Greatest-hits albums are generally anathema to indie rock.
But if anyones earned the right to one, its probably Texas music royaltySpoon.
To celebrate, theyve also embarked ona summer-long tour with Beck and Cage the Elephant.
Credit: Oliver Halfin
It was pretty random.
It was a lonely summer, and I was trying to write all the songs forKill the Moonlight.
And somehow I came up with that [sings]duh-duh-duh duh-duh-duh-duhduh.
The words I said first were actually thats the way we getback.
I sat there for a while on the floor like, So what would this song be about?
[On having the song used in the Will Ferrell movieStranger Than Fictionand on shows includingShamelessandThe O.C.
[Laughs]What brought that one on was my ex-girlfriend, Eleanor Friedberger.
I thought it was great.
It happened real fast.
And for a couple days that was my favorite song, I loved it his version, my percussion.
Then that band sort of broke up.
Its such a great song.
So we covered it, and it became one of the biggest songs we did after The Underdog.
And the [Natural History] guys get some royalties, yeah.
I Summon You(2005)
Same apartment.
[Laughs]I moved right afterGimme Fictioncame out, to Portland.
But yeah, I was in that pretty dark, very small apartment for a long time.
We had maybe six weeks together before she moved, and it wasnt an easy place to get to.
I had I summon you written down on a piece of paper kind of haphazardly.
I like it when producers say that, you know?
I havent had one do that lately, but its good.
It gets you to a better place.
But on tour we just played it on guitar.
Its almost impossible to mic a kalimba, did you know that?
[Laughs]Oh, and I remember I came up with the drums in the shower.
Inside Out (2014)
I wrote that on piano.
I was like Are you kidding me?
I know this is fing great!
And then it kind of just existed as this piano vocal song for a long time.
So we put a beat to it that was sort of stolen from this Dr. Dre song.
Then it sounded like something wed never done before.
Lyrically, it was literally drawn from physics time gets distorted when theres intense gravity.
It was the one song we didnt do with Mike McCarthy, our producer.
We were flabbergasted but she was right.
It became one of the biggest songs weve ever done.
