Interview - Britt Daniel, Spoon
As you’ll no doubt be aware, the pandemic has pushed a lot of things back. Some movies are still to hit the screens after all this time, live shows of all kinds are perpetually postponed or rescheduled, and the issues with vinyl manufacturers (albeit not entirely related to COVID) are causing huge delays in album releases.
Yet some artists used the delay to their advantage. One of America’s most well-regarded rock bands, Spoon hit the studio shortly after frontman and founder Britt Daniel had spent longer than anticipated working on their Greatest Hits collection, 2019’s Everything Hits At Once: "I thought; ‘compiling a record? How much time could that involve?’ Well, it ended up involving a bit more time that I thought! We recorded some songs for it and just the promotion of it took a really long time," he tells Gigwise. "I did go listen to all the records straight through. I don’t know if I’ve ever done that. It was revealing!"
"We were hopefully all set to complete the [new] record in 2019. We’d just come off this massive tour with Beck. We spent the whole summer doing that and then once we really got started, COVID happened." So the delay was down to the pandemic? "It was a few things at once. We were working on it for a long time. We toured a lot on [previous album] Hot Thoughts and there were a number of things that made this one drag out; one was that we ended up doing this Greatest Hits project. We thought we were probably almost done, then COVID hit and I wrote a lot more songs because I was alone. I knew that some of those songs had to replace some of the songs we had recorded because they were just better. But we couldn’t get together for another six months so I just kept writing."