**the making of they want my soul by spoon - featuring britt daniel, jim eno and alex fischel**

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Intro:

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim.

Spoon formed in Austin, Texas in 1993 by Britt Daniel and Jim Eno. They signed with Matador Records initially and released their debut album, Telephono, in 1996. A Series of Sneaks followed in 1998 on Elektra Records, but they were dropped by the label shortly after its release. At this point, they signed with Merge Records, and released a string of albums over the next decade including Girls Can Tell, Kill the Moonlight, Gimme Fiction, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and Transference. They decided to take a break and during that time, Britt Daniel formed Divine Fits, while Jim Eno produced records for other artists. When Spoon got back together, they brought in new member Alex Fischel and opted to work with producers Joe Chiccarelli and Dave Fridmann for their next record. They Want My Soul, was eventually released in 2014.

In this episode, for the 10th anniversary, Britt Daniel, Jim Eno and Alex Fischel reflect on how the album came together. This is the making of They Want My Soul.

Britt Daniel: Hey, this is Britt Daniel and we are here to talk about They Want My Soul, our record that came out in 2014. I think this is the first record we put out where none of the songs were songs that we played, you know, at shows and clubs before we started recording them. And that could be tricky to break with tradition like that. But I think that the record turned out great, you know, some of our best stuff. We had the ability to try a lot more after we made this record. We had, you know, working with Dave Fridmann and all of the things that he could bring to it, if anything, we got labeled minimalists for years and years, which I never minded that, that title, that description. But that is not what Fridmann is, you know, he's a maximalist, and he likes everything to be big and, you know, never the easiest way, never the thing that you've heard before. He really likes to fuck with it, and I love that about him. It's one of my favorite records we've done, yeah, I love it. It's got some real high points on it.

You know, we made a lot of records, we made five records between 2001 and 2010, and it was a wild ride, it was a lot of fun, but I guess we kind of needed a break after that. I think that the records just got bigger and bigger as we went along through that decade. And then with Transference, we put out our sort of least commercial record, the weirdest record, the least inviting record. But we were playing it in front of the biggest audiences that we'd ever played in front of. It was a weird combo. And when we got to the end of that tour, which was a pretty long tour, we said, “Hey,” I said, “Hey, I need to take a break.” And I went and started another band. I wanted to be in a band with Dan Boeckner. I really wanted to be in a band with someone else who wrote songs and could be up there on stage with me, you know, like a partner, you know, that's what I wanted, a partner. So we started that band. It was a good band. And I think that Jim went and really started producing a lot of records right then. And it was good to just take a break and not be around those songs and be around some different people for a bit.

Jim Eno: Hi, I'm Jim Eno and I play drums in Spoon. We had been pretty much going strong since about 1995. You know, write, record, tour, write, record, tour. Got to Transference, we were all pretty burned out. We decided to take some time off. Britt did, you know, Divine Fits, and I just did a lot of producing at that time. I think it really, I think it really helped, you know, it gave us some distance and doing other projects helped us appreciate the project and working together. I feel like it was a good break, a well needed break. But I do remember after all of that stuff happening, we did have a little sit down and we were all like, you know, this has to be fun to do, you know, that's what I feel like the break helped us realize and helped us, you know, appreciate is the fact that making music should be fun, and we should enjoy it, and we should enjoy being around each other and making good music. I also feel like, getting Alex into the band was really a game changer with that.

Britt Daniel: Yeah, so I met Alex with Divine Fits. We started out as a three-piece, Divine Fits, and then we quickly realized we needed another person for going out on tour and brought Alex into the fold. Alex was in a band that opened for Dan's band, and so by a very random occurrence, we ended up meeting Alex. I don't know, I really liked Alex's vibe on stage. I thought that, you know, he was very into it, and that was part of the problem with the Transference thing was, I felt like I was up on stage without, I didn't have a partner. And so I knew that Alex was great on stage, was very, very into doing it. And I said, “Why don't you come over to Spoon?

Alex Fischel: Hey, I'm Alex Fischel and I played keyboard and some guitar on They Want My Soul. I met Britt in late 2011 or early 2012, I was 21 or 22 and I met Britt through Dan Boeckner. I had been playing around L.A. in a bunch of different bands and one of them ended up opening up for Handsome Furs and I got a call from Dan a few weeks afterwards, and he asked if I'd come to this rehearsal, and I had no idea what it was, and I even almost canceled because I thought I was getting a little sick, but I just decided to, you know, take Tylenol or whatever and go, and I showed up, and it was Britt and Dan, and I was kind of like, what am I doing here, and I thought that might be the end of it, you know, I was so young. I was like, “What would they want to do with me?” And they just kept calling and it ended up being this long, beautiful friendship that I have now. So I'm glad I went. Divine Fits was doing two shows in Vegas for like New Year's Eve in like, whatever, 2012, 2013. Going into 2013, I think. And I showed up for soundcheck on the second day, and I heard Dan and Britt talking about me, and I, of course, immediately thought I had done something wrong the night before. I think maybe we had, like, taken a little bit of mushrooms or something, and I was just being paranoid, and after the soundcheck, Dan told me, “Oh, by the way,” ike, “we were talking about how Brit was gonna ask you to join Spoon,” and I tried to keep it cool, but I went up to my room and kind of, you know, celebrated with a friend that was visiting with me. And it was great. It was really, it was a wild thing to happen.

