GIMME FACTS: AN ORAL HISTORY OF SPOON’S GIMME FICTION by Sean O'Neal

At the dawn of 2003, Spoon found itself dealing with what had once seemed mockingly just out of reach: success. Only a few years before, the band had gone from Austin idols to indie darlings to major-label casualty, all in near-record time. But after being lifted up, knocked around, and all but marked for death, Spoon entered the new millennium not just surviving, but thriving, releasing two back-to-back albums, 2001’s Girls Can Tell and 2002’s Kill The Moonlight, that were the best—and best-received—of its career. No longer the underdog (though not yet “The Underdog”), Spoon found itself with its largest audience to date. Naturally, expectations ran high for the band's next album.

Daniel began the next year by digging—first along the Pacific Ocean, then near the seawall in his birthplace of Galveston—for what would come next.

Britt Daniel: A guy named David Klowden who I didn’t know but was just a real kind, cool guy wrote a letter to me and said “If you ever want to go on another writing stint you could use my beach house.” So in early ’03, I drove to Ocean Beach in San Diego and started writing songs for the next album in a tiny house that overlooked the ocean. I was there for a couple of weeks, and I remember working a lot but feeling not much amazing stuff was coming out. There'd been so many cool ideas on Kill The Moonlight that just kind of happened accidentally, and I didn’t know how to make that happen again. Like where I did the beatboxing on “Stay Don’t Go” and made that into a loop. I was on the hunt for more lucky accidents like that. I was coming up with some ideas, but I was having trouble coming up with ones that I thought were unique.

When we were pulling stuff together for this reissue, I went back through all my tapes, and there were 25 four-track cassettes just for Gimme Fiction, all full of home demos or attempts at songwriting. I wasn't expecting there to be that many.

“Monsieur Valentine” might have been the first song that I thought was really good—this one 4-track demo that had fake strings on it, and was made with a drum machine, and where I finally got the words to the song right. I remember sending it to our manager at the time Tony Margherita, and him really liking it. The last songs that came were “I Turn My Camera On,” and I think “Beast and Dragon” was the very last one.

Jim Eno: A lot of my feelings about the record have to do with how the demos came to me. Britt would give me a demo like “Delicate Place,” and it would really blow my mind. And then he would give me the next demo, and it would be like, wow, he topped it.

Britt Daniel: I was writing a lot of songs on piano for the first time. The first idea for “Sister Jack” was written on a dinky keyboard in San Diego. “Mathematical Mind,” some of the B-sides like “Carryout Kids” were written on piano. Girls Can Tell, that was the first record we decided it was okay to really use piano. Before that for some reason we were stuck on this notion that piano was a little uncool – a very indie rock way of thinking. Over time, I started being able to play it a little bit, and then it got to where I could actually write a song on piano. Still very rudimentary, but when you don’t know how to play an instrument and you’re writing a song, you go to all kinds of different chords that you wouldn’t if you knew what you were doing. Certainly different stuff than I would have on guitar. It was all based on what I could actually play and if it was a chord progression that stayed away from the black keys, that made it a little bit easier.

With piano becoming more and more of a voice in the band—and some songs inevitably requiring the black keys—it had become crucial to have one on stage. After several years of “keyboardist” being a revolving-door position within the band, the time seemed right to settle the matter on a more permanent basis. Daniel found the perfect candidate right next door—or technically, two doors over.

Eric Harvey: I had lived in Texas for a little while out in Wimberley, and I was coming back to Austin. I called this acquaintance of mine and I was like, “I need a place to live.” This was before Craigslist. My friend was like, “There’s this apartment complex that I’ve been to some parties at, and there’s usually a place there.” So I called these people up, and the office manager is like, [in a thick Southern accent], “Oh yeah, it’s real chill here. We got this DJ livin’ here, we got this Rasta guy. The guy from Spoon lives here. And you can buy cigarettes and beer and rollin’ papers right next door.” I just rented that apartment sight unseen. When I got there, the door’s not even locked, there was still food in the fridge from the last person who’d lived there, there was something that may have been blood on the walls. This was a place where when people moved out, they would just fucking trash the place.

Britt Daniel: Eric lived two doors down from me, but I didn’t know he was a musician or what he was doing. We had this seriously insane, very troubled man living between the two of us, and that was the only thing we ever communicated about.

Eric Harvey: Next door to me was this dude named Duffy. He was this really dark, introverted middle-aged dude, and he would skulk around the apartment complex and bum cigarettes off people. He never really gave anybody much trouble—except for me and Britt, because we had the apartments that were directly adjoining his. He’d knock on your door at 3 or 4 in the morning and ask if you smelled gas fumes. And you’d be like, “No, I don’t smell anything.” “Are you sure? Are you sure you’re not pouring gas into my apartment?” Or, “Are you shining a bright light on me through the wall?” Shit like that. It’s the kind of thing that freaks you the fuck out in the middle of the night. At some point, we figured out that he was doing this to both of us.

I really didn’t see Britt all that much. You know, he was probably just in his room writing fucking Kill The Moonlight. He always looked like he was in a hurry to get the fuck out of there.

Britt Daniel: I remember I went over to his apartment to microwave some popcorn once.

Eric Harvey: I don’t really remember having a microwave, so I don’t know if that actually happened. I don’t know where he comes up with this shit. I feel like I would have remembered if the singer from Spoon needed to come into my apartment so he could use my microwave. But I got introduced to Josh Zarbo somewhere along the way and we were hanging out for a while. At some point, Josh asked me if I played keys. I was like, “Mostly I play guitar now, but I did play piano when I was a kid.” He mentioned that Spoon may be looking for somebody, but at that point I was like, “You know, they probably want a professional. They probably want someone who knows what the fuck they are doing.” So I didn’t really follow up too hard.

