Photo by Autumn de Wilde

Britt Daniel sings like a man terminally congested—someone with a ball of fog in his lungs—always teasing the mystery and allure of the half-hidden. On the phone from New York, though, he sounds more... regular. Over the course of a couple of hours, we delve deep into specific songs from Spoon’s discography, from the band's rough, punky early records through the ghostly studio puzzles of the 2000s, all the way up to this month’s They Want My Soul.

He had his picks, and, as someone who first heard Spoon as a suburban misfit in 1998, I had mine. A lot of our conversation pertained to the idea of accident—the filigree and details at the margins of Spoon songs that makes the band’s recordings unique. Many of the accidents I brought up turned out to not be accidents at all. The resulting chronological, track-by-track chat has been edited and condensed, as Spoon seems to like it it.

Soft Effects EP (1997)

Britt Daniel: I like Soft Effects quite a bit. The songs on it were originally supposed to be B-sides for singles for [Spoon’s 1996 debut album] Telephono. But after the [poor] reception of Telephono, it became clear there was no need for any further singles.

The rest of the songs on Sound Effects were recorded on a real tape machine, but “Mountain to Sound” was done on a four-track cassette—we were pretty tripped out on Guided By Voices at that moment. And when I came in that day, we had never played the song together—[drummer] Jim [Eno] didn't really know it when we hit record. That's why it sounds like a totally unhinged drum track. It was kind of magic. After we recorded the music, I thought, “Clearly, this is the best thing we've ever done.”

At this point we still thought keyboards were uncool, so for "I Could See the Dude" I put my guitar into a delay pedal that was then sped up, looped, and thrown through a wah pedal. It made the most glorious sound. And [Soft Effects producer and engineer John] Croslin said the line “as the crackers watch you take it off again” was real creepy, which made me proud.

When we made Telephono and Soft Effects, pre-production basically involved recording rehearsals on cassette. Later, it would get more intricate, and I would do various versions of songs, trying different approaches, different instruments. We were always looking for some kind of accidental thing to happen.

A Series of Sneaks (1998)

I don't like A Series of Sneaks as much as Soft Effects, but I think it's real good. It definitely had a style to it—it was really dry. We fought with [co-producer] John Croslin the whole time about keeping it totally, unnaturally dry, and not adding any reverb, and not having any room sounds. We were adamant about it not having any sweetness to it, maybe to a fault.

It was also the first time we figured out that the distorted electric guitar was something that seemed too used, too simple, too alt-rock, took up too much space. So a song like "The Minor Tough" had way more space than anything we'd ever done before.

My girlfriend at the time, Eleanor [Friedberger], didn't like A Series of Sneaks much, but I remember playing her ["Metal Detektor"] and her smiling. Finally there was one she liked.

When our manager heard the first rough mixes of Sneaks, he said, "Well, I'm not jumping out of my seat." And then, as we were going through the songs, he started reading the titles with disgust in his voice: [imitates bored, exasperated tone] "What is this, ‘30 Gallon Tank’? ‘June's Foreign Spell’?” He just hated it.

“30 Gallon Tank” was probably the weirdest tune we'd done to date at the time—and it might still be the weirdest. It's a song that never repeats a section, a landscape of different parts. We were intrigued by the wave of electronic music that was going on: Tricky, Aphex Twin, the first Daft Punk record. While I didn't like most of it, we thought the idea behind electronica was cool. So we made these fairly long, weird alternating drum loops for this song.

And the distortion sound in the end section—the wargh-gah-gah-gah thing—was an accident I did on a four-track. Later, we used that same sample on "I Turn My Camera On".

“The Agony of Laffitte” b/w “Laffitte Don't Fail Me Now” (1999)

Pitchfork: Given what happened with getting signed and then dropped from Elektra after A Series of Sneaks, what was your mood like at this time?

BD: I felt pretty beaten. We'd gone into our deal with Elektra looking out for the worst, trying to not be naïve, and doing things the right way so it wouldn't be a bad experience. But we were dropped less than four months after the record came out, and even in our worst fears we didn't think that was going to happen. But we also didn't think our A&R guy [Ron Laffitte] would completely fuck off.