Britt Daniel: His enthusiasm meant a lot. Yeah we first got together in about, I guess, spring of 2013, as Divine Fits was starting to wind down. That's when we had our first rehearsals with, with Spoon getting back together and with Alex involved.

Alex Fischel: I had this musical relationship with Britt already existing, but I didn't have any relationship or a music relationship with any of the other people in Spoon yet. So I didn't want to come in and like, you know, totally fuck everything up. But I also wanted to like, you know, Britt asked me to do this for a reason. He wants me to like be contributing in my way and I want to be contributing in my way. So it was like, “How do I navigate feeling like I'm putting forward ideas and, you know, contributing without like, stepping on anyone's toes at first?” And so eventually, like, once that's kind of settled and like, everybody's chill, it definitely opens things up more.

Jim Eno: I mean, he comes up with just so many great parts. And he is the kind of musician that is like, so talented that when you are working with him, you'll hear like a little seed of an idea, and then can take it in a specific direction. And he's always open to change, you know, building on a part or he's really great at taking direction. So I feel like adding him into the mix was a game changer for the band. We've always used other producers I feel like except for Transference where we produced it ourselves, but don't really think that, you know, that went well. So we like having people to bounce ideas off of, people who are like running the show sound-wise, who have a vision for what the songs should sound like. So I feel like we always knew we were going to work with some producers. So I feel like we started putting feelers out. We've done that on other records too, like we did work with Jon Brion a little bit. We do switch it up. And so after Transference, it was sort of like a clean slate.

Britt Daniel: You know, I did a lot of Transference just on my own, absolutely by myself at home in Portland. That was the way we wanted to do that record. And it's one of the best records we made, but it wasn't as commercial. A lot of people kind of jumped ship at that point (laughs), you know, the people that just knew us for “The Underdog,” but the people that really like Spoon, Transference is one of their favorite records. Anyway, yeah, we did, we just said, “Let's do it with a producer this time.” The combination of ideas is what we wanted to go for.

I'm not really sure how, but somehow we came up with the idea that we were going to record They Want My Soul in two halves. We were going to record half of it, then mix half of it and record another half of it, then mix that. We had originally asked Dave Fridmann to produce the record and he wasn't available, but he said he would have time to mix it. I had worked with Joe Chiccarelli on a single with Divine Fits, and so we, you know, we'd worked together for maybe four or five days and I liked working with him. And so that sort of worked out with our plans, “We'll do half of the record with Joe, we'll go mix it with Dave, then we'll do the other half with Joe and then go mix the other half with Dave.” But I'm not sure why we decided it should be done in two halves. I mean it worked out great because we did that first half of the record with Joe. It went pretty well. And then we worked with Dave, mixing that first half and that went so well, then we switched gears and then Dave produced the second half.

Jim Eno: I mean in my recollection we were working with Joe and then we went to Dave's to mix and there was just sort of a vibe with Dave that, you know, we really enjoyed working with him. And we really loved his ideas and it sort of opened up, you know, sort of a personal relationship that we felt like, this is actually really cool, we really love this guy, we love what he does. So we decided to actually, you know, track with Dave.

Britt Daniel: Yeah his schedule opened up and I guess it got slightly tense with Joe. We first, we recorded with Joe at Sunset Sound. That's where we did the basic tracking for the first half of the record. And that was cool. I mean, just to record at Sunset Sound where, you know, we were in the room where the Doors recorded their first couple of records, where the Rolling Stones, we did like, we shot some photos in that echo booth where they recorded, “Gimme Shelter,” where Merry Clayton actually got into the chamber and sang, and Mick Jagger was in there. We did a bunch of stuff in there just because they'd done it in there (laughs). And then once we'd done the basic tracking in LA, we went and did a lot of tracking with Joe in Austin, and you know, Joe would be there sometimes and then he'd leave and he'd come back. And when he'd come back, I would have recorded a new baseline on “Do You,” and he'd say, “Now why'd you do that?” I said, “Because I wanted to improve the bassline, you know.” But there's a little bit of tension there. I think Joe really wanted to have a hit, which was not a bad idea. And then the first five songs, one of them was “Do You,” so that was kind of a hit, but I think he just wasn't really totally pleased with how we were doing things, which was very hands on, you know, and if you would leave town for a couple weeks, we would keep recording. And then when he would get back and inevitably would be a bit different from when he was last there, you know, and so I don't know, maybe that was unsettling for him. I don't know, but Joe was good at a lot of things. He was really good at sort of sorting out where the peaks of songs should be and the form of the songs before we even started recording them.