Then there was this art opening at Gallery Lombardi, around the corner from the old Electric Lounge, and it was this rare occasion where Britt and Josh were hanging out socially. They had a tour coming up in June, and they kind of brought it up, like, “Yeah, we’re looking for a keyboard player. What do you think?” I was lucky that, at that point, the band was not going to lengths to really audition people. They were content to find somebody locally they could train to do what they needed.

Josh Zarbo: Eric, you know, maybe he’s not the most proficient keyboard player. But he really felt like more of a band member than anybody else who had ever played with us before.

Eric Harvey: I would go see them at Emo’s, just like I would go see everybody. I remember watching them at Emo’s one time, and Britt was just playing hollow-body guitar on everything, and me going, “Those guys could use a second guitar on some of these.” At that point, the keyboardist never did that stuff. The keyboardist’s role seemed like a pretty understated part of the band. Also I remember I’d see Josh playing bass one time, and then I’d see Roman [Kuebler] playing the next time, and I’d ask myself, “Is that the same dude?” Or I’d see Sean [Kirkpatrick] on keys, and then I’d see Kevin [Lovejoy], and I’d be like, “Who the fuck are all of these people? Why are these people always different at these shows? I just saw this band a couple months ago. What the fuck?”

So when it sunk in that they were going to give me a shot, I went from feeling like, “Those guys could get somebody better” to feeling like, “Maybe I’m the right guy for the job.” I knew that some of the other people that had played in the band, like Lovejoy, he probably just had an eye on the next gig. I felt like, “Maybe I don’t have the pro gear and the pro attitude, but I think I can fit in with these dudes.”

The band had recently recruited Jeff Byrd, a Bay Area engineer who ran the boards on a brief tour with John Vanderslice in 2002. Spoon’s live audience had only continued to grow since then—and now it had even more expansive songs. Eventually, Spoon decided it should hire someone who could help it realize those songs on stage. Byrd join the Spoon camp later that year, bringing with him the spontaneity of live, manipulated effects. That crew soon embarked on a series of live shows where they got to know the new material (and each other).

Jeff Byrd: Between Kill The Moonlight and the Gimme Fiction tour, they started to get more depth of sound, more lush. Before it used to be, like, “keyboard left, keyboard right.” Gimme Fiction, I had six channels of keyboards. Then Britt got that Gibson 335. That was a big game-changer. His guitar tone completely went up a whole ’nother level. Prior to that, he had this Guild Starfire that he would have to tune after every song. Josh called it “Grandpa.”

Eric Harvey: We did this two-week tour and played that weird festival Wakarusa with Guided By Voices. I remember Britt and Jim hanging out with Robert Pollard—and for me, being real new to it, and being in some trailer and Bob Pollard walks in and just starts busting Britt’s balls… It was like, “All right, this is cool. I could do this for a living.” It was interesting joining a band that had this popularity, that had records, that had these tours booked.

You know, that first tour was in a 15-passenger van, and Britt was still keeping all his pedals in a fucking tote bag. All of the equipment was just kind of getting shredded. Spoon was still touring like some little punk band. It’s always taken Spoon a long time to get to the next level of where they should be doing shit. But I thought it was cool. I still got a little taste of the more DIY, earlier aspect of that crew when I joined.

Jeff Byrd: I had this delay pedal and a reverb pedal I chained together, and that was my effects for the show. I would do all that weird stuff with Britt’s voice, just psych it out and get kind of dubby with things. It started to create this element to the live show that wasn’t there before. That was when Britt started calling me “Hot Pockets.” He would yell it out on stage during the show, encouraging me to fuck with the sound.

Britt Daniel: Jeff got a Memory Man—or maybe two of ’em—and had them back at his desk. And while we were playing live, he could mess with those things, and get creative on the fly and do something different every night. I don’t know that we ever discussed it; it just sort of developed naturally. He did one thing one night where there was extra-long feedback that he sent into infinity. And then the next night, he’d do it a little different..

Jeff Byrd: I think it was Eric who brought this King Tubby compilation on tour, and Britt flipped out. I know that had an influence on him. It was funny, because I never could have predicted the effect that would have on me down the road, which was it gave me an identity in terms of my work. People knew me as the guy that does all the dubby Spoon stuff. Spoon would write in the liner notes, “Live Sound: Hot Pockets.” People would come to me and go, “Hey, are you Hot Pockets?” It was really surreal.

Eric Harvey: At that point, Ben [Dickey] was tour managing, and Ben and Britt roomed together, and then Jim and Josh roomed together. And it was traditional that the keyboard player would room with the sound guy—who at that point was Jeff Byrd. So I spent a lot of quality hotel time with Jeff Byrd. Needless to say, we are much better friends now that we don’t cohabitate. I was definitely embracing being in a rock band and everything that comes with that, and Jeff Byrd can be a little… judgmental about lifestyle. But also I have to say, I was slightly disrespectful of other people’s space and privacy.

Britt Daniel: We used to call it darkness. “Eric's gonna get up to some darkness tonight.”

Eric Harvey: Some bands, there’s at least a couple of people that seem like they’re constantly fucking up, and there’s a lot of drama. There was really none of that.

Britt Daniel: We drank coolers full of drinks every night, and we did our share of substances, but yeah, there was never a thing where somebody fell off a balcony or had accusations leveled against them, or whatever. We were walking a tightrope, but we walked it pretty well.

Eric Harvey: The one time I was two hours late for bus call in Portland, and I made us late for some border crossing that Jim was meeting his wife at…. I can’t believe I didn’t get fired for it. I would never fucking do that now. You know, sometimes you see bands—especially really young kids—and they’re just these slow-motion train wrecks going down the road. From the moment I joined Spoon, it was not that. I mean, they'd stay out drinking and have fun, but somehow be up and on time the next day.

