Spoon Revisit Their Drafts a Decade Later

For many of us, few bands from the last 30 years have assembled a more consistent catalog than Spoon. The Austin heroes, who first broke ground with Telephono in 1996, have doubled down on their virtuosity time and time again, dropping the nocturnal, noisy Gimme Fiction and the confident, hooky Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga back to back in the mid-2000s, only to make Transference in 2010 and, after watching it hit the Top 5 on the Billboard 200, completely retool their sound three years later. In 2014, Spoon re-emerged with They Want My Soul, a psychedelic, back-to-basics comeback (of sorts) that saw Britt Daniel, Jim Eno, Rob Pope, Alex Fischel and Eric Harvey clawing at all-time status. If you loved Spoon for their ability to wed experimentalism with pop textures and voluminous rock theatrics, then They Want My Soul was ceremoniously the real deal for you then—and it likely remains as such.

Upon the recent 10th anniversary of They Want My Soul, I had never realized how narrow my bubble of Spoon fandom was. Granted, I’d never really engaged with anyone else about the band’s catalog, nor had I ever caught wind of any online opinion about them. They existed, to me, in the same quadrant of my brain as the National, Interpol and the Hold Steady—groups that put out solid record after solid record and never kick up too much of a fuss outside of their longtime demographic. But the They Want My Soul anniversary stirred up some passion among my music critic mutuals last week, many of whom arrived on Twitter to heap praise onto Spoon’s eighth studio album. Ever since I heard Hot Thoughts in my college dorm room in 2017, I was hooked. Folks I’ve come to consider peers and even friends were just as hooked, too. I never knew. Now, I can never go back.

I saw a few accounts claiming that it was high-time we embraced the truth: They Want My Soul is the best Spoon album. For years, I’d long considered myself to be among the select few Spoon homers who hold They Want My Soul higher than Gimme Fiction or Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. It felt good to be vindicated so long after thinking “Rent I Pay” was, once upon a time, one of the best rock ‘n’ roll songs I’d discovered myself. The record has been quintessential since the moment it dropped, as tracks like “Do You” and “Inside Out” have been staples in Spoon’s setlists for a decade now. I’ve always likened it, spiritually, to R.E.M.’s Life’s Rich Pageant—an album not nearly as iconic as its predecessors but, whether you like it or not, just as (or far more) triumphant, sublime and enjoyable. And with Daniel and Eno at the helm, both minds throwing punches at the stratosphere, the band became whip-smart anchors of a still-fresh rock momentum, sinking hooks deep into you and then dug them out with grooves that gyrated like a drill bit twisting into plywood. Every time a new Spoon record drops, an outlet labels it a “return to form.” They Want My Soul exists as an argument that Spoon never left their form to begin with.

Spoon are currently on tour, skating around North America and playing up the buzz of They Want My Soul’s first double-digit birthday and their razor-sharp 2022 LP Lucifer on the Sofa. Before their first gig at Belly Up in Solana Beach, they went back into the rehearsal space and learned how to play “They Want My Soul” and the demo version of “Do You.” On the anniversary date, Spoon dropped a “Deluxe More Soul Edition” of the record, packing the project with 11 souvenirs from 10 years ago, including demos of tracks when they went by different titles and special mixes of “Inside Out” and “Let Me Be Mine.” Daniel spent a lot of time with They Want My Soul earlier in the year, finding rarities and putting a ridiculous amount of time into mixing them. “I thought that it would, maybe, take a couple of days to put together all of the bonus tracks,” he laughs. “It ended up being like, I don’t know, a month or two. I’m very familiar with the record again.

Reissues fit with demos, remixes and alt-takes is fairly fertile ground these days—turning a single LP into a double-LP and pressing more wax and charging $40 or more per copy is an integral part of the music industry’s current financial infrastructure. But Spoon’s approach here is not some thin attempt at making a quick buck. For Daniel, he holds a deep affection for demos and listening to them as a way of deepening an artist’s lore and process. “When I have a record that I have grown attached to—a record that holds a place in my mind and I know that record inside and out—to hear how those songs started is a thrill for me,” he explains. “The Cure did that with all of their reissues, you can hear all of Robert Smith’s demos. As a song nerd, it’s exciting to hear the way that things progress.” It helps that They Want My Soul was a heavily demoed album—and a very produced one at that. “With a lot of these songs, I would make a demo, get it to a place I liked and then get bored with it and try another demo,” Daniel continues. “I tried the same song in a different way. We did that a lot, and there’s documentation of all that.”