Alex Fischel: I would say Dave is more experimental in his approach and Joe is more traditional. So like, to me, that means Dave's gonna lean towards the sonics of things. Even though, like, he also is focused on the music and the songs, of course. Like, you have to be. But, I'd say that, like, Joe is more focused on that as the root and, like, capturing that song. And I think Britt really liked that about working with him, because it was, you know, some help, an extra set of ears for that kind of stuff. I think working with Dave, it became apparent that it was, like, a very good match. The way he works is like you come into his life kind of because you're going into like his studio in his town and his son was the assistant and it's kind of like a familial thing. So I ended up spending a lot of time in Fredonia, New York.

Britt Daniel: I love working with Dave. The thing about Dave is he's just like, I don't think he realizes how far out his stuff is. You know, like when you mix with Dave, he wants us to be there at the studio, but we're not allowed to be in the room when he starts mixing, right. So for anywhere from five to say eight or nine hours, he's in the one little control room mixing, coming up with his ideas, and me and Jim, or whoever in the band is there, is in some other room doing whatever, you know, but we're not allowed to hear what he's doing. And you're finally brought in, once he's gotten to a place where he is happy with some form of it. He brings you in, and it's almost never what you expect it'll be. And sometimes that's right on, right? Like sometimes it's, this is not what I was expecting and it is amazing. That's sort of was the experience with “Outlier,” but sometimes you want to shape it. And I remember a lot of times on this record saying, “Dave, this is good, but it's got so much distortion. I mean, the whole mix is distorted.” And Dave would say, “It is?” “Yeah, it's distorted.” He's like, “I can't hear any distortion.” And he would, he would claim to us that he can't hear when something is distorted or not, which is just lovely. You know, he's such a freak.

“Rent I Pay”

Britt Daniel: The original idea for that song, “Rent I Pay,” was, I heard this Toots and the Maytals song called “I Shall Be Free.” It had a bassline that was sort of a walking bassline, and I just thought, it was one of those, “Okay, I have a concept, I'm gonna write a song quick as I can, kind of ideas,” and the concept was “start with this 6/8 waltz walking bassline.” And I had the lyric, “rent I pay,” that I'd had sitting around forever. And it was just like, “Use that baseline, write a new song.” And I came up with something really fast and probably happened in about 30 minutes. But yeah, t's pretty different from what you hear on the record. Yeah well, we actually tried it like that. We tried it with the 6/8 waltz version. And we, when we had that first rehearsal where Alex came in for the first time, we played a band version of what I'd done on the demo and, you know, it was all right. It was kind of, yeah definitely more of a soul thing. And something about it reminded me of, what we were playing, reminded me of “One Man's Ceiling is Another Man's Floor” by Paul Simon. And so then we played that and then we just never came back to it. You know, it wasn't decided like it was good or bad, we just, we moved on to other things and we never, never thought about it again. And then, so half a year later, most of the album had been recorded. And we were, by now, working with Fridmann at his studio. And I think we were working on “Inside Out” in Fridmann's main room. And while he was programming beats, I was literally in the back room at his studio, trying to write one more song for the record.

Alex Fischel: “Rent I Pay” was, that was a fun one to kind of discover for me. Cause the way that Dave's is kind of laid out is there's the main studio and there's a hallway, and then there's kind of the second studio, the B studio. And a lot of the time, while we were working in this A studio, Britt would be in the B studio, kind of working on vocals and stuff like that. I didn't even really know “Rent I Pay” was a song until I heard like basically the majority of the recorded version of it. Which was really cool, like, “What have you been doing back there?” So he brought “Rent I Pay” in after working on it for however long. And then we started working on it, and it was pretty flushed out at that point. I think we just, like, added organ and piano, maybe. And, like, Dave did some of his tricks. Dave trickery. But yeah, that was a nice surprise.

Britt Daniel: I looked at what songs were on the record. And I was like, “What this needs is sort of a slow, heavy rock song.” You know, that's what this record means. And I think I got on that kick cause I'd heard Joan Jett on the radio. You know, “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” and I always loved that song. And I tried to write an entirely new song, I think in that vein. But I also went back through some of the old songs we've worked on. It's like, “Oh yeah, there's this one ‘Rent I Pay.’” It's a different time signature, but, you know, I saw if I could convert it and somehow it worked. And then I just wrote, you know, sort of this new version of the song sitting back there in the back room at Fridmann’s studio while everyone else was in the front working on “Inside Out.”

Jim Eno: I do remember that this song was probably recorded, as one of the last tunes. The drum sound was just ridiculous, it’s just, you know, he puts up a bunch of mics, I start playing and then you go in the control room and it sounds like, you know, the snare is a cannon and it's just like, “Yeah, that sounds pretty great (laughs) from the get go.” So I remember that I’m pretty sure that maybe me and Britt got together to work on a little bit of the feel and the drum part and stuff. And, you know, not to get too nerdy, but I felt like, so on “Rent I Pay,” I play it open handed, meaning I play my hi-hat with the left hand, and any time there's a kick drum I play the floor tom. And so it's like, “boom, boom, cha,” and I'm hitting the floor tom with the kick. And I feel like that was something that I stumbled upon that was really helping with the, like, the toughness and the impact of that drum track. And Dave really like leaned into that kind of approach.

