Street Scene initially caught my interest because I recognized a few of the bands on the lineup. As I started to look more closely at who was playing, I realized I had heard of all the bands before - either briefly in passing or I had heard some of their music but never paid much mind to it. Now was the time, I decided, to start expanding my musical scope and learning more about what these smaller indie bands had to offer.

I figured I’d start off with Spoon. My roommates’ recent infatuation with all of this band’s songs was starting to wear off on me and soon I found myself singing along to her blaring computer speakers as I got ready for work each morning and clicking on her MySpace page just so I could listen to the catchy tune by them she had posted as her default song. Huh, I thought, I really kind of like these guys. If you haven’t heard much of them, that’s because they are fairly underground, but their music definitely deserves a listen. Check them out and check this out, too:

Coming together in 1992 in Austin Texas, Britt Daniel and Jim Eno formed a band that sounded like a crossbreed between the Pixies and Sonic Youth and eventually in 1996, produced their first album, “Telephono,” which introduced music fans to an emerging band that would one day be just as popular as their inspiration.

Spoon, and indie-punk music hybrid band that has produced six albums, the most recent of which - “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” - came out in 2005 and features the hit song “The Ghost of You Lingers.” With several other EPs and short CDs, the group has released many songs that have received critical acclaim and much radio play, including “I Summon You,” “Don’t you Evah,” “Paper Tiger” and “The Way We Get By.” In regards to writing their eclectic, silly and sometimes even serious and romantic lyrics, singer/songwriter Britt Daniels said he lets the process evolve for him and doesn’t try to organize it any special way, according to an interview with PopMatters.com.

“I just usually try to do it on feel. Often when I try to plug in verse-bridge-chorus, and try to write it in order like that, or specifically say, ‘OK, now it’s time for the chorus,’ it just very rarely works for me,” Daniels said. “The songs just don’t feel as good, and we usually end up discarding them. Most of the songs just start being these sorts of freeform moments of trying to come up with melodies and just sorta feelin’ it. And then later comes the analytical part of ‘we could turn this into that.’”

“I still think that there’s something really special about putting on one album at a time,” Daniels said. “I understand that it happens and I know it’s gonna happen and I know why it happens, but it’s a little bit sad to me that people don’t listen to music in the environment that they did where they had to put on a record and listen on two sides. You put it on, and it was such a hassle to go in and put that record on that you’re not gonna go flippin’ around a whole lot. You’re listening to it the way the band intended for it to happen. Some people don’t listen to music the same way, but I think that the people that are real music fans will listen to records that way, ’cause they want to know what the band intended. And they’ll keep listening to them like that. The people that only listen to one song from a record and flip around that much, if that’s the only way they listen to music, they’re probably the kind of people that like music as something to drive to, you know?”

For more information about Spoon, visit the band’s official Web site.