"Between 25 and 30, we put out our second album, A Series of Sneaks, on Elektra, and were quickly dropped from the label afterward. At that point, I didn’t think the band was going to exist or that I would be able to keep putting out records. I didn’t know what was going to happen and I didn’t have any money and I was living in a shitty apartment in Austin for a while, in a friend’s extra room. I felt pretty directionless. But getting dropped made us come up with that single, “The Agony of Lafitte”/“Lafitte Don’t Fail Me Now,” [which took aim at the band’s Elektra A&R rep, Ron Laffitte]. We were advised not to do it, but it turned everything around. It was really the first story we had. We did it because it was funny and cathartic—someone came up with the song titles, and they were too good not to make a single out of. So I went and wrote the songs. It was a little revenge. It felt good. The next summer, I went to New York and worked a bunch of temp jobs. I latched onto one gig at Citibank, where I had to wear a tie every day, and I kinda got into it. I liked the idea of taking the subway from Brooklyn into the city and working in a high rise every day. It wasn’t anything I felt passion for, but there was something about it that I found a little romantic. And it paid really well, like $23 an hour, which seemed like crazy money in that moment. We had no business making our next album, Girls Can Tell. There was no reason why anyone would want to put out a Spoon record again. We had blown it in the indie world and in the major label world. We were tainted. We had been advised by everyone that we worked with to start another band, or take on a different name. But we just kept doing these local shows, and I kept coming up with these songs, like “Anything You Want” and “Lines in the Suit,” and I felt real proud of them. So we recorded them. I didn’t want to use another name. This was the band. That was also when I got into the Kinks. This was around the time you could start buying CDs on the internet, and there was this thing where if you signed up for this online CD store you could get a free album as your first order as long as it was an address that hadn’t been used before. So I got the entire Kinks catalog by sending CDs to all my friends addresses and my mom’s address and my PO box. And Face to Face was the first one that I got. I could feel a lot of vulnerability in his lyrics, and there were a lot of songs that were just about a single thing, like a train or a party line, just one little notion. I love that. A song like “The Fitted Shirt” would not have existed without the Kinks."

"There’s something very quirky about the two records Brian Eno made just after he left Roxy Music. They feel naturally 'him’, in a way, like he didn’t really think about it too much. He did it very quickly, in a sort of 'of-the-time’ kind of way, and those records really brought out his character more than any other music he’s done over the years, even including his ambient stuff – I think he thinks about all that ambient stuff too much, in a way. The earlier records feel like they were done with humour and fun. Obviously there’s a big cash incentive if you’re asked to produce Coldplay or U2, they’re difficult things to turn down if you’re any producer. But I think it’s been debilitating for him, he should just be more experimental. [But] I do hear a lot of good stories about his approach and the way he coaxes the best out of people as a producer. There was a bit of a connection between him and Depeche Mode – he did some remixes for 'I Feel You', which were called the Swamp mixes, and they’re typical Eno. They sound exactly like the kind of thing you’d expect him to do, and I loved them. And I thought they were great. There was a connection because Flood had worked with on the U2 records, and they’d hired a house and built a studio there, and all lived together to make a record. I said 'That’s a great idea, let’s do the same thing’. And it was a total disaster. We lived together and recorded together, and of course, it was one of the most uncreative recording sessions… actually, it wasn’t really – it was one of the most difficult recording sessions we’ve ever had. We were all living in this house and nothing was getting done, and yet, when I look back and see what we produced over a very long period of ten weeks, we recorded three of the best Mode tracks ever."