Britt Daniel: And it has that Fridmann sound that, you know, just like blown out drum sound from the top, which is such a great way to start the record.

Jim Eno: I do feel like the way it starts with the snare drum being like a cannon was sort of cool as like, “Hey, you haven't heard Spoon in a few years and this is the first thing that you hear from us is like a big rock tune.”

Britt Daniel: Yeah, that's right. I mean, I forgot that was the first song that anybody heard off of this record, we felt pretty good about it. You know, that was one of those songs that when we would get done working at the end of the day at Fridmann’s studio. And we'd take the drive about 20, 30 minutes into town to go have a drink. We would be blasting that one over and over again in the car on the way there. You know, it was, it definitely felt good. We knew that was working.

“Inside Out”

Britt Daniel: “Inside Out” was a song started out just sort of as an instrumental piano bit. There were just some good chords. I was waiting, I remember I was waiting for a friend to come over to my house, she was late and I just sat there and worked on this song for a while and I'd been reading about theory of relativity, some gravitational time dilation stuff and the next day I said, “Okay, I'm gonna make a demo out of this.” I just threw some words down about that over this little piano bit and I might've done two verses and it was good. It had a good vocal for sure, but it wasn't much more than what you'd call a piano ballad. You know, it was some nice chords, but nothing that special. And I didn't know that I wanted another, like a piano ballad, on the record. So when I got together with Alex and Jim, a couple of days later, we started thinking of ways to approach the tune. And I'd been listening to a lot of 2001 by Dr. Dre right then. So I said, “Let's do this piano ballad. But let's give it a hip hop beat, right?” And Jim was all about that. And I always heard, you know, Alex was always playing the piano line to “Still D.R.E.” You know, just goofing around. And so I knew he'd be down.

Alex Fischel: At some point, Britt and I started listening to Dr. Dre 2001 a lot. I almost think that like he had never really gotten into that record before and got obsessed with it. And so at some point he threw out the idea of doing a song in that vein, which brought us to the harp. So I think, me and him had kind of landed on doing it with this like harp feel thing.

At some point, eventually me and Britt and Jim went and jammed on it in Austin, but just to like hear it with that kind of backbeat groove. And I think after we did that, it really was like, “Okay, that's how we're going to do it.”

Jim Eno: So for “Inside Out,” he wanted it to have sort of a hip hop feel, so I sort of just played along in the studio and was ripping off some hip hop beats. And then, I'm pretty sure how it started was, Fridmann took my drum part that I did, you know, not to a click or anything, just in my little studio with maybe like one or two mics and he took that and he laid it out in Pro Tools, but then created a like sort of a sample bass like a drum machine-based beat from my beat so he took every snare and every kick and then laid it all out and then snapped it to a grid and then that was the starting of of the song. So technically I didn't play on it, but I like sort of did (laughs). Because it sort of, he took my part and laid it out. So I thought that was a really interesting approach. We obviously, once we got that done, made a lot of changes to the part because it was sort of a going from a rehearsal space first time hearing it. So, you know, we would be like, “Oh, that kick doesn't make any sense, let's do this, let's do that.” So that's how that song started.

Britt Daniel: On paper, that may not have looked like the best idea, but it really worked and all of a sudden we had this totally new vibe to this thing that was just a very basic ballad beforehand. And in that little session, that's where we, you know, we just did a basic two track recording and on the album, you hear that sort of more lo-fi version, that intro and the outro that was recorded at that first initial rehearsal. Yeah, then we took it over to Fridmann's place and we thought since we're going to go down this Dr. Dre route, Fridmann might as well program the beats instead of doing live drums, which we almost always did, you know. And he made it super long left lots of space and we thought, “Okay maybe we'll fill in that later but,” or “maybe we'll shorten it later,” but it was it was just such a good, everything kind of fell into place. And all of these sort of glistening solos that Alex did kind of, I know at one point we were going to cut a couple of minutes out of that song, but I'm glad we didn't. It seemed to work.

Well, I love Al Green. I'm not sure what came over me, you know, I'm not sure why that happened with this song, but it all just fell into place. You know, like I say, it was, I wasn't even sitting down trying to write a song. It was just, I got to kill some time because my friend is late getting here. And then it became this. There's definitely the history of growing up religious in Texas as part of that song. That with the theory of relativity stuff makes it, you know, these two very opposing viewpoints that really make it lyrically interesting for me.

Alex Fischel: Dave definitely had a big part in the way that that one ended up sounding. I think with like the electronic drums and the kind of intro thing. And there's some cool distortion moments that kind of peek in and out. But that was, that was really fun for me, cause it really felt like, I felt integrated during that song for sure. Cause there's the harp solo and then there's these like Wurlitzer arpeggio solos. And I feel like at some point, both of those happened while we were working on the song. So we're like, “Oh, we'll use those in the song somewhere.”