You can imagine that there might be some degree of hesitancy in sharing your rough drafts with not just your fanbase, but the entire world. But Daniel didn’t have any apprehension toward the process at all, knowing when to cut a below-average demo versus when to put a gem on the final tracklist. “There were a couple—maybe four or five—demos that I found that weren’t quite as good, and we left those off,” he says. “There’s another version of ‘Rent I Pay’; there’s another version of ‘Inside Out’; there’s a couple other versions of ‘Rainy Taxi.’ We put the best ones on, and I got no problem sharing those.” There were no songs from the They Want My Soul era that went unused then and were repurposed later on Hot Thoughts or Lucifer on the Sofa. But Daniel did write “New York Kiss” when Spoon was making Gimme Fiction in 2004, but he and Eno couldn’t come to an agreement on how to present it.

The story around They Want My Soul is well-documented—that Daniel and Eno reconvened in 2013 and, after Daniel had made music as Divine Fits with Dan Boeckner and Sam Brown, recalibrated Spoon’s sound. The band spent time at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles with Joe Chiccarelli (Manchester Orchestra, The Shins) before tracking some stuff at Public Hi-Fi in Austin, Tarbox Road in Cassadaga and the Catacomb in Portland with Mercury Rev bassist David Fridmann, who’d worked with everyone from the Flaming Lips to MGMT to Sparklehorse. I can only imagine being in the studio during those sessions; it must’ve been like a renaissance painting. In terms of what song(s) set the tone for the recording of They Want My Soul, Daniel isn’t so sure they had an explicit starting point that galvanized anything. “The best songs weren’t written until the very end of the project,” he says. “‘Rent I Pay’ and ‘Inside Out’ were pretty late.” He pauses. “‘Do You’ was one of the oldest ones that we tried, when we all got back together and Alex came and rehearsed with us for the first time. We were finally a five-piece.”

On the new edition of They Want My Soul, Spoon pair home demos and band demos together, articulating the record’s progression through various intervals of involvement—a choice Daniel sums up as him “pick[ing] the one that I thought was more interesting.” You can hear him tap his foot like a metronome on the stripped-back, one-man rendition of “Rent I Pay,” only to tap into the metallic, droning unpolish of “Knock Knock Knock.” The only band demos available are of “Do You,” “Knock Knock Knock” and “Outlier,” the latter two of which exist in the middle of the original tracklist and are, to put it bluntly, the epicenter of They Want My Soul’s greatness—a middle-point cross-faded into itself. “Outlier” was always a demo, according to Daniel, and one of the few songs in Spoon’s catalog that started as an instrumental track that Harvey and Eno wrote. “They got together, came up with this track and gave it to me,” he says. “They gave me four of them, and the other ones were pretty good, but I heard [‘Outlier’] and, immediately, I knew I could write something on top of it. That’s a good way to work, and I would love it if that happened all the time—where people just hand me this track and all I’ve got to do is sing on top of it.”

During the demoing process of They Want My Soul, Daniel found himself working on songs so much that he would copiously rewrite most of the verses. You can hear the metamorphosis on the record, as “One More Shot” is just a different version of “Rainy Taxi”—a version that Daniel calls “the Neil Diamond version.” There were a handful of iterations of “Rainy Taxi,” actually, including a gloomy, Black Sabbath-inspired metal version, a ‘60s beat version and the demo that wound up on the deluxe, which features almost entirely different lyrics but shares the same chords with the track that came out 10 years ago. “It’s interesting to hear a detour that we went down, that we never really let see its conclusion,” Daniel says. “‘The Way Love Comes’ is the earliest version of ‘Do You,’ and the original idea behind that song was just to have a song called ‘The Way Love Comes.’ I think it’s a good version, but it was a thing where I got a little bored with it and wanted to keep developing it—long before I came up with that falsetto part that really tied things together.”

