By Joey Odorisio
Spoon (photo: Oliver Halfin)
For over two decades, Britt Daniel and his band Spoon have been releasing critically acclaimed records and steadily building a fan base to the point that the Austin, TX band has become one of the true veteran mainstays of the indie rock world. Pulling from an impeccable catalog full of beloved tunes, Spoon has released Everything Hits at Once: The Best of Spoon, collecting most of their best-known songs.
Spoon spent most of the summer on the “Night Running” tour, opening up for Beck and Cage the Elephant on the co-headlining powerhouse trek. Before the tour’s stop in Camden, NJ, Daniel sat down to chat with FMQB’s Joey Odorisio about best-of sets, their surprising ties to Presidential candidates and more.
FMQB: What can you tell us about the new single “No Bullets Spent?”
Britt Daniel: “No Bullets Spent” was a song I wrote last summer in New York City. I was there for most of the summer once we got off tour and I just went immediately back to writing some songs and that was the first one I got. It was based on an old instrumental track called “Dracula’s Cigarette,” [which] was on this weird record called Get Nice. I always loved that track so much and had an idea that I was gonna turn it into a song with words. That was the original idea: I’ll just take that instrumental track, write words on top of it and we’ll be done.
I did that, but then I got tired of that groove so we ended up changing it all up. You wouldn’t probably recognize it as being “Dracula’s Cigarette,” but that was the original way it started.
FMQB: In the lyrics, you sing, “you picture yourself,” which is a lyric in other Spoon songs, like “The Mystery Zone.” Is that intentional?
Britt: “Picture yourself” – it was on “The Mystery Zone,” it was on “The Underdog”…it was in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” I like that line, it’s a good starter. You just say “picture yourself” and things start happening.
FMQB: How has the “Night Running” tour with Beck and Cage the Elephant gone?
Britt: It’s been a blast, honestly. The tour has its challenges for us because it’s gonna be still sunlight out when we play. That’s not quite as fun as playing in the dark. You’re a step down in vibe and the lights help with everything. But despite all that, most of the shows have been kind of fantastic and we’re having a really good time.
All the bands are buddies and I know all the crew by now and there’s a hundred crew people on this tour, it’s insane how big it is. It’s a traveling city.
FMQB: Do you go back with Beck a ways?
Britt: Actually Matt [Shultz] from Cage invited me to do this tour. He asked me to do it and then said, “Oh and by the way, Beck is going to be on the tour.” And I was like, “Oh! Why didn’t you say so?”
FMQB: In every interview you’ve done for Everything Hits at Once, you’ve had to defend making a best-of record in the age of streaming. I know you’ve always namechecked The Cure’s Standing on a Beach as your entry point into that band and a reason for releasing one.
Britt: There’s two parts to it. There’s the marketing part. That’s kind of what a greatest hits record is about. It’s more of a marketing experience than a normal record and it worked perfectly for me, because I had never heard a note of The Cure. I bought that record because I knew The Cure was this New Wave band that people love, bought it, became obsessed and from there bought all their record.
And it actually works as an artistic record in and of itself. I still go and throw on that compilation Standing on a Beach because it’s a great collection of those songs and sometimes that’s just what I want to hear.
FMQB: Which of your peers have done a best-of record? Beck doesn’t even have one!
Britt: Yeah, I guess he doesn’t…
FMQB’s Joey Odorisio with Britt Daniel of Spoon
FMQB: It depends on the rights, because he’s been on different labels. You had to deal with that for Everything Hits at Once…your songs were from three different labels, right?
Yeah, we had to navigate that and it was not easy. All the Elektra stuff we got back and we gave to Merge, so it was Merge, Matador and Loma Vista we had to negotiate with.
FMQB: That makes it much easier than if you’re negotiating with an Interscope and their catalogs, like Beck would.
Britt:Yeah, in the end we own all those records, we just licensed them out. And a lot of those bands that put out records on major labels, they do not own those records, you know, they never will.
FMQB: Other than The Cure and obviously Spoon, who else can you think of that have good, entry-point greatest hits album out there?
Britt: Elvis Costello’s Girls Girls Girls is another one, it’s not in print and hasn’t been for a while, but that’s how I found out about him.