Britt Daniel: Before Alex came into the band, I was the, at least on record, I was usually the piano player and the kind of stuff that I was playing was like the way we get by the most basic piano. It's a great piano, but it's very, very, very basic. I could probably teach my mom to play it in a couple of hours. But now that Alex was in the band, we could do things like “Inside Out.” We just could not have done that before.

The less glistening one, the less peaceful one is something that came up when we did that first initial recording, that first initial rehearsal, but that still left a lot of space and I don't know, I think I just said to Alex, “I want it to sound like a long breathy spacey bit,” you know, and we just worked a long time just getting the sound right with the right delay and the timing of the delays. And it was a magic moment when he finally started playing that solo in that way with a thing that goes up (sings keyboard part). You know, it was beautiful. It's just one of the best parts. And it's something that we never would have been able to do in the band before Alex was in it.

Alex Fischel: My idea for that was kind of like, I wanted to kind of mimic like a triggered sample in a way, like hitting a sample and it's not going to be perfectly in time. That song particularly felt like it was a change in the sound for sure. I mean, when we made the next record, we kind of referenced that sound as like, “Okay, what if we made a record just kind of like that sound,” but yeah, it felt like a new kind of thing. And yeah, I think that's what like helped me feel like a part of it. Like I was there helping discover something new or something like that.

Britt Daniel: And when the record came out, I thought this is clearly the the thing that's the most special, “Inside Out” was and you know, it wasn't the first thing that we released. We put out “Rent I Pay” and then we, you know, really made a push with “Do You” and so “Inside Out” was not, was not the big push. And so for it to eventually have become the most played song on the record, or maybe that we've got, yeah, it says something, it tells me that people are listening. I just, I knew it was special, you know?

“Rainy Taxi”

Alex Fischel: There was like a version that we had of that song that we determined was to like, quote unquote metal. And I wish I had the recording of it because I'm really curious actually what that meant now. Maybe that would be a cool (laughs), a cool place to go for the next record, but anyways, we ended up landing on this like piano driven kind of version with these kind of sinister guitar leads that was somehow, like it came from the metal version, I think, but it's not the exact metal version.

Britt Daniel: “Rainy Taxi. There's a lot of versions of this song. You know, it started out as a sort of acoustic Neil Diamond kind of thing. And then we did some band versions. I took that demo to the band and we started playing it. There was a version that was very kind of Black Sabbath. I was looking at all the demos we have for this album when we were putting together the deluxe version of the album, and there's like, “Rainy Taxi First Metal Take,” “Rainy Taxi Last Metal Take,” like “Rainy Taxi Instant Karma Version,” you know, and then there was this, the thing that ends up on the record on the demo side is the “One More Shot” song, which is sort of a, it's got the same chords as “Rainy Taxi” and it's got, there was, I think, a couple lyrics that are the same, but you know, quite a different song. So we just explored, we explored a lot of different avenues on this one.

It was an apocalyptic love song (laughs). That's all I really remember. I remember thinking that the bridge was maybe the best part of the song and we recorded that one with Joe Chiccarelli and I think he really tried to talk us into doing the bridge more than once and, you know, to have it two or three times in the song. And we really, we just didn't want to do that. It was just like, “That was the peak. That was the thing.” We wanted it to have this one special part. And I remember Jim and Joe arguing quite a bit about that.

Jim Eno: I mean, I love the bridge of “Rainy Taxi.” It's great. One of my favorite bridges.

Britt Daniel: Fridmann did produce that one, but we had gone over it with Joe Chiccarelli and that's when Joe said, “Have the bridge happen more than once.” Maybe that's why we didn't record it with Joe, I don't know (laughs). But yeah as it turned out, yeah, we just did at the one time.

I think that was Alex's idea to just sort of go have that little explosion of non-melodic piano bits that just happens right there. It's very Alex.

Alex Fischel: And Dave like definitely encourages that as well. I mean, I remember recording the piano on “Rainy Taxi.” And he just threw a mic, like it seemed arbitrary to me, but like, I don't know if it was, he just threw a mic up in this, you know, quote unquote, arbitrary place. Probably not arbitrary, but in my mind, I was like, “Oh, wild.” And it was just like a weird, cheap mic. And then like put it through a Kaoss Pad without really ever talking about it. A Kaoss Pad is like, it's this box with a touch pad on it. And depending on where you put your finger on the touchpad, it'll either, like, increase or decrease the volume, or the repeats on the delay, or the rate of the chorus, or it's made so you can, like, play with the effect really easily. And some of the effects are pretty wild, with, like, multi-effects going on at the same time. And he was like, “Why don't you play the Kaoss Pad while you do the piano part?” And I had never done that. I was like, “Great, cool. Sounds fun.” And it ended up being the piano sound for the song. And, you know, that's just kind of how Dave operates.

