Moving escalators and sidewalks will probably never be as poignant as they are in the minimalist and evocative blue-lit music video for Spoon’s "I Ain't the One”. The seventh track from the consistently solid Texas quartet's sonically inventive ninth album Hot Thoughts (2017) sees frontman Britt Daniel in a more morose mood. London-based artists/ filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard aptly situate him behind a grate of shadows as his vocals foreground the track, narrating his regretful transition into lonesomeness: ‘I ain't the one/ So now I'm leaving you all behind me’.
In the band’s Rolling Stone feature earlier this year, Daniel revealed that the song was inspired by country legend Johnny Cash. Relying primarily on an acoustic guitar, he attempted to create a "mythic outsider, tough-guy kind of song”. The track’s sparse synths (and the outbreak of drums and guitars) nevertheless situate Daniel’s melancholy in a minimalist rock sonic palette, instead of emulating Cash’s Southern musical influences. The soulfulness is certainly there, however, as is the relatively stoic display of sorrow in the face of personal adversity: ‘When the world comes crashing, crumbling on me/ When the day comes knocking, knocking on me/ I say, I ain't the one’.
The song previously served as the soundtrack for an emotionally-charged montage in the 11th episode of season 7 of Shameless last year.