FMQB: Is it weird doing promo for a best-of collection? Do you ask yourself, “Didn’t I already answer every question about “I Turn My Camera On” 14 years ago?”
Britt: A little bit. Honestly, it’s been pretty surprising how much interest there is in it, because we’ve done reissues before and they just kind of came and went. But then we did this greatest hits and it’s been about as much press and radio and stuff to do as there has been with a regular record, so it’s cool…I was surprised.
FMQB: I’m guessing it’s also a lot easier to tour on a best-of, since obviously you don’t have to learn a new record to go out on the road.
Britt: Yeah, a lot of the songs that are on the best-of are songs that have never left our setlist. We never got tired of playing “I Turn My Camera On” or “The Underdog” or “Inside Out.”
FMQB: But you do have a new member in the lineup (bassist Ben Trokan replaced Rob Pope earlier this year).Has that been tricky with a different member in the band who just jumped on board?
Britt: The announcement would make you think that Rob quit right before the tour, but he let us know last Halloween and I spent a couple months trying to talk him out of it. In the end, we sat down in Williamsburg and he said, “You know, I’ve got a three-year-old and a five-year-old and I can’t spend as much time away from them anymore.”
FMQB: “Don’t You Evah” is on Everything Hits at Once and it has such a great backstory to it that many people may not be aware of…
Britt: Yeah, there was a band called The Natural History that we toured with a few times and became buddies with them. Once one of those tours was over, I went back to Austin to write an album and Max and Julian [from the Natural History] went to New York to write an album. We started trading tapes of songs that we were working on. And one of the ones Max sent me was “Don’t You Evah.” I loved it, I put down some ideas for it, some percussion ideas, maybe some guitar. I sent it back and said, “This one’s great! They’re all great but this is my favorite one.”
Two years later, I was starting to come up with songs for another album and “Don’t You Evah” had still never come out. I said to the rest of Spoon, “I know this hit that nobody knows and we can maybe snag it.” And that’s what we did.
Eventually that song did pretty well and we did a “Don’t You Evah” EP and we put out their version on that EP as well as some remixes.
FMQB: The other thing that’s unique about this collection is that they’re “hits” that come from all over, from movies or commercials, and not just specifically radio hits, like you’d see 20 years ago.
Britt: For us, it’s a different level of goalposts, you know? When that “Don’t You Evah” EP came out, so few people were buying singles that it was I think the #1 single the week it came out, in terms of sales. It terms of airplay, it was zero…nobody was playing it. That was the kind of weird following that we had, that people who listen to this band wanted to buy it and they were excited about that.
FMQB: How surreal is it that your band is intertwined with two different Presidential candidates at the same time right now?
Britt:It’s pretty surreal. Well the Pete Buttegieg one is particularly surreal, because I didn’t have any contact with him or that he knew us or anything and he doesn’t have a Texas connection. I started getting these emails one day saying, “I’m sure you’ve seen this but there’s a video of Pete Buttegieg playing your song [“The Way We Get By”] before he goes onstage one night.” And it kind of blew my mind.
FMQB: He’s become friendly with Ben Folds and played on stage with him too. And then Beto O’Rourke obviously does have a Texas connection.
Britt: We kind of came to him… I had been hearing about Beto for a while and I have buddies in certain Texas politics who hip me to certain things going on and I get pretty interested in that stuff. So I kind of knew about this up-and-comer and that he was coming to Austin to do a fundraiser when he was running for Senate. We offered to play it and that’s where I first met him.
FMQB: What’s next for Spoon when you’re done this tour?
Britt: We started a record in February and we were working on it right before we went on tour. So we’re going to go back to that. I’ve got a few more songs to write. [Drummer] Jim [Eno] keeps telling me we’re about a third of the way through it, so we’ll see.
FMQB: Did going back through your entire catalog for this project influence the new material in any way?
Britt: It reminded me that there’s certainly some great drum sounds that I hadn’t thought about in a while, that made me think we could try doing drums like this again. When we recorded everything on tape, everything was a bit more stripped down. And as probably happens with every band, you move into digital and there’s limitless tracks and limitless possibilities and things get more complicated. I do like that more simplistic sound, it’s something to shoot for now and then.