He was the guy that sold us on that situation after I told him our concerns about major labels. He heard those concerns and then was a totally different guy once we signed the deal. I didn't hear from him anymore. He really fucked us over. Somehow we managed to survive and, in the end, I'm happy with where we're at. But back then I did not have any inkling that there would be any kind of success lurking for this band. It felt like it was all over.

Pitchfork: The lyric goes, “All I ever asked of you is a copy of Garage Days and to tell me the truth”—a reference to a Metallica EP of hardcore and early metal covers from 1987. Did you at least get a copy of Garage Days?

BD: I do have a copy of Garage Days, but I certainly didn’t get it from Laffitte.

Girls Can Tell (2001)

I remember seeing an old picture of my dad going to work in a dress shirt and tie—it was a look that I didn't see too much anymore. For “The Fitted Shirt”, I must have asked someone to bring in a harpsichord because of how into the Kinks I was in that moment. I found this website right when online sales of music were starting—maybe it was called CD Universe—but there was a flaw in their system, so as long as I entered a different address every time, I could order a free CD. So I ordered, at various addresses, the entire Kinks catalog. If it wasn't for that website, Girls Can Tell might have had a different attitude and sound.

Pitchfork: I find that one line in "Anything You Want"—“You know you’re the one, and that hasn’t changed since you were 19 and still in school, waiting on a light on the corner by Sound Exchange”—so moving. Did it actually happen?

BD: Yeah, it was a song about Eleanor [Friedberger]. It was a big-picture song, and at the end it zooms way into this specific moment. I could definitely see her standing on that corner.

Pitchfork: Part of the power of that line comes from the way the syllables get crammed in there at the end. It's like you have to rush the words out.

BD: And that's what's great about it, right? It originally wasn't like that. It was just regular syllables at the end, and the lyric was, "This is a song called fuck or fight, it's the same thing every night," but Jim suggested it didn't fit the mood. So I came up with that other idea, and [then-bassist] Josh [Zarbo] told me it ruined the song. But I thought it really made everything personal and unexpected. When we recorded, [co-producer] Mike [McCarthy] had me fade off the mic at the end of the line. It's totally personal and real. It rings true.

Kill the Moonlight (2002)

Girls Can Tell was all about trying to replicate this '60s R&B/pop feel—about finding a piano and reverb and being able to use them for the first time. With Kill the Moonlight, I thought, “Let's try to make it a little weirder.” And since Girls Can Tell was the first record where things actually felt like they started working for us, we wanted to put out another one real fast. I thought the way to do that would be to go off by myself, somewhere where it wasn't too hot and maybe close to New York City. So I went to New London, Connecticut. I didn’t go out. I would go to the video store and rent a few movies or occasionally go down to the Chinese restaurant and get lo mein, but that was basically it.

“Small Stakes” and "The Way We Get By" came right at the same time. “Small Stakes” was influenced by "I Gotta Walk" by Julian Cope—it's got the same sort of weird chord progression and then, for part of the song, it goes up a whole step, hangs out there, and then goes back down to the original chord. And that's it. That's the song.

We recorded “Jonathon Fisk” live with all of us in the room with Mike [McCarthy], who was making us do it again and again and again. We were all for it, but it just went on and on—just when you thought he couldn’t ask for another one, he would. And it's on tape, so we're recording the tracks over and over, and we don't have anything saved. We're re-recording over all the other tapes. And, finally, Jim and I got really angry and it started to affect our playing. When we started that one take that ended up being it, you can hear Mike say, "I like it!" at the beginning.

The first time I sang the chorus to “The Way We Get By”, it was just off-the-cuff, but I knew it was good. From that, I turned it into a glorified, fucked-up-relationship song about a scrappy couple getting high in the backseat, making love with the [Iggy Pop] song “Some Weird Sin”, seeking out people that don't speak very much. We believe in the sum of ourselves.

We played that song on a couple of shows, it was the first time we got on TV. Girls Can Tell was like the windup and then once Kill the Moonlight came out, everything sort of took off.

Next: Britt Daniel breaks down tracks from Gimme Fiction, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Transference, and They Want My Soul