About Me

I’m a drummer and a writer in Chicago.

Some people call me Spoon.

I love to record and tour.

And I love writing on the internet.

Spencer performs on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

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Thanks for being here.

Spoon

Some of my close friends and collaborators

Special Projects, Hare-Brained Schemes, and Failed (?) Experiments

Observations books. In 2018, I started a daily blog about interesting things and people I encountered out in the world. I published at least one item on it every day until 2023, when I stopped liking the rigid format. Over the course of the blog I published two paper chapbooks compiling my favorite posts.

Fjord Audio. Also in 2018, I started an audio products company that made cotton-covered microphone cables (in collaboration with Conway Electric), and ran a successful Kickstarter campaign. The promo video featured my grandpa Peter. I delivered all the purchased cables, but didn’t have the will to market it much beyond that (selling fancy cables felt like selling sugar water—just not something anyone really needs), so I shut it down. But there’s still at least one audio electronics project I’d love to work on.

Avrom Farm Party. Since 2018, I’ve co-produced a festival with my friend and longtime bandmate Hayden Holbert along with other Chicago artists on Hayden’s family’s farm in Green Lake, Wisconsin. Hayden’s grandpa, Lester Schwartz, was a celebrated painter and sculptor. Many of his works still adorn the farm.

Buck Tees. In high school, I started a graphic tee company with a classmate. We sold about a hundred shirts to friends and people online, and then lost steam.

Chicago Service Relief. During lockdown, I was overwhelmed by the amount of fundraisers for bars and restaurants and their staff. I thought we might be less overwhelmed, and more likely to actually donate, if there were a directory of fundraisers. I compiled Chicago Service Relief and open-sourced the code. A few people in other cities adapted it for their own communities.

Freelance web design. Very occasionally, once every blue moon or whatever’s less frequent than that, I’ve done web design and development for friends’ nonprofits, their record labels, or (once upon a time) the Pixel Union Tumblr theme market.

Spoon’s General Store. In 2022 I ran an experiment in online… retailing? Some remnants of my great-grandfather’s, great-uncles’, and grandfather’s DNA are in me, calling me to try to curate and sell cool things. (They ran a department store in downtown Chicago in the mid-twentieth century.) In this case, “cool things” was a line of custom hats, t-shirts, photographic prints, and honey made by Chicago bees, centered on the theme “Plant Something.” It was a fun creative project, but I lacked the will and skill to market it effectively enough, so I shut it down. The coolest part was that 500 people signed up for the store’s mailing list when I teased it on Instagram.

Macatron. When I was a tiny child I tried to distribute Mac “apps” under the name Macatron. They weren’t really apps; they were packaged scripts that would do little things like turn off translucency for the menubar or whatever else was available in the OS.

A timeline, why not?

You made it all the way down here. Whoa!

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