned out, with the spirit that it did.” Here, Daniel takes us inside every song on the album.

“Held”
“We hadn’t played it since some show—probably in 2004 or 2005—and hadn’t thought too much about it. But we were having a bit of a jam in the studio, and I just called that one out. I loved the tune—I related to the words about opening yourself up to that kind of surrender and connection. And before, I was always the one playing guitar, but this time I moved to bass and Gerardo [Larios]—he’s sort of a wizard on guitar—he took the riff and it really made it work a lot better. I sent it to Bill: I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was very succinct and positive.”

“The Hardest Cut”
“It was the first time we wrote when we got back to Texas—when I moved back to Texas and Alex [Fischel] moved over from California. He’d never lived here before, and the idea was he’d live here until the record was done. Maybe it’s because it was the first song we wrote after all that, but it didn’t sound like a typical Spoon riff to me. I mean, we could have called it the ZZ Top riff, but I just called it ‘the Texas riff.’”

“The Devil & Mister Jones”
“This is a tune that Andrew Cashen and I wrote—he’s a friend of mine here in Austin and he’s in the bands A Giant Dog and Sweet Spirit. He just sent me an iPhone recording of him whistling while he was playing acoustic guitar, and sometimes that does nothing—I think he sent me a few of those before—but this time it kind of just immediately turned into this thing. The first version was more straightforward and sounded like him on the acoustic guitar, but I searched around for a way to do it. I wanted to make it more of a dance song from the ’60s, some kind of R&B single you could dance to.”

“Wild”
“Jack [Antonoff] and I got together years ago. I feel like we worked on two songs—this one and ‘Can I Sit Next to You,’ but nothing really happened with that. I don’t know how exactly to describe his signature other than there’s something about the chord changes that are a little more epic than usual. When you work with other people, you recognize how, when you’re writing on your own, you get locked into certain patterns. Even when you’re coming up with a brand-new song, its new chords and its new changes and everything, there are certain patterns that just exist in your mind. So, when you work with other people, it’s so much easier to break out of those patterns. We just kind of got brought together—someone suggested we would enjoy writing together and I sure did.”

“My Babe”
“I didn’t used to write love songs at all. For the first album or two, if anything nearing vulnerability or even genuine emotion seemed to creep into the lyrics, I would kind of try to disguise it. But eventually, I embraced that a little bit more. This song is a declaration of genuine love. It kind of talks about the complexities of a deep relationship. It can be a bit repetitive being in one, it can be a lot of the same. And you can embrace that, you can fight it, you can find the beauty in it, you can try to give it more variety in some way, but this song is about getting past that. It’s about the magical moments or the magical feeling you get from that kind of love.”

“Feels Alright”
“This one we recorded pretty fast. Instead of doing a bunch of takes, it’s a song that just kind of took off—about feeling good and feeling alive, about the great feeling you have about a really great night. It’s not super deep, but if I think about it more, I’m writing about when I was young. So, it’s also a song about that feeling when you’re on your own for the first time, that thing where you’re making your own rules, without supervision. And I still remember what that felt like. It was a real charge. It was a blast.”

“On the Radio”
“I wrote this one in New York in 2018. It’s one of the oldest songs we’ve got on here. This was in reference to an AM and FM radio—what I was listening to when I was a kid, growing up in Temple, Texas, with the clock radio on my bedside table. And that was my lifeline to the outside world. I spent a lot of waking hours just doing nothing but listening to that radio. Every night, after lights had to go out, I felt a lot less lonely when I had that radio there. It kind of felt like the people on the radio were talking to me personally.”

“Astral Jacket”
“This started as some lost acoustic recording I found, from who knows when—me doing maybe five or six takes of this idea after I had this initial spark of inspiration. I wasn’t sure where to go with it and I tried it a bunch of different ways, but then one night, we had quite a time in Austin. We went to this place called Stay Gold, saw Sabrina Ellis play a show and saw our friends from White Reaper. It was a Friday night, there was a lot of tequila involved, and it was just a really fantastic night. This is pre-pandemic. When it was about 2 am and everybody had to go home, Alex and I said, ‘This is why we’re in Austin together: We’re going to go work on a song.’ So, we came to my house, and I got on a classical guitar; Alex got on a Wurlitzer. Somehow, that sort of comedown moment made the song speak for the first time and ring true in a genuine way.”

“Satellite”
“It feels like this is the one song that we played live for years and years before we recorded it. We tried to record it for [2014’s] They Want My Soul and didn’t really love that version, but then just kept playing it pretty nonstop. Even though it’s sort of a left turn from the last few songs, this was the idea of the record, where you home in on the song as a band first, then you record it live. It’s a common thing for me, where you have an initial idea that you really love, and that initial idea might come to you in about five minutes, without intention, but after that, you’ve got to use some intention to kind of turn it into a finished thing.”

“Lucifer on the Sofa”
“That was a song written for sure during lockdown. I wrote a bunch of different verses. There was a bridge to it that eventually got dropped, about Mike Pence at the Pearly Gates. I’m not sure where that came from or where it was going, but then there was the line about Lucifer on the sofa, which I wasn’t really sure where it came from either—it just felt really right. After the song was fully written and I’d really had a chance to get away from it for a second, I figured out what I think it means: That Lucifer on the sofa, it’s the worst that you can be, that you can face in times of stress. It’s a part of yourself you have to deal with. It’s a representation of bitterness or loneliness, and it’s that thing that can keep you on the couch and maybe doing nothing for a week, self-indulging. So, this song, to me, is about the battle between yourself and that character you can become. That conflict, in this case, is played out through a long night in the troubles, downtown Austin, all alone.”