That serious work ethic had long been shared by producer Mike McCarthy, whose guidance on Girls Can Tell and Kill The Moonlight had been instrumental. So when it came time to begin putting some of the new songs on record, naturally Daniel thought of returning to McCarthy. To his surprise, the suggestion was met with a cold response.

Britt Daniel: I remember getting an email from Mike's lawyer saying one word: “Pass.” [Laughs.] Just, “Pass.” That’s how we found out Mike was not gonna do it. It was a thing where months later once me and Mike actually got together, we ironed it out. But when we were going through lawyers, it felt real contentious. Later I remember going to Las Manitas with him and discussing what our differences were, and we both clearly wanted to make the record. But he passed at first, so we started working with John.

With McCarthy out—at least for the moment—the band reached out to recent tourmate John Vanderslice, a sought-after producer in his own right who’d overseen sessions for artists like The Magnetic Fields, The Mountain Goats, and Death Cab For Cutie from his San Francisco studio, Tiny Telephone. Vanderslice and Spoon shared an appreciation for the warmth and unpredictability of analog recording, so it seemed like a natural fit. Vanderslice and engineer Scott Solter came to Jim Eno’s Public Hi-Fi recording studio (then a retrofitted garage) in early 2004 to begin bringing some of Daniel’s demos to life.

John Vanderslice: I was in a band that was obsessed with Spoon back when they put out Telephono—when they were a micro-band. I would go see their shows and there would be like 15 people there. My band covered one of the tunes on Telephono, and then Soft Effects came out, and that record completely changed my life. I became friends with Jim and Britt from that point. Jim and I, as we got closer, we both decided that our real goal in life was to start recording studios. So he started Public Hi-Fi and I started Tiny Telephone the same month in 1997, I think—which is completely insane. And me being lured into working on that record was an extension of that, like being rewarded for early fandom.

Jim Eno: When I started getting the studio up and running in ’98, I turned to John. He taught me a lot. We would chat on the phone all the time about gear and what I should buy, so by Gimme Fiction I had some nice equipment. We had a good tape machine, a good console, a lot of good outboard compressors and mics. We could make really good-sounding records in a 20x20 room. I would be tracking drums in the same room as the console—which is not ideal. But we did have it down to a science.

John Vanderslice: I was in Austin with them for, I wanna say, nine days. We tracked a bunch of songs, did overdubs on some stuff. Of the ones we tracked from the ground up, we did “Monsieur Valentine,” “Was It You?” and I think we did two or three other songs. Usually bands have way too many ideas. But those guys are very, very smart, and they know exactly what they want.

Britt Daniel: I remember one thing we did was listen to a bunch of ’60s Bob Dylan records, and John pointed out how distorted the vocals were. They weren’t distorted like Nine Inch Nails kind of distortion, but they were super hot and just a little bit crispy. The level was hitting a little too hard, and it was a fantastic sound. We spent some time trying to replicate that.

John Vanderslice: Britt has always been one of my favorite guitar players, so to record him playing guitar was pretty amazing. And he has always been one of my favorite singers. These guys are really, really good and very, very confident in the studio. I’ve worked with a lot of bands that have, like, a career going, where you think they would just be cool as hell in the studio, and they’re just total fucking trainwrecks, man.

The more I make records, the more I respect bands who can actually hold it together and do good work. Spoon was very, very competent, and very graceful in the studio, and that’s just not as common as you would think it is. And I think that coolness and confidence is in the recordings.

Unfortunately, that handful of recordings was all Vanderslice would be able to complete, as his own album and touring demands soon took precedence. So Daniel returned to his original plan to work with Mike McCarthy again. Lawyers be damned, the two buried the hatchet over Mexican food and agreed on mutually acceptable terms. And in July of 2004, they returned to Public Hi-Fi to begin laying down the tracks that would become Gimme Fiction. Here, unlike in previous recording sessions, Spoon found it suddenly had the luxury of time (for better or worse). This allowed for more experimentation with different instruments—and whatever else happened to be lying around. Over the next several months, the album slowly began to take shape.

Britt Daniel: Even though we had done the two albums before at Jim’s, we had been pretty limited, because the gear was still coming together and because Mike was so busy with Trail Of Dead and a bunch of projects in Nashville. I think Kill The Moonlight was made in a matter of two or three weeks of actual work time. With Gimme Fiction, we had a little bit more of a budget to pay him. And once we got through our issues, he’d just finished a Trail Of Dead record, so we had plenty of time.

Mike McCarthy: My whole goal with Spoon, even from the very first time I worked with them, was for them to grow into making what I consider to be records that stand the test of time, that you’ll always want to go back and listen to. And that has to do with integrity and performance and songwriting. I always thought Britt had the voice and the words to be heard across the world. The music, let’s make sure it stands up to what I still consider the most important thing—his voice.

Britt Daniel: We had more of a budget than before but we still didn't have access to a grand piano, and “The Beast And Dragon Adored” needed one. So we did the thing I'd done a few years earlier for Girls Can Tell where I snuck into the piano lab at the University of Texas music building. They have all these soundproof rooms, maybe 50 of them, with pianos for music students to come and practice on, and nobody guarding them. So me and Mike took some mics and mic stands and snuck in.

“Beast And Dragon” was the last song written for the record, and from the very beginning of its existence, it sounded like an album opener to me. And then I thought, “OK if it's the first song, maybe what I should do lyrically is reference the other songs coming up. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

Mike McCarthy: The “Beast and Dragon Adored” lyrics are awesome.

