Fire Track: Spoon – “Lines In The Suit – 30 Minutes Old (1999 Home Demo)”

Spoon’s Girls Can Tell ranks very high in TFN list of indie releases. To mark this weeks’ 20th anniversary of Spoon’s third studio album Girls Can Tell, here is the recently re-unearthed rarity, the accurately-named “Lines In The Suit – 30 Minutes Old (1999 Home Demo).” You can read what founder Britt Daniel had to say about the release below.

“Girls Can Tell was the Hail Mary pass that absolutely no one thought was gonna find a receiver. It was the record where the colors changed, trains collided, and suddenly we sounded a lot more like us than we’d ever sounded before. At the time it felt like a last chance and it also felt like the last gasp of youth, which seems a little funny now considering how shaped it was by oldies radio, the Supremes, the Kinks, and Eleanor Friedberger’s cassette of Get Happy. The big idea behind Girls Can Tell was to take stock of the band’s MO from inception until that point, to carefully consider all the things we’d been trying to do and the way we’d been doing them, and then set out specifically to avoid all of it. To instead come up with some new songs that were actually about where I was at and how I was feeling! Songs that knew no cool rules. Songs that cried themselves to sleep at night and got up and shook themselves by the collar the next morning. It was the record that sorted out how much fight we had left in us. It came out February 20, 2001.”

“And now here’s the #GirlsCanTell Deluxe Playlist – all the tracks from the album plus songs I was obsessed with and forcing on my bandmates at the time. It’s possible you’ll notice some hints of You’re Lookin Fine in The Fitted Shirt, or some very similar opening lyrics in Possession and Anything You Want, or some amateur stabs at the Supremes’ rhythm section on Take The Fifth. All liberally borrowed when we needed it most, now gratefully returned via the digital sea.” — Britt Daniel