Prior to SummerStage kicking off its 40th anniversary season, founder Joe Killian sat down with Billboard at Rumsey Playfield last month to talk about the best of what the New York City summer concert series has to offer. “There were some days here in July and August where it’s in the 90s, you’ve got 5,000 to 6,000 people sweating and drinking beer, and you smell both beer and sweat,” Killian said. “There’s nothing like that.”
While it wasn’t quite that balmy on Wednesday (July 8) night when Spoon and opening acts Bodega and Ratboys played SummerStage 2026, the sensory experience was much the way Killian described it: a gorgeous communal night for music and revelry inside the lush, skyscraper-lined environs of Central Park.
The occasional gray head and hipsters with children old enough to sing along to songs like “The Underdog” and “I Turn My Camera On” was a gentle reminder that SummerStage wasn’t the only entity celebrating an anniversary this year: it’s been 30 since the Austin band’s debut album, Telephono, and 25 years since their creative breakthrough, the low-key masterpiece Girls Can Tell.
“I love a show in New York in the summertime,” frontman Britt Daniel told the rapt crowd. After promising some “new old songs” the band hadn’t played in a while, Daniel added, “We learned some new new songs, too. We’ve been working on a record.”
Their last album, Lucifer on the Sofa, went top 40 on the Billboard 200 in 2022 and produced their third Adult Alternative Airplay Chart topper, “The Hardest Cut” (which was the third song in their SummerStage setlist). Considering the band struggled to get heard in the ‘90s and existed mostly as critics’ darling for the first half of the ‘00s (2005’s Gimme Fiction was their first LP to even hit the Billboard 200), Spoon’s curving road to success has been well earned. And that slow and steady rise to niche fame has made Spoon one hell of a live band – vibrating with nervous tension one moment (“Take a Walk”), crackling and commanding the next (“My Mathematical Mind”).
Daniel introduced “Out Go the Lights,” a reflective track from 2010’s Transference, as “one of my favorite Spoon songs we never got to play before this tour.” But the real surprise was the band welcoming “a dear friend of ours, straight from the Hamptons” to the Rumsey Playfield stage: Hamilton Leithauser. The Walkmen frontman joined them for not one but two songs: a loose version of Spoon’s “Do You” and a freewheeling take on a truly old-school rock classic, Larry Williams’ “Bony Maronie” from 1957. While they’re far from overly serious, Spoon has a decidedly art-rock bend – they can jam, but they’re not really known for shaking out sillies on stage, so it was a treat to watch them cut loose with Leithauser.
After Leithauser left the stage, Spoon trotted out another cover, one far more in keeping with their sonic world – David Bowie’s “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” the final track on his swan song Blackstar (which was recorded in Manhattan). Like Bowie, Spoon is proving to be a rock act that is capable of maturing without softening, aging without slowing down.
Prior to Spoon, opening act Ratboys delivered a delightfully easygoing set, dedicating “Go Outside” to Central Park’s famous pond turtles; and before them, Bodega offered up their own surprise guest – Britt Daniel, who joined them to sing Spoon’s “The Fitted Shirt.”
Mix in some gentle dancing and the smell of sweat and beer, and you have another lovely SummerStage night befitting a 40th anniversary.