Britt Daniel: The title came from this magazine I found at my grandmother's house. She was a painter and there was a piece in some nice 50s art magazine on Middle Ages French tapestries, which were all religious, and one of the tapestries was called “The Apocalypse: The Beast And Dragon Are Adored.” I heard a lot of talk about the apocalypse growing up, in church and at home, and I thought that title was something else – really creepy.

I love the intro to it. You can barely hear a little recording of Eleanor Friedberger singing a Fiery Furnaces song in that intro. She never noticed, so I doubt anyone else has. She’s singing, “The hardest thing I ever done,” which was a lyric in a song they did, “Rub Alcohol Blues.” I felt like, when I got to the end of this record, I did consider making it the hardest thing I'd ever done. And it was Eleanor and you know, I loved Eleanor. I ramped the master volume up at the end of the intro manually so it would feel even more huge when the band came in.

Mike McCarthy: We had fun doing the guitar solo stuff. That’s really tough to do, that abstract guitar playing. Britt and I would go back and forth and try solos, both of us, on those atonal guitar overdubs. I don’t know if he used anything I did. It was a strange chord progression to play over. You can’t do melodic or any kind of normal guitar soloing over it, so it dictated the odd character of it. I think it was the beginning of him finding his odd guitar style, where he’s doing weird, cool little noises that are kind of like solos. But they’re not Stevie Ray Vaughn solos. They’re Britt solos.

Britt Daniel: With “The Two Sides Of Monsieur Valentine,” originally it was, “Every morning, I pick up the cans,” ’cause I was drinking a lot. Every morning, I would be picking up all the beer cans around my apartment. Eventually I figured out I didn’t exactly want to write about that. It became this fuzzy story of a play and the characters in the play, and me trying to land a part in it. The play was called The Stranger Dance, and there was a character named Eddie. The words amused me.

Mike McCarthy: I had done some sessions in New York, and by accident I used these Neumann tube mics underneath the snare drum. As a kid, when I would go to recording sessions, if the drummer wanted a snare mic, all anybody would ever do is get a 57 or 421 or a cheap dynamic mic, and cram it up real close on the bottom of the snare. It just sounded like somebody snapping a rubber band.

But I was doing a session in The Magic Shop in New York, and they had a Neumann KM56 and I pulled it up and was like, “Oh my God, it’s the Beatles drum sound. It’s fuckin’ awesome.” It gave this overall tone to the entire drum set. You could hear all the vibrations of the drums jelling together, and that’s the missing link in recording drums. I recommended Jim buy this microphone, he bought it, so I used that. I had one I used clean, then I took the other one and distorted the crap out of it and ran it to its own track. And that’s how the “Two Sides” snare has that weird whip sound.

Britt Daniel: “I Turn My Camera On” was intended to be a dance song from the beginning but if it was about anything, it was about getting to a place where you're untouchable. About putting a camera in front of your face, so that you have this thing there, some distance… Emotional distance.

From the first demo of “Camera On,” I thought, “This is something else” The demo itself was just an acoustic guitar and a xylophone and my vocal, and I thought that was pretty special. And then once Jim came up with that beat, it was a beat I never would have predicted…. We’d never really done anything like it before. Once we got started with Mike we recorded that one very early on and I just felt like, “Wow, we have this in our back pocket. I know this is a hit.”

Mike McCarthy: It was tough, because it’s so sparse, and everything had to be really right on the money. That was the first time I suggested we use Pro Tools to get the drums tightened up and be drum-machine-y. They were all against it. But then one day, they called this Pro Tools guy, Jim Vollentine, and asked him to do it. They didn’t even ask me. [Laughs.] So I came back and all the drums were all tight and perfectly in time—like a drum machine.

Britt Daniel: I don't remember it like that, I thought we were getting the drums tightened up because that's how Mike suggested we do it.

When we were planning the record release to me the obvious first single was “I Turn My Camera On,” but I remember the label wanting to do “Sister Jack.” And I thought, maybe it’s a good pop song, but it doesn’t stand out. “Camera On” stood out.

Josh Zarbo: The one that sticks out the most in my mind, because it materialized within moments, was “My Mathematical Mind.” At the end of a band practice, Britt said something like, “Hey, I got this other song, what do you guys think about it?” And he had an electronic piano or some sort of keyboard sitting on the floor, and he started playing that piano part. Jim and I kind of looked at each other, and we just started playing something really close to what ended up being the arrangement. That was really exciting. I was kinda copying a Paul McCartney, Beatles-y type thing with all the slides and stuff, and Britt really liked that. He liked the little frills.

Britt Daniel: That one I wrote in Galveston. I didn’t think I was writing a song. It was just a weird little groove and even after I finished the demo I didn’t think there was any way it would be a live band song. It was just gonna be an out-there B-side or something, based on the demo that I made. But then the first time I brought it in and played it for Josh and Jim, Jim had this sort of John Bonham approach to it that I wasn't expecting, and it turned into this massive rock song. I was shocked.

Mike McCarthy: “My Mathematical Mind” was recorded out at Jack Rock’s studio. I’d been doing a lot of work out there with Fastball and Trail Of Dead. That song, they wanted to track together with Eric playing piano, Jim playing drums, Josh on bass, and Britt playing guitar. Basically the Spoon sound is Britt, with Jim drumming. The other guys, stylistically, they don’t play the way Britt would play or the way he writes. So in most of the songs, it’s important for Britt to play the parts, so that it has that style. But that song, they wanted to do it all together.

Britt Daniel: We did a shit-ton of takes, and the fact that all of us were playing at once was something Spoon hadn't done in a long time but on this one it made sense because we were doing it so well live.

