Spoon’s Kill the Moonlight Turns 20: Britt Daniel on Making the Record “As Gnarly as Possible”
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The post Spoon’s Kill the Moonlight Turns 20: Britt Daniel on Making the Record “As Gnarly as Possible” appeared first on Consequence.
Britt Daniel doesn’t like to sit too long with any of his records. Throughout his career, he’s challenged the songwriting on whatever his last project was to push his latest work in new directions. So it’s not terribly surprising that despite the landmark status of both Spoon’s Kill the Moonlight and Divine Fits’ A Thing Called Divine Fits, plans to mark their respective anniversaries this month are minimal.
Both albums are being given the commemorative reissue treatment: Kill the Moonlight will be pressed on white vinyl (out September 9th) for its 20th anniversary as part of Matador’s Revisionist History catalog series. Meanwhile, A Thing Called Divine Fits has a 10th anniversary release out from Bandbox featuring yellow vinyl, a 16-page zine, a track-by-track guide, and the first interview with the full band (Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner, current Spoon member Alex Fischel, and New Bomb Turks/Operators’ Sam Brown) in nine years.
Those are no small stakes, but would it not be nice if these LPs — so beloved by fans — were celebrated in some larger context? Perhaps a more in-depth reissue like Spoon did for Gimme Fiction? Or (be still my heart) a Divine Fits reunion show?
Well, expect none of that for now. Daniel and Spoon are currently focused on their latest masterpiece, Lucifer on the Sofa, and gearing up for their co-headlining “Lights, Camera, Factions” tour with Interpol (tickets for which can be found here). And frankly, that’s perfectly fine with us: Why spend time living in the past when the now is so exciting?
Still, when we spoke with Daniel ahead of Lucifer on the Sofa’s release earlier this year, we couldn’t help but ask him a few questions about Kill the Moonlight and Divine Fits. He reflected on the similar circumstances behind creating LotS and KtM, the possibility of Divine Fits reactivating, and dreams of a rarities collection.
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Lucifer on the Sofa was written largely in the isolation of the early pandemic days; Kill the Moonlight was written in a sort of self-imposed isolation in New London, Connecticut. 20 years apart, how did those different types of loneliness impact your approach to the music?
I don’t necessarily think of Kill the Moonlight as a lonely sounding record, but the process of making it, for a lot of it, was. I went to a town I’d never been to before and where I knew no one, and that was by design. Just the random circumstances that brought me there were almost comical: I knew someone who knew someone who worked at a radio station with someone who was leaving her apartment for the summer. And I got in touch with that person and I took over her lease for the summer and, you know, it was just lonely. It was an intense experience, but it was just what I needed to focus. I wanted to get a record out real fast.
Whereas with Lucifer on the Sofa, it wasn’t self-imposed and you were actually given extra time. There is a big sonic difference too, with this latest one being a big rock and roll album and Kill the Moonlight considered a landmark minimalist indie record. Can you talk about the 20 year gap between those two sounds?
I think what it’s got to do with is I tend to want to rebel against the sound of the previous record. When I was working on Kill the Moonlight, we were coming off of Girls Can Tell, which was a return to… or a first-time attempt at classic songwriting and Motown and Elvis Costello. First time [doing] a kind of vulnerable lyrics type of record, lots of piano and reverb. Oldies radio is what I was kind of doing.
So when I made Kill the Moonlight, I think the design was to do something that felt a little bit more wild and stripped back — kind of like a new wave demo, you know? And as gnarly as possible. That’s what we were shooting for. This one, we’re coming off a record, [2017’s Hot Thoughts], that we were largely writing as we were recording it. It was a fairly pieced together record, very produced record. And we wanted to make something that felt more like genuine rock and roll. More in the room.
Have you revisited Kill the Moonlight at all with the anniversary coming up?
I haven’t listened to it in a second. I think probably the last time I listened to it straight through is when I was listening to all the records straight through when I was figuring out songs to put on the greatest hits, [2019’s Everything Hits at Once: The Best of Spoon].
But there’s only one Kill the Moonlight song on that record, isn’t there?
Yeah. Well, my first thought about that greatest hits collection was that it was gonna be a double-CD, which I guess would mean triple-vinyl [laughs]. It was gonna have rarities, it was gonna have alternate mixes and stuff. And it ended up not being that project at all. We might do that at some point. So, yeah, the ambition of it was stripped back quite a bit and that’s right, there was just one song from Kill the Moonlight.
So are you planning on doing an expanded greatest hits thing?
Well, that’d be something cool to do at some point. I’d like to do a B-sides/rarities disc, because there’s a lot of them. There’s a lot of really good B-sides that we’ve done that have never been collected.
You intended to release Lucifer on the Sofa in 2020, so did the pushed release date potentially change any plans for Kill the Moonlight? It’s the type of record you might expect a band to do an anniversary tour around.
We’ve never done an anniversary tour. We’ve never looked back like that. We did a deluxe version of Gimme Fiction, which I thought was fucking awesome. It had an amazing bio in there and I went and mixed down all of the demos, and it’s fantastic. But it was a massive project. We haven’t done that for Kill the Moonlight. I guess the anniversary for Kill the Moonlight is August? Yeah, I might be running out of time on that.
When speaking about Lucifer on the Sofa, you talked a bit about what Alex Fischel’s skills brought to the band. I always think you kind of stole him — and I mean that endearingly — from Divine Fits, because that’s where you guys first worked together.
Yeah, that wouldn’t have happened had it not been for Divine Fits.
Is that a project you ever think could be coming back?
I think it could. I think we could do something else again at some point. I mean, I still talk to those guys. I’ve talked to Dan and Sam both in the last month. We didn’t talk about doing Divine Fits, but you know, there’s still a lot of love there.
(Editor’s Note: Boeckner actually joined Spoon onstage at a show in New York City a few months after this interview took place.)
That’s cool to hear. I just love Divine Fits.
Well, thanks, I’m glad you do. You know, I haven’t heard that record in a long time. Every now and then when I do hear a song, it shocks me. Because unlike with Spoon, I’m playing those songs still, those records still feel kind of present to me. But the Divine Fits one feels like, ‘Wow, that’s a different lifetime.’ And I don’t remember so much of that record.
Spoon’s Kill the Moonlight Turns 20: Britt Daniel on Making the Record “As Gnarly as Possible”
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