“Do You”

Britt Daniel: I lived on 45th street and Avenue A in Austin. And that's, you know, that's where that line comes from. Yeah, it does feel nostalgic. Those lyrics, I'm not sure where they all come from, but something about Austin. I was half out of a bag. My favorite parts of that song are the things that came last, the sort of the falsetto “do do do do to do” that happens at the beginning and a few times in the song, which is total Mick Jagger, you know, if you listen to like, “Waiting On a Friend,” for instance, it starts out with this amazing falsetto, almost acrobatic vocal by Mick Jagger with the reverb on it. It's just beautiful, right? And the song had come along, we had it in a good place as a band song, but it needed some kind of, it needed some kind of kicker. It needed something to really invite you in at the top. And that's where I thought of trying to do a falsetto vocal there. And I think it's pretty good.

Jim Eno: You know, I mean, I love this song. I think it's a great song.

Alex Fischel: That one I remember, being like, “This song is going to rip” (laughs).

Britt Daniel: Yeah, we recorded this one at Sunset in LA. And I remember Joe saying that the song needed a peak and that's how the idea of that sort of dropout and the white noise burst happening.

Jim Eno: You know, I was in the studio and tracking it and, and then we were playing it as a band, but mainly we were trying to get the drum track. Yeah and it just wasn't hitting yet, you know, and Joe, Joe was like, he's like, “Man it just doesn't sound like a record yet.” And I feel like that little tidbit clicked in my brain and I'm like, “Oh yeah, okay, I see what he's saying.” And I just felt like I had to play it more like I was playing a live show as opposed to like I was playing it in the studio. So I feel like, yeah, I definitely hear that I'm playing it a little bit, to lay back, you know. And then so we kicked off the next time right after he said that and I immediately could see through the control room that he was like bopping up and down and I'm like, “Okay, yeah, this definitely feels a lot better.” And I'm pretty sure that whole thing is one take after he gave me that feedback. So it was definitely a case where I felt like it was a good recognition of, you know, the recording process and sort of having the producer understand what was happening and then, you know, mention one thing that wasn't, you know, antagonistic or putting me down or anything, but it just was a really good indicator of how we can get the track and how I should play, you know. I felt like that was a good moment and I feel like the track feels exciting from a drum standpoint.

Alex Fischel: The demo was different than the way that we ended up having it slightly. Like the ideas were there, like Britt had changed the way, like the “doo doos” were sung from the demo. And then we kind of morphed into this more driven feel, with the “doo doos” kind of more on the downbeats. And yeah, that was just super exciting.

Jim Eno: Britt tries these songs a lot of different ways. And when he hits on something that he likes, that's sort of ends up being the best direction, you know, and I feel like he hit a feel and an approach to the song that just, that worked really well.

Britt Daniel: We started early on it, maybe even pre-Divine Fits. We never played it with Divine Fits. It was, I wrote it as a song called “The Way Love Comes” and that you hear that version of it on the album. I mean, a lot of the songs on this record were done up as very proper demos. And when I say proper, I don't mean like recorded in a proper studio. I mean, I really spent some time, making these demos and then the song would sit there in that way for a bit and then I'd get bored with it. And so I'd do another demo and try it a different way. So this song is like that. I mean, I don't know what's wrong with it, the version of the song that's called “The Way Love Comes,” but when the band starts when Spoon actually starts playing “Do You,” the song form has changed, there's some new chords in there, the words have changed and so it kept morphing. And that's totally what it is a Kinks kind of beat and Joe really liked it that way and that was almost the way we recorded it, and I liked it that way too, but I thought we've just done this before it sounded too much like maybe “Don't Make Me a Target” or “The Way We Get By” or you know, we had a few songs that had that sort of “dun dun ka dun ka dun ka dun” kind of beat already and I just didn't want to, I wanted to move forward.

My other favorite part of the song is the flute solo at the end, which is very very very moody. That's Alex. All Alex dripped in reverb.

Alex Fischel: I had just gotten into Austin. Like it was the nighttime and they had been working for that day already. And I walked into the studio and Britt was like, “Can you do like a kind of like 1970s New York kind of solo on the outro here?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure” (laughs). Like, “I'll try it.” And I think like that solo that's on there is just the one that happened right then. But I just remember very vividly like walking in straight into that solo and feeling really good about it.

“Knock Knock Knock”

Britt Daniel: “Knock Knock Knock” started with, well, there's a song on Dark Side of the Moon with a similar kind of drum beat. And I remember hearing that and thinking, “I bet Jim would like playing drums on this song.” It just sounds like his thing. And so then I wrote a song with a similar beat so that Jim could have a song like that to play on. And then later on, we decided that Dave Fridmann should program the drums, but you do get to hear what Jim can do on a song like that on the band demo that you hear on the deluxe version. I really liked that version. I'd completely forgotten about it until, you know, we went looking for demos about six months ago and I was shocked how good that was. But Jim really goes to town on this song. It's a very moody piece.

Alex Fischel: “Knock Knock Knock,” there was a demo for that. Britt had like a phasery kind of drum machine on. And I think in Britt's mind, we were always going to replace that totally. And Dave said, “No” (laughs). “We're not going to do that.” And I was stoked cause I thought it sounded cool. That one Dave definitely had a big part of as well, like I remember a lot of the string stuff, like he would sit at his computer and he had like a little keyboard, you know, like a piano keyboard next to his computer keyboard, and he had all these samples pulled up and, you know, we had had the like majority of the song recorded at that point, and he was starting to put in these like really creepy strings throughout the song that really helped give it shape.