Mike McCarthy: Jim’s studio was a small, one-room garage, and we needed a room where they would all be able to set up and a place that had a piano. Jack had a piano we could isolate, and Britt’s guitar was out in the guesthouse with a very high ceiling, so that’s that big, roomy sound on the guitar amp.

Eric Harvey: That was the first time I’d been in the studio with Mike, and I remember being a little shy. And the first thing Mike said to me after we’d been there half an hour was, “What’s with the attitude, man?” I was like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “What’s with your attitude?” Thinking back on it, I’m just like, “What an asshole thing to say!” You know, it might have occurred to him maybe I was just being a little quiet because I was nervous. But instead he has to call me out. Typical. That was a great first date with Mike McCarthy.

Mike McCarthy: [Laughs.] I was probably just teasing, trying to get him to loosen up. I didn't want him to be nervous. I wanted him to have fun and to do a good job. People can misinterpret anything they want, as far as what I say or do, but it’s all to get everybody in the right place to record.

Jim Eno: Mike is hard in the studio sometimes.

Mike McCarthy: They basically got “My Mathematical Mind” on the first take, but because they lacked confidence, we recorded it about 10 more times. But we still used the first take. I think just because we spent all that money going out there and all that time to set up. I was like, “We’ve already got this fucking song.” But they’re like, “Let’s play it again, let’s play it again, let’s play it again.” So we had a whole bunch of outtakes they wanted to use. Jim and Britt picked an outro they liked better from another take, and I spliced it onto the end of the first take, so it’s actually a combination.

Mike McCarthy: “The Delicate Place” is a kinda creepy, kinda bizarre tune. I don't really understand it.

Britt Daniel: That was one that we were playing live before we recorded it, and I remember us playing it at a rehearsal for Mike, and Mike saying that he didn’t really get it. That there was not much to it, that the way I was playing the guitar sounded like the Pixies to him.

Mike McCarthy: “Sister Jack” always reminded me of that Wilco kinda vibe. I don’t know. That song is okay. I don’t love that song.

Britt Daniel: It’s very straightforward. The piano demo has a lot more emotion. The album version ended up being almost power pop, which to me can be so boring, that it seemed like the instrumental break couldn't just be a guitar solo. So we made the solo on “Sister Jack” a sound collage, mostly a bunch of random hip-hop shout-outs, samples of them, all strung together and run through some kind of pedal. And the sound of a horse whinnying.

Mike McCarthy: In “Sister Jack,” there’s that whole solo break that we used a Juno or a Moog filter to run a bunch of silly samples through.

Britt Daniel: We recorded the sound of—do you know that Emergen-C stuff? And you pour water on it, and then it makes this bubbling sound? We recorded that, I don’t know, 20 times, trying to come up with some kind of sound that would be interesting enough to use. It never happened.

Mike McCarthy: It wasn’t my idea to record Emergen-C. It’s a pain in the ass. The level is so low, and it’s splattering water all over the place, which is the worst thing for a microphone. Cigarette smoke is better for a microphone than water.

Jim Eno: We recorded a version of “Sister Jack” with John McEntire in Chicago but for whatever reason we didn't use it. But one thing we got from it was, at the end, there's a time signature change where it’s in nine. It adds one beat. We were trying to figure out how to do this ending, so we threw all these different versions at him. And he just reaches over to the talkback, and he’s like “Dude, do it in nine.” We played that song on Letterman, and Paul Shaffer was very, very close to me—like 10 feet away—and as we did that part of the song his eyes got really big, like his mind was blown. And we did it a second time, and he just nods his head to me, like, That was cool.

Eric Harvey: I remember them going to Chicago to work with John McEntire, which I thought was kind of a strange pairing—and not only that, they were working on “Sister Jack.” Which, if you’re going to pick a song from that record to do with John McEntire, that’s probably not the one. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t use that version on the record.

Britt Daniel: Yeah, maybe we should have done a weirder one with him. But I sent him a big list of all the demos I’d put together, and I said, “We can work on whichever of these you want.” And that’s what he wanted to work on.

Josh Zarbo: “Sister Jack” has that lyric “I was in a drop-D metal band called Requiem.” Britt knew I was in a band called Requiem back in Virginia. He asked me if Requiem was a drop-D metal band and, I was like, “Fuck yeah they were.”

Britt Daniel: Josh brought a cassette of his old band to practice, and they were called Requiem—which, he wasn’t not proud of it, but he knew we'd think it was funny.

Jim Eno: Probably my favorite song on the record is “I Summon You.”

Britt Daniel: I’d read a book about Bob Dylan after Kill The Moonlight came out, and I got really into this attitude that it was all right to just go with whatever interesting language comes and then let the listener make something of it. “I Summon You'”s got some real emotional weight to it, but there’s a lot of playful visualizations.

The lyrics that I did come up with intentionally were real life. I had a girlfriend and we had fallen for each other really fast, but the whole time we were meeting each other, we knew she was moving away. So within a couple months of us meeting, she'd moved to Arkansas. “I summon you” was something I'd write to her. I missed her a lot.

Eric Harvey: On tour, Britt was doing “I Summon You” by himself, so I just heard him play that acoustic. And then I remember going into Jim’s studio one day when they were working on it, and I was just blown away. It’s still one of my favorite tunes.

Britt Daniel: It’s a good one. We play it at just about every show. It’s funny, I wrote the chords real fast one morning, and it was sort of one convoluted chord after another that didn’t have any pattern. Just a long string of non-repeating chords. I had to write them down so I could remember how they went. And then once I had the guitar recorded, I went and had lunch. Then I came back and sang on top of that and just got really lucky, the melody and the words came really fast. I remember that evening thinking I'd just written something that I could be playing the rest of my life.

