Spoon’s Britt Daniel Breaks Down ‘Gimme Fiction’ Songs, Demos

Spoon will revisit their 2005 LP Gimme Fiction on December 11th with a deluxe 10th anniversary edition that boasts home demos of all of the album’s 11 tracks as well as rehearsal versions and alternate takes. Before the reissue drops, singer Britt Daniel provided a side-by-side analysis between the Gimme Fiction songs and their accompanying demos for NPR Music.

In his analysis, Daniel explains the inspiration behind each song, how he created the lyrics and, in some cases, how the tracks morphed from the demo stage to the studio. According to Daniel, much of the album was written during a week in Galveston, Texas in 2004, a period where the singer was obsessed with Prince’s Around the World in a Day and the Beatles’ Revolver. Fears about the apocalypse also informed Daniel’s lyrics, especially on opener “The Beast and Dragon, Adored” and “My Mathematical Mind.”

In the case of “They Never Got You,” Daniel reveals the track was inspired by the Misfits’ Glenn Danzig. “I’d read this interview where [Danzig] was talking about the Misfits and how ‘those guys never got what the fuck I was trying to do,'” Daniel wrote. “And that made me think of how I felt about my real first band in Austin, which was called Skellington, and how nobody was really as into it as much as I was, and nobody really got what I was trying to do.” The title track from Spoon’s 2014 album They Want My Soul was also inspired by Danzig.