For his feelgood third solo album We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized, Pavement co-founder Scott Kannberg – best known to the musical world as Spiral Stairs – concocted some of the most fun and accessible music of his storied career by expanding his musical repertoire, in the process embracing some sounds and artists which for some reason or other slipped through the cracks as he took alternative rock to the world during his action-packed youth.
“To me We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized feels like the records I’ve been listening to and the records I’ve been digging and aspire to sound like,” Spiral offers. “In my early-twenties I felt like I knew everything – I always knew about new bands before everyone else – but that kind of closed off a lot of bands that I didn’t give much credence to, and now I’m a bit older and it’s, like, ‘Wow, how did I miss that?’
“I’m talking things like the first two Nick Lowe records – I’m fucking obsessed by that shit, they’re beautiful, beautiful songs on those records. Then he led me to this guy Jim Ford who’s like a weird country-soul singer, he’s so good. And I’ve really got into Van Morrison way deeper than I’ve ever got into Van Morrison before.
“YouTube is the greatest thing ever because you can find everything that you want – I can read about a Van Morrison bootleg from 1982 or something that’s supposed to be the greatest thing ever and you can find it on YouTube! So I got into that 1973 album Veedon Fleece, and then of course Roxy Music stuff and Brian Ferry.
“But I think the influences on this are definitely Nick Lowe and Van Morrison – I even tried to sing like Van Morrison on a lot of the songs, like how he repeats himself a lot. Those are the kind of bands I would never have liked in 1984… or 1994… or 2004 really.”
Naturally these new flavours and inclinations are filtered through the core Spiral Stairs aesthetic that served him so well over five Pavement albums, two long-players with his subsequent outfit Preston School Of Industry and eventually throughout his slowly-blossoming solo canon. We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized may mark a musical evolution of sorts but there’s no denying its source.
Kannberg’s solo career proper began with the first Spiral Stairs album The Real Feel back in 2009, and after taking a lengthy break following Pavement’s triumphant global reunion tour in 2010 he returned in 2017 with his acclaimed sophomore solo effort Doris & The Daggers.
That album scored Kannberg some of the most fawning reviews of his career – UK music bible Mojo espousing that “it’s been a long journey, but Spiral Stairs has finally found his voice”, while Q Magazine called Doris & The Daggers “his most enjoyable music in two decades”, amongst many similarly positive critiques – and it’s from those same sessions that the seeds of We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized were sown.