Britt Daniel: It was somewhat personal, yeah, definitely a friend who was addicted to something or other. And wrote that one in LA, where I was living at the time and feeling a bit, a bit trapped by this person. But you know, it really came together once we got it to Fridmann’s studio. Yeah Dave Fridman really did his thing, I mean, he really shaped this song up. It was a good song and at its core was a sturdy song, but he added all of these elements to it. That were just like, you know, the sort of the whispering, we call them “Whispering Satanists” that you hear, he had a, like a sound effect library of that or something there. He had all these sounds that he'd just been saving up that he never used on a record. He said, “What do you think about that? Putting this in there?” And I said, “Yeah, that's amazing.” Then there was the very far out guitar solos that kind of sound like a drill. You know, and the creepy strings that kind of zoom in and then drop out, fade away. And, you know, it was all very Fridmann.

Jim Eno: Dave is a master at that, you know, and I remember for the super loud guitar solo thing, like it's really just like screaming noise that is like clipped on the front and clipped on the back. You know, it just pops out of nowhere. We were going to track that part and I remember Dave just went into his pedal box and just grabbed, I don't know, it was like maybe 10 to 15 different pedals and just like laid them in the on the control room floor and just started hooking them all together. And then Britt's playing the guitar and he's just putting the sound through all the different pedals until he got the sound that's on the record, you know. I don't even know how many pedals we finally went through, but that's the kind of like fun experimentation that we did with Dave. He's very cool about that kind of stuff and very open to experimentation.

Alex Fischel: Those like guitar solos were very reminiscent of “Beast and Dragon” to me, where it was like these kind of skewed and messed up guitar solos that had a lot of emotion still to them, but weren't what you would traditionally call a guitar solo.

“Outlier”

Jim Eno: “Outlier,” yeah, so Eric Harvey and I decided to do like a little writing session. It was just me and him. And so we got together at my studio and we just came up with a bunch of like, drum, bass, and keyboard ideas. We did about three tracks and sent it over to Britt, and I guess we got lucky and he, you know, figured out something melodic to sing on top of it. So that's sort of how the song started.

Britt Daniel: Yeah, this one started I think as a sort of instrumental track, like a jam that Jim and Eric did together. I think maybe they were alone when they did this, which is totally unusual. I'd say that 95 percent of the songs that are Spoon songs start with me, either me or me and Alex working, you know, on our own. But this was nice to have been just handed this great, creepy track. Creepy, but like a great beat to it, you know? And I think that they came up with maybe four or five tracks during this session, and this is the one that I thought, “Okay, I can do something with this.”

This is one we recorded with Joe and Joe really wanted it to have a full on chorus, not the “nah, nah, nah, nahs,” you know, And I did try, I tried and tried and, but nothing beat the “nah, nah, nahs.”

Alex Fischel: I think there was like a bit of tension between Britt and Joe on that one perhaps. Nothing like insane, but I mean I agreed with Britt, like the song felt like it didn't need any more sections. And I think Joe was very much wanted there to be like a proper B section or something like that in the song. We never found anything that worked. I'm kind of glad we didn't because I like it just as it is, as this like hypnotic, monotonous rhythm that's going and flowing and flowing.

Britt Daniel: I like how it turned out to me. It was more of a mood piece, sort of like, there's this record by the Eurythmics, the soundtrack to 1984 that has a lot of instrumental tracks on it, or nearly instrumental tracks. And I kind of zoomed down that pathway when I was working on this one.

I was with my friend Emma who, we went to go see Garden State and she insisted that we leave. She was, you know, I think we saw about 30 minutes of it and she'd had enough (laughs). She just, it wasn't to her liking. And it was just a song about her. She had moved to Switzerland and I never got to see her anymore. She's happy in Switzerland, it’s great. But I miss Emma. It's the first song we worked on with Fridmann at this point, he was just going to be the mixer on the record. And I talked to him on the phone, but I'd never actually met him. And his studio is kind of out in the woods and a long way from Buffalo, the nearest biggest town. I flew out to Buffalo and I rented a car and I drove way out into the woods to his studio and let myself in and spent the night in this room. And then Dave came by the next morning and I met Dave for the first time and he just converted this song into this, you know, it was something that was kind of there and he turned it from something that was kind of there into something that was totally there. He created this sound world for it. And he was right, you know, he told me, even if he can't, at first he wasn't gonna produce the record and he said, “Even if I can't, I can really add something in the mixes,” and he really did. It was, he changed the form, he made it this sort of trippy, reversed a bunch of the vocals and use them as ambient elements and you know changed this verse goes here instead of here and, you know, he added a lot to it. And I loved it and I thought from the start, I was just like, “This relationship with Dave is definitely going to work.”

Alex Fischel: That was one that I wanted to like quote unquote do better than it did. I really liked that one. It's fun to play.