Mike McCarthy: I like “I Summon You” quite a bit. That’s probably my favorite one. I asked Jim to play that drum part on there. With that one I was like, [singing], “You say you want a revolution…” The drumbeat that Ringo plays on there—“bum-bum-bum-chik, bum-bum-bum chik.” I said, “Hey, this isn’t that easy to do on the kick, but I think this beat might work.”

Jim Eno: From my standpoint my favorite recording was “The Infinite Pet.” I don’t think we’ve ever really played this live—maybe a couple times. I remember hearing the demo for it and not really knowing what I was gonna play, because it could just be a standard little shuffle-y thing, but I didn’t really want to approach it that way. So I asked the guys to sit outside for about 10 or 15 minutes, and I played along with the demo with headphones and came up with that beat. It was just one of those things I stumbled on, and 10 minutes later we were tracking it.

Mike McCarthy: I don’t like the songs on side two besides “I Summon You.” I think “The Infinite Pet” is crap.

Britt Daniel: I’m not a big fan of “Infinite Pet” but my mom likes that one.

Mike McCarthy: “Was It You?” is just meandering. They'd started it with some different people. It was okay. I did overdubs on it and mixed it again. It was kinda long and drawn-out. Not that interesting to me.

Britt Daniel: I'd written that song on an acoustic guitar in maybe 60 seconds, two or three years before. It was a bit throwaway, but then I made a drum machine demo of it when I was working up songs for Gimme Fiction that I loved. That one is probably the best example of a demo being better than the recording. There was something hypnotic about the Scott and John version, with those bell-like drums, that I did like. But when we started working with Mike, I said, “Mike, why don’t we re-record this like the demo?” But Mike said the demo was “too white.” That was an expression he used a lot. I think I know what he meant, but maybe the song needed to be white? [Laughs.] But it was a thing where it was going to take some time, and he wanted to just add to the John and Scott version, rather than work on a version like my demo.

Josh Zarbo: I love “Was It You?” Eddie [Robert]’s bass playing on the record is fantastic.

Britt Daniel: That’s one thing I really do like about this version. Eddie got that I was really into Prince, and he saw how this recording was a sort of long groove and very minimal like the 1999 album. And he said, “Well, what would Prince do? He’d probably put in this weird little perfect bass lick, and maybe just do it twice in the whole song.”

Josh Zarbo: “They Never Got You,” not to dismiss what Britt did, but it reminds me of John Lennon’s “Remember,” that song off the first Plastic Ono Band album, and I really love that about it.

Britt Daniel: It was definitely influenced by Lennon. The only really unique thing was that bass line.

I thought this was one of the more direct, less poetic ones. It was about feeling—as a lot of people do—when you grow up that you’re alone. There’s something that everybody else gets that you don’t get, and you feel left out. I went through a lot of that – feeling deep down like everything felt kind of wrong, and that I was dealing with a lot of people that just didn’t get where I was coming from. The chorus lyric came from an interview I read with Danzig, where he was talking about The Misfits. And he was talking about how those were some good records, but that those guys in the band, they just never got where he was coming from.

Mike McCarthy: I programmed those drums and basically got the drum sound right away, and then Britt had me change the bass drum mix like six times before he was happy with it. And it really wasn’t all that different. It was a drum machine.

Britt Daniel: I like the demo for “Merchants Of Soul,” but I think the recording is pretty good too. We used the Tosca strings for that and “Monsieur Valentine.” It was the first time we'd ever hired a string quartet and had it done professionally.

Mike McCarthy: “Merchants Of Soul” has a good drum part.

Britt Daniel: I managed to get Ralph Reed’s name into a song, that was the highlight for me. I was into this idea of Ralph Reed taking me on a journey to the danger side. It’s Ralph Reed’s night out.

Mike McCarthy: A lot of people have come up to me over the years and said that Gimme Fiction is the best-recorded, best-engineered record of all time. And I’m like, “What?” The whole thing is a weird record to me, really. On a technical level, it’s a little all over the place. But it was the bridge that led to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, which is more of a finely crafted record. I think Gimme Fiction was a first attempt at trying to do that. It’s a totally different world than Kill The Moonlight, which is very stripped down. It’s still back in what I consider Britt’s comfort zone—very simple, very minimal parts, and not very big sounds. Gimme Fiction is an attempt at making more of a big, full, band sound. It's the intro to the evolution of them becoming a band, because Britt now includes the other guys in the process a lot more, and this was the beginning of that.

With that bigger sound came the need for extraordinary artwork—a cover image that would not only capture the feel of the new music, but the attention of fickle crowds after Spoon’s three years away. (After all, for some bands, three years is an entire life cycle.) For this part of the process, Daniel sought out Sean McCabe, the Brooklyn-based illustrator who’d made an auspicious debut with Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights, and together they began sifting through ideas.

Britt Daniel: For a while the title of the record was The Beast And Dragon Are Adored and that would be the first song, and in that first song, I would talk about all the other songs that were coming up—or at least reference them. But eventually I realized I didn’t love that as an album title so I went looking for another one.

I knew I wanted to use the word “gimme” in the title. And I just kept thinking for days, “Gimme what?” Gimme Fiction felt good and it ended up being a great title for the artwork. It’s still my favorite album cover.

Sean McCabe: He gave me a list of potential titles, and one of them was The Beast And Dragon, Adored. He sent me a couple of images, one of which was an old medieval tapestry of a dragon or some kind of mythical beast. You know, he’d send me stuff throughout the process, but none of it made any kind of logical sense. It would just be more like, “There’s something about it that I like,” and it started a visual dialogue.

