It seems excessive to produce two music videos for a single, but when the song is as excellent as "Inside Out" and you're a 'Critical Darling' to the extent that Austin-based indie rock band Spoon is, it all makes sense. Metacritic has lauded Spoon as the 'Artist of the Decade' for creating so many "consistently great" albums over the years; their Metacritic scores for their past 6 albums read like the report card of an overachieving Harvard-bound high school valedictorian.
"Inside Out" is the second single from They Want My Soul (2014), which is, as The Guardian's Alexis Petridis notes, an intricately meticulous production: "Meticulous is an adjective that seems to attach itself a great deal to Spoon, and it applies here. They Want My Soul is a beautifully produced album. It takes a standard rock-band lineup and adds a sense of otherness by lightly dusting every instrument with effects, and arrives packed with beautiful, subtle detailing".
The 'sense of otherness' is apparent in the lyricism of the song, which might be referencing Albert Einstein's attempt to explain relativity to a layman: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity":
'Time's gone inside outTime gets distorted whenThere's intense gravity[...]There's intense gravity in youYeah, there's intense gravity in youI'm just your satelliteI'm just your satellite'
The addressed love interest's magnetic pull is powerful to earn comparions to gravity and the ability to distort time. This metaphor is juxtaposed against Britt Daniel's disavowal of his small-town Christian indoctrination: 'I don't got time for holy rollers/ Though they may wash my feet/ And I won't be their soldier'. The lyrics point towards agnosticism or atheism, but the instrumentals on the track are ethereal and heavenly. Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal notes that "Inside Out" "finds submissive contentment amidst a drift that hints at eternity ...the track willingly enters that ether as koi-pond synths twinkle in the distance, its tranquility tempered by the fact that Spoon have never made a song quite this pretty before".
The first music video (directed by LeBlanc + Cudmore) involves frontman Britt Daniel appearing nondescriptly in various domestic and intimate scenes around a small town (Austin, Texas?). Their second music video is more of a psychedelic visual feast, utilizing surrealist photographs by Todd Baxter and a trippy melting effect. It's ironic that the song has a line that goes 'We got nothing else to give', when Spoon delivers an aesthetic experience that works seamlessly on so many levels.