Britt Daniel: When we toured last year, I think we played, we played “Rent I Pay,” “Inside Out,” we played “Rainy Taxi,” we played “Do You,” we played “Knock Knock Knock.” I mean, I think we even played “Outlier.” So there's songs on here that are not going away.

“They Want My Soul”

Britt Daniel: “They Want My Soul,” I’m trying to remember, I think that the bassline came from, you know, that A.C. Newman first solo album he did? And there's a song called, “On the Table.” If you listen to that, there's some similarities there. But the song, I don't know where it came from. I’d totally forgotten about the Toni Braxton thing, but yeah, I think that I wrote the original, melody and chords and was pretty happy with them and then I realized, “Does this sound like, ‘You're Making Me High’ by Toni Braxton?” And so I set it aside for a bit because I thought maybe it was just too similar. You don't hear Toni Braxton on there, do you? It did start out as a sort of slower version, like that song. And I do love that song. But I think at that point, that was before I had the words. But yeah, it came around.

I had this title, “They Want My Soul.” That just seemed like a good song title to me. And then I wrote a song around it. Yeah, it was fun making that list. A list of people who want to steal my soul in one way or another. Different meanings of the word soul. That definitely happened with Transference where it was a reaction to, “This band has gotten bigger than we ever thought that we would get. We've done things we never thought we would do,” and so it was a little bit like, “We just never thought that we would this would ever happen.” And yeah, it just felt like we could do no wrong for one and also we just didn't know that we needed to do anything for anyone other than ourselves. That's where Transference came from. “Let's make a weird record. Let's make a record that, and we're going to produce it ourselves, and even if it doesn't succeed on every level that we've succeeded with records before, we're going to fall down in a way that's going to be really interesting.” I was happy with where I was at when I was making this record, I was happy to be working with Spoon again, and to be, you know, working with Jim and for the whole thing to feel new again with Alex brought in.

Yeah when I first met Alex, which was not too long before this record was made, he told me he could not play guitar, you know, and then yeah, he's playing a lot of solos (laughs). He's playing a lot of the guitar. Yeah definitely a rock and roll record.

Alex Fischel: That one. I definitely play guitar. And I remember that. Yeah in like the chorus sections. These like bigger chord things. Cause I remember being like, “Whoa, I'm playing guitar on a record” (laughs).

Jim Eno: This has that weird solo in it, doesn't it? Oh yeah. I just remember Dave editing that guitar solo at the end. You know, like how it's sort of glitchy and stuff. I remember Dave doing that and we're just like, “Go Dave. You have a vision, just, you know, go for it and we'll let you know if we like it.”

Yeah, he was cutting up the audio file and then he like was doing, I think there were some reverse things in there that swell up, you know. He's really good at like collages, soundscapes and things.

Britt Daniel: I think we recorded it as a regular guitar solo. And the thing I remember kind of going for was like an Undertones kind of vibe, if anything. You know, regular good old fashion guitar solo. And you know, the thing with Dave is he's not happy with that. Everything has to be a little bit more interesting than the first idea, you know? And so he is the one who cut it up and made it bounce from side to side and probably put some glitches in there, but it was originally just a regular very old fashioned rock and roll solo.

“I Just Don’t Understand”

Britt Daniel: That was a song that I didn't know and a friend of mine who was working with a blog asked me to do a cover of, I think it was all girl group covers, right? And she wanted me to do one. She gave me a few, a list of a few songs that we could do. And this is the one I picked. It was very much not intended to be a Spoon song or something that would go on this record, but it was due while I was working at Fridmann's place. And so it was another situation where Dave was in the main room working on something himself. And I said, “I've got, I think I might have an hour here. Maybe I should go try to record this cover for my friend's blog.” And so Jim was with me. Jim was on drums and I was on a, you know, Dave's grand piano back there in that back room, but yeah, very much just the idea of handing in a quickie cover, but very soon it just seemed too good to just only give away to that. It seemed like maybe it could fit on the record.

Jim Eno: This is cool because Dave had two control rooms basically. And he had one, the main control room with his console, but then he had another one on the other side of the house. It was just a large room, very live room. There's a grand piano in there. There's a Pro Tools system. So Britt just holed up in there and he would work on stuff and then we could transfer things back and forth. So it was a really good, like working environment because, you know, there's a lot of stuff that falls on Britt as far as like vocals and things like that so I just remember Britt was working on this song over in that other room and, you know, he had me come over and listen and then we just set up a mic. Man, I think it was like one mic or one or two mics in the room and we just recorded the drums in that room. That's why the drums sound a little bit different and then I left and he kept working on it. So it's cool because it was very mysterious, you know, like the tracks sounded great, I played drums on it and then I hear a little bit later and I'm like, “Oh man, this is, this is sick, man,” you know, so it's cool to see that process. Not being involved in or not being able to hear every little progression of the song, but just hearing the song at a later date, where you're like, “Oh wow, a lot of progress has been made, and it's really sounding amazing.”

Britt Daniel: She sent me the Ann Margaret version, and once I picked the song, then later I realized that the Beatles had covered it as well. I probably had heard that before, but I