After originating as “The Way Love Comes,” “Do You” went through several other variations. The band demo on the deluxe-edition employs a “Dead End Street” by the Kinks beat, which Chiccarelli said would be a hit. “And I said, ‘Well, we’ve done that so many times. We did that on “The Way We Get By” and we did that on “Don’t Make Me a Target.” Let’s try it this other way,’” Daniel says. “The deal we had was, if the way you hear it on the album hadn’t worked, then we were going to go back to this ‘Dead End Street’ version. But I’m glad to say that Joe decided that the new version worked better.”

Rewriting lyrics was a pretty new exercise for Daniel in 2013, but demoing is as elemental to Spoon as anything else. And demoing has always been Daniel’s preferred mode for songwriting. “I’m putting it together as I’m writing the song,” he says, “writing the lyrics as I’m making the demo.” Having such a relationship with the material you’re constantly workshopping and editing is why many of us regard Spoon as one of rock music’s most reliable and hard-working groups—and maybe one of the pickiest. When the band got back together to start making They Want My Soul in the summer of 2013, Daniel wasn’t sure they were going to come out of the sessions with an album. “I felt like I just didn’t have the songs,” he says. “I felt like it just wasn’t coming together. I was really stressed that I wasn’t going to be able to pull it all together, at least not in any kind of timely fashion. And that just made me work harder, and that’s why you get so many of these demos.”

They Want My Soul is the reward Spoon earned for themselves after outmuscling burnout. Daniel put together Divine Fits soon after Transference came out and made A Thing Called Divine Fits and then, rather quickly, jumped back into making the eighth Spoon record. “I felt like I was just depleted,” he admits. “Then, feeling depleted, I threw myself into it. I did nothing other than demo and write songs for months. Creativity likes to find you working. I worked hard and then, suddenly, this great batch of songs came out.” That much is true, as They Want My Soul hit #4 on the Billboard 200, nabbed universal acclaim and landed on countless year-end lists.

Chiccarelli and Fridmann each produced one-half of the album, though it’s Fridmann whose style can be heard throughout—this maxed out, muscular sense of aesthetic and tone. They Want My Soul put Spoon on the verge of stadium power and, with Fridmann in the wings, they were ripe for something that epic and vaulting. At the beginning of the recording process, Spoon thought Chiccarelli was going to produce the entire thing and that Fridmann was going to mix it. “We had this plan that we were going to do half of it, mix it and then do another half of it and mix it,” Daniel says. “Once we mixed the first half with Dave, his schedule cleared up and, at the same time, Joe’s schedule was more difficult. So we changed gears.”

Daniel is honest about the sessions with Chiccarelli, calling them “good, but sometimes difficult.” “One of Joe’s strengths is that he is really good at getting with the band, getting everybody together, playing the song and then overtly, consciously talking about how to make some peaks in the song or how to change the form around, shaping the actual form of the song,” he continues. “I love working with a producer like that, somebody from the outside who can say ‘Yeah, think about it this way.’ Dave is much more like, ‘Okay, what’s the song? Okay, that’s the song. Let’s get started.’ Then, we get started and then he fucks it up.” Fridmann’s impact on Spoon’s music was simple: He took the skeletons of the songs and broke all the bones.

The “Inside Out” demo is, as Daniel calls it, “a little piano ballad” that balloons into a five-minute soundscape on the final tracklist. Before working with Fridmann, he brought the song to Eno and Fischel and got their takes on how to make it more interesting. “The first idea I had was to do it like Dr. Dre, which was only because I’d been listening to a lot of Dr. Dre right then,” Daniel says. “And by ‘do it like Dr. Dre,’ what I meant was to use a programmed, hip-hop kind of beat. And it worked well, because the tempo of that song is about 90 BPM—a lot of hip-hop songs are like that. It lent itself to it, and we played it in that style and the song became radically different.” After Fridmann entered the picture, “Inside Out” convinced Spoon to leave a lot of space in it—to make it verse, chorus, verse, chorus, space. “At one point I thought, ‘Well, okay, we might just edit that down and bring it back to a three-minute song,” Daniel laughs. “But this one was so good, it just made sense to leave it long.”

