 McMahan reflected on the album 's success : " We worked really hard on Spiderland . I mean , I definitely felt much more personal about it . I thought it represented us as people , musically , a lot more than Tweez did . That 's about it . It seemed like when we were around , and actively playing and stuff , that people 's responses to us were fairly ambivalent . I thought it was funny when the press picked up on it . For an independent release , it had a strange sort of audience and kept selling three or four years after we recorded it ; it still sells more copies than when it first came out . " Touch and Go founder Corey Rusk said that Spiderland is " like an icon now . But when it came out , nobody cared ! The band had broken up by the time the album came out , and it really didn 't sell particularly well or get written about all that much in the year it was released . But it was a revolutionary , groundbreaking record , and it 's one of the few instances where people catch up to it later on . " 