He gave me really, really rough demos, and it was weird, because there was nothing in the music that gave me an idea for a visual, necessarily. And he kept stressing that, for him at least, what was important was that the cover just looked cool. It didn’t have to literally tie into a title or a song or anything specific. That actually was pretty freeing for me, to just be able to go off on whatever feeling or vibes I got out of the music. I found that the music, even in the raw stages of what I heard, there was a certain sinister feeling. What’s interesting is that They Want My Soul—which I love the design of—has kind of a running theme of the occult and supernatural. And I started in that vein with Gimme Fiction.

It wasn’t until he said, “I think the title is going to be Gimme Fiction” that I actually came up with the concept. I just thought it would be funny to put a well-known literary character like Little Red Riding Hood on the cover of a rock album, but not have it look like that. I liked the very sort of tough, demonstrative kind of title: Gimme Fiction. To me, it smacked of, “Show me something really real, or give me something that’s not real.” I tried to create a visual story around that.

I picked Little Red Riding Hood because it’s such a powerful myth, and it has all these psychosexual overtones. And the themes I was getting out of the music were about a relationship going bad, in these sort of sinister songs.

Britt Daniel: At first I wasn't sure about the idea of Little Red Riding Hood being on the cover, but I loved what he came up with. He made a few versions where you could see it was a girl in a red hood with a picnic basket and she was carrying a wolf’s mask. But this one, where you couldn't really tell what’s going on, was elegant and amazing.

Sean McCabe: I told him what I wanted to do, and I didn’t really go into too much detail, because I just didn’t think he would buy it. I just figured I had to mock it up and show him, and that’s what I ended up doing. I used this Polaroid camera that I had, an old SX-70, and I took the photo, scanned it in, and blew it up. It almost looked like an old fresco or medieval painting. We both liked that, and it led to the whole package design.

Britt Daniel: To me, the cover art made the album larger-than-life. When I think about that album, I think about the cover – it's iconic.

Sean McCabe: I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I kind of wish he had gone with The Beast And Dragon, Adored. It would have been really interesting—something monstrous but mysterious at the same time. But it’s definitely my favorite album cover that I’ve done. It was a struggle to get it to work, and he was…. I wouldn’t say “difficult,” but he’s very focused. He’s a pretty hip guy, and he’s got a really good design aesthetic and sense. He’s the kind of person who, when he sees it, he knows it. So we went down a lot of different pathways. He came up here while we were working on it, and he’d hang out in my apartment—sit, read, whatever—and I’d work, and we’d try different ideas. I hadn’t collaborated on such an intense level with an artist before.

I’ve had a lot of people write me about this cover, and I’ve had a lot of people that, when they find out that I did it, they’re like, “Oh, I really love that.” It’s a special album just for me, because it was a point in time when they were starting to get really, really big as a band, and everything was kind of aligning right. And I feel really blessed to have been a part of that.

Josh Zarbo: The photo on the inside of the record is from a friend of mine, Marika Ripke. We were playing a show in Philadelphia at, like, a frat lodge—an old frat lodge—and Jim Romeo was Spoon’s booking agent then. He had been with them from the very beginning. And he booked us into this place, and we were all just grumbling like, “What the fuck, Romeo?” I think it was a Friday night, too, and we were like, “We can’t do better than this on a Friday night in Philadelphia?” Anyway, there was a balcony above the stage, and I gave her my camera and she took some pictures. And that show actually turned out amazing. It was a makeshift PA, one of those great shows where there was no huge spectacle, no huge light show, but it’s just loud, hot, and sweaty.

Soon enough, playing the sort of shows immortalized on Gimme Fiction’s inside cover would prove impossible. The success of Kill The Moonlight had certainly given everyone high hopes for its successor—not least Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance at Merge Records, which was already on a roll with albums by Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel, and The Magnetic Fields. But when Gimme Fiction was finally released on May 10, 2005, neither they nor anyone else could have guessed it would debut as Spoon’s highest-charting album so far, or that it would get the widespread exposure it did.

Laura Ballance: I’ve always been a sucker for Spoon. I’ve always thought they write really catchy, fun, songs. But I don’t think that when I first heard Gimme Fiction, I had any idea it would become the relative commercial success that it did. I’m not good at predicting those things. I don’t think anybody is, really.

Mac McCaughan: The cool thing about Spoon is that the growth is organic—as it should be, because then you’re really building a fanbase, as opposed to having a bunch of people that really love one of your songs. We had expectations for this because “The Way We Get By” had gotten a lot of play, and [Kill The Moonlight] had certainly grown their audience from Girls Can Tell. But as much as you think a record is going to be bigger than the one before, you never know. In this case, it was. And the reception was deserved by what a solid album it is.

Laura Ballance: I think that what made that record go was the timing—being a great record, but coinciding with it being the first record we put out by them where we had a digital presence in place. We did our deal with iTunes in 2003, and the world had sort of turned digital. A lot more people were able to access the band because of the internet, and partly for that reason—only partly—lots of people got into it. It was the beginning of the era where people started watching videos on YouTube, too.

Mac McCaughan: “Camera On” was picked for a single because it is such a striking song and such an interesting turn of direction for them, and because it was a single they made a video—which, I don’t remember loving that video. The “Sister Jack” video is hilarious.

Laura Ballance: The “Sister Jack” video is awesome, and funny, and makes you feel like you know the band a little bit. The “Camera On” video was kind of stiff and uncomfortable. I don’t think anybody would make that video now. Or maybe they would if they were a metal band and didn’t care about women being used as objects? Probably Spoon didn’t mean it that way. But a woman in high heels in a bathing suit, crawling across a lawn…? [Laughs.]

Britt Daniel: I never understood the concept, but I liked that I didn’t understand the concept, and I trusted Autumn [deWilde] and just kind of went with it. I mean, a woman made the video. Autumn was leaning on the aesthetic of Guy Bourdin, which was a very sexualized, glamorous, girls in leotards kind of thing. It's not my absolute favorite video but I don’t find it offensive.

