Twin Cities fans know pretty well what Spoon's Britt Daniel was up to during his band's three-year hiatus. His side project Divine Fits scored heavy airplay on 89.3 the Current and earned particular local favor thanks to his lyric, "I wish that I was in Minneapolis."
Spoon's other co-founder, drummer Jim Eno, stayed even more musically active — including several projects with Minnesota ties.
"I pretty much worked nonstop, and maybe the best part was it was with a really wide variety of music," said Eno, whose band returns to Minneapolis on Sunday to headline Rock the Garden — a preview gig for Spoon's first album in four years.
Eno's choppy and chugging rhythms have been a driving part of Spoon's sound since the mid-1990s, when the band could barely fill the aptly named Hole in the Wall in its native Austin, Texas.
In recent years, he has engineered, produced or mixed dozens of records at his Public Hi-Fi Studio, a list that includes such indie darlings as !!! and Telekinesis as well as Austinites Alejandro Escovedo, Heartless Bastards and Black Joe Lewis.
Minnesota-bred singer Har Mar Superstar turned to Eno to produce his transformative 2013 album "Bye Bye 17." Said Eno, "I was real excited when he told me he wanted it to be a '60s-style soul record. I was super-impressed with his songwriting and the way he worked through the arrangements."
Eno also mixed Poliça's debut record, "Give You the Ghost," and has done mixing and session work with Gayngs and Marijuana Deathsquads. "Ryan Olson is a music genius," he said of the Minneapolis sonic guru behind all three groups.
Of course, the record Eno was most excited to talk about by phone from Austin last week is Spoon's new one. Titled "They Want My Soul," the band's eighth full-length won't arrive until Aug. 5, but several new songs have popped up in shows over the past month, including the snarling and steadily building first single, "Rent I Pay."
