"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."

"I liked Jerry Lee Lewis, because my dad turned me on to him, so I had this collection of all the Sun sessions that I would listen to a lot. I mainly just listened to 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On'. I used to love that line, ""got the bull by the horns"", I used that line in 'He's Alright', my song from a long time ago. It's so bluesy and goofy and from a wild man. But then at a later period, I read that book The Dark Stuff by Nick Kent. Adam [Granduciel], my buddy, one of my best friends, from The War On Drugs, he sent it to me for my birthday, which was nice. He wasn't even around, but he sent it to me. Anyway, I couldn't put that down. He knew I would like that book. The best article [in there], is on Jerry Lee Lewis, who's just a notorious maniac and is obviously an incredible piano player. In that article, he talked about a book, a biography about him by Nick Tosches called Hellfire and this book is off the hook, it's unreal. So just around that time I found the vinyl of this one, the Sun Sessions, maybe it's volume one, again I burned it and cranked it in the 'phones and played it a lot when I was driving around LA. There's a song, 'Little Queenie', which is a cover, but he says: ""She's too cute to be a minute over 17"" and I morphed that line in 'Pretty Pimpin': ""a little too cute to be admitted under marbles lost"". Whatever that part of the song is, the first time I say: ""All I want is to just have fun, live my life like a son of a gun"", but it's like a morphed version of that Seeds song, 'Pushin' Too Hard', like [sings]: ""All I want is to just have fun, live my life like it just begun"", so it's sort of referencing those old guys, two different eras. Obviously, if I had to pick one, Jerry Lee Lewis slays The Seeds. But it's just like that down-home, real rock & roll. How do you explore his back catalogue? I think you just start with the early stuff. He had a crazy career, because he had all these hits young and then he married his super young cousin, but he was totally in love with her and she was, and then they went to Europe and during that time they found out it was his cousin and then he was banned everywhere, basically. Then he had a resurgence, he started doing country music and was bigger than ever, so he would always go up and down, but he was a maniac. He would just always be battling demons. He would go back to Jesus. He would go to church where they would speak in tongues, he would just live extreme lives. He would go back and forth, lose his mind, take a million pills, play shows and his hair was flying around, playing with his foot. I mean, he was a bad motherhumper, as you would say!"