Mike McCarthy: I never thought “I Turn My Camera On” would be a radio hit. I would’ve never picked that in a million years. Maybe in retrospect it makes sense, but it was so simple and repetitive. I thought it was the lower common denominator of writing for Britt.

Britt Daniel: I remember playing it for Gerard [Cosloy at Matador], and he had a response to that song that I had never seen him have before, where he was like, “Okay, I think we can really do something with this.” And he was right.

Mac McCaughan: I remember being at the beach that summer, a couple months after the record had come out, and there was this big black SUV that was blasting “I Summon You.” In the past, you wouldn’t have thought, “Yeah, there’s probably Spoon fans in that car.” I remember thinking, “Spoon’s audience is getting bigger.” I felt like this was a turning point.

Jeff Byrd: There was a big leap in the size of venues between where we ended and where we began with Gimme Fiction. Some bands with particular instruments, when they get into bigger spaces, it just gets really messy. But their sound and their songs adapted to larger environments. Even with the success of Kill The Moonlight, nobody knew what was going to happen next. The fact that they made another record that was just as successful—if not more so—was very exciting. And it wasn’t one of those things where everybody just wants to hear Kill The Moonlight. The crowds were really receptive to the new songs.

Spoon was also trying to make headway in Europe, where the band toured with Interpol during the lead-up to Gimme Fiction’s release—a trip that also represented a homecoming to the band’s original label, Matador Records. After releasing Telephono and Soft Effects, Matador’s Gerard Cosloy and Chris Lombardi had reluctantly parted ways with Spoon before its brief, ill-fated sojourn to Elektra. Now Matador welcomed the band back to the fold by taking on its European distribution, where it set about reintroducing Spoon’s music to a continent with notoriously mercurial tastes.

Chris Lombardi: I remember feeling that [Gimme Fiction] sounded huge—and that I felt a little bit competitive about it because we had an Interpol record coming out. And I remember closely following the sales between the two records as they cruised along. You know, there’s a couple of songs on there that are some of the most important songs to me ever, personally. “My Mathematical Mind” was a super important song for me. The drive and intensity and the release of it all. I think it’s a monumental record, you know? A really important album for that time. It’s one of my favorite records, and clearly it was a lot of people’s favorite record. It went on to sell like gangbusters. I especially remember it doing well in Germany, where I also remember hanging out with Interpol and Spoon. We had a very interesting and expensive night.

Josh Zarbo: We played with Interpol in Paris, and Billy Corgan and Robert Smith from The Cure were there—and you know, Britt is the biggest Cure fan. There’s a picture of him standing like five feet away from Robert Smith, who’s talking to Britt's friend, and Britt is just standing there grinning his ass off.

Britt Daniel: It was like interacting with a superhero or Ziggy Stardust or something, ‘cause, you know, he’s in character all the time.

Josh Zarbo: Those kinds of experiences, where Billy Corgan and Robert Smith are going to show up to your show in Paris tonight, it was like goddamn, what is going on?

Britt Daniel: Once this record came out I felt like we were in the place we'd always wanted to be in. People gave a shit. My good fortune to be able to do this for a living wasn't lost on me.

Eric Harvey: The records I work on always become a soundtrack for that period in my life, and I was going through kind of a weird break-up at the time, and my living situation was kind of fucked up. There was a tumultuous period right around the time this record was getting finished. A song like “I Summon You” became this really emotional thing for me. I have this emotional connection to this record. When I hear it, it takes me back to that little chapter of my Austin existence and I remember all the excitement of joining the band. I have a lot of positive feelings wrapped up in this record.

Jim Eno: I feel like this is album is No. 2 for me. I like They Want My Soul the best now—maybe because it’s the newest. And I really think that the new record pushes our boundaries, sort of like this one did. But this is No. 2 for me, just because of how I was introduced to the songs, and how exciting it was to get each demo and work on them.

Jeff Byrd: Even though Kill The Moonlight was the first album where I was with them, Gimme Fiction was the album that really built the foundation for the years to come in terms of the records that followed, and the sound and the performances. It was definitely special.

Chris Lombardi: It wasn’t easy to get Europe turned on. The press didn’t appreciate them as much as they should—or even if they were well received, there wasn’t that kind of “This is an essential band.” It has a little bit to do with a certain mindset of the music scene in Europe, where there’s a big emphasis on the brand new. To Europe, they were a band that had sort of been around for a little while.

Spoon has never had that, in terms of being the hot shit, fashionable band of the moment—in the best of all ways. It’s never been about doing something shocking or dramatic. It’s been about doing interesting things, but being smart and tasteful—and being super talented. And that’s the true artist. They are a tremendous band, and I think we are all lucky to have them with us, and that they didn’t give up their guns, and that they stuck to the good fight. That’s the kind of band that I’m gonna continue to buy records from and continue to be a fan for. And that’s the best kind of rock ’n’ roll, in my opinion.

That tastefulness and consistency, while never producing a burst of super-stardom, nevertheless leaves a far more lingering impression. And in the decade-plus since Gimme Fiction, Spoon has only kept it up, album after album. It’s hard to declare a pinnacle in a body of uniformly exceptional work, but even in the still-growing pantheon of Great Spoon Records, Gimme Fiction represents a historic forward leap. Ten years on, it remains special for all the collaborative effort that went into it and for all the chances that it took. Most importantly, Gimme Fiction cemented Spoon as a band that will never be content to coast on success.

–Sean O'Neal, June 2015

Sean O'Neal is a writer in Austin. He's been hanging around the margins of Spoon since 1996.