The keyboard and piano performances on the final cut of They Want My Soul and its demos were mostly supplied by Fischel, who’d just joined Spoon the summer they began working on the record. His addition proved crucial, and the songs grew into something spectacular with him involved—multi-dimensional maps of backwards keyboards and British Invasion-style harmonies hardened by drowning guitar fuzz. “We wouldn’t have been able to do a song like ‘Inside Out’ without Alex,” Daniel declares, “because, before Alex was in the band, I was playing most of the piano and keyboard parts—at least 90% of them. My abilities were very limited. I could play ‘The Way We Get By,’ but so can Pete Buttigieg. Anybody can play that song, it’s very rudimentary. When Alex was there, suddenly we had this whole other palette of instruments and abilities. ‘Inside Out,’ it’s one of my favorite songs we’ve ever done. Without Alex, it just wouldn’t be the same.”

Songs like “Outlier” and “Inside Out” became landing points for Hot Thoughts three years later. Spoon wanted to take those templates of very produced, very Fischel-heavy-on-keyboard tracks and make an entire record around them—staying true to the course they’d mapped out on Kill the Moonlight and Girls Can Tell, but altering the formula just enough to make it feel like a unique, worthwhile turn. Then, on Lucifer on the Sofa, Spoon went in a totally different direction by capturing the effect of a band all playing together in one room. That kind of sound does exist on They Want My Soul, as “Rent I Pay” was a live recording, but Daniel and co. just weren’t all that keen on documenting some kind of atmosphere akin to a stage presence 10 years ago.

There’s a version of “Inside Out” labeled “Reduction Mix,” but it’s not a remix. “It’s a whole other recording,” Daniel says. “At the time we recorded it, the record had come out and Alex and I were doing a lot of sessions. He and I had this version of ‘Inside Out’ that was very similar to the demo, but he played it with a lot more flair. We thought we should document that.” Daniel and Fischel recorded the misnomer at Eno’s studio and sent it to Fridmann to mix, and Fridmann is who coined the name “Reduction Mix.” “Let Me Be Mine” comes with a “Night Version Dub,” a demo of the song’s original form—Daniel messing around with electronics at home—from 2011. “I started with a beat very similar to ‘Nightclubbing’ by Iggy Pop, and I plugged the synthesizer into an amp that distorted it in a really nice way and held down really long notes,” Daniel adds. “It sounds glorious, and I wrote the words on top of that. Later on, I got bored of it. That’s when I grabbed an acoustic guitar and started playing that melody but much more upbeat and sprightly. That was the version I thought we should do as a band.”

Iggy Pop and Dr. Dre weren’t the only access points for They Want My Soul’s blueprints. Daniel heard “Any Colour You Like” from The Dark Side of the Moon and noticed a beat that he’d try to mimic when writing “Knock Knock Knock.” “I thought, ‘Wow, I bet Jim would love playing this song. That’s right up his alley,’” he says. “‘I’ll just take a beat like that and write a song around it. Jim will love that.’ And we did, and you hear him playing it on this demo. But, for some reason, when we went and started the song with Fridmann, instead of Jim playing it sweet, we programmed beats. I don’t remember how we came to that decision, but that’s not even Jim playing it on the record.” Before sitting down and researching all of the vault stuff from 2013, Daniel had completely forgotten about the “Any Colour You Like” connection. The “Knock Knock Knock” band demo is the only “draft” that is actually shorter than its final shape on They Want My Soul, as the band shaved an entire minute off of it by the time it got in Fridmann’s hands.

On August 5th, the anniversary of They Want My Soul, I tell Daniel that I consider it to be the definitive Spoon album, and that the internet had been corroborating my theory all morning. He hadn’t seen the buzz yet, as it was still morning for him in California. There might not be a consensus as to whether or not it is their greatest, but few records in the last decade have captured a band’s juxtaposition of remaining consistent while rarely hesitating to break their own boundaries quite like this one. If Daniel had to make an argument for why They Want My Soul is where Spoon became Spoon, he chalks it up to the album having some of the band’s best, stickiest and most direct songs they’ve ever done. “It’s got songs that we want to keep in the setlist forever, ever since it came out,” he says. “Those are all hits, and we just keep playing them. We’ve always played ‘Knock Knock Knock,’ ‘Do You,’ “Rainy Taxi,’ ‘Rent I Pay.’ I’m not sure if we have another album that’s like that, where there’s that many songs that just stay.”

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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.