Believing Is Art

I’ve been listening to Spoon since 2006, and somehow it took me until this year to fully fall in love with “Believing Is Art.”

I always liked it, but now I think it might be one of my favorite songs on Girls Can Tell.

The whole thing is so restrained and cool, and then the chorus opens up and the guitars just tear through it.

Britt Daniel later said the song is about how “believing in yourself is sometimes so hard it can be an art,” and that makes the whole track hit even harder in the context of where Spoon were at the time.

Elektra had dropped the band only four months after releasing A Series of Sneaks. Britt later remembered thinking, “We very likely would be breaking up.” He was broke, working temp jobs in New York and substitute teaching when he could.

He had finished an early version of Girls Can Tell in May 1999 and would leave his temp job during lunch to call his manager and lawyer from the pay phones at the Times Square Marriott. Week after week, the answer was the same: nobody wanted the record.

Britt called it one of the lowest points in the band’s history and later described Girls Can Tell as their most emotionally difficult and perhaps most vulnerable album.

“Believing Is Art” wasn’t even on that first version. It came later, alongside “Everything Hits at Once” and “10:20 AM,” when Britt and producer Mike McCarthy returned to Austin and began rebuilding the album in Jim Eno’s garage studio. Britt and McCarthy worked there during the day; Jim, who still had his semiconductor job, came home at night to record his drum parts and give his input.

What really changed the song for me was learning drums. I’ve been stuck in my own loops, playing the same patterns over and over, and then I started trying to play this song. Something clicked.

Jim’s drumming controls the tension of the entire track. It’s such an unconventional beat that, frankly, was inaccessible to me for a long time. You don’t fully understand how much work that groove is doing until you try to sit inside it.

The restraint is what makes the chorus explode. Jim holds the song in place so tightly that when those fuzz guitars arrive, they feel enormous.

I think that’s why I’m rediscovering so many Spoon songs through the lens of the drums. Jim Eno is one of those drummers who can completely change your understanding of a song once you start paying attention to what he isn’t doing.

When Girls Can Tell finally came out, Jim remembered people beginning to show up after years of tiny crowds. The audiences grew larger and had an energy the band had never experienced before. “It felt like a victory,” he said.

That energy is all over “Believing Is Art” to me now. The final push before victory, engulfed in uncertainty, when there is no evidence that things will work out and you choose to keep going anyway.

It sounds like belief under pressure.

“Believing Is Art” used to be a very good track on a great record. Now it feels like one of the keys to understanding why Girls Can Tell was the album where Spoon became Spoon.

Seriously, go blast it.