Spoon Unearth ‘Lines in the Suit’ Demo for ‘Girls Can Tell’ Anniversary

Spoon have unearthed their 1999 demo for “Lines in the Suit,” a track off 2001’s Girls Can Tell, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Austin band’s third studio album.

Unlike its polished album version, the home demo for “Lines in the Suit – 30 Minutes Old” finds the track in its embryonic form; as suggested by its title, the track was recorded just half an hour after Britt Daniel conceived of the song, giving the demo an unsteady feel.

“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,” Daniel said of the album in a statement. “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 to specifically avoid all of that. 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.”

Spoon have taken a nostalgic trip through their catalog in recent years, rerecording songs in different styles (like “Inside Out” and “Rainy Taxi (Big Beat)“) and digging up old demos. As Daniel told Rolling Stone last year, the band was also at work on their follow-up to 2017’s Hot Thoughts, but Covid-19 halted their plans.

“I’d say we had 70 or 80 percent of the record done,” Daniel said. “We were recording right up until March 10th. And then March 11th was when this whole mess kicked into high gear.” Nearly a year later, it’s unclear if Spoon have put the finishing touches on their 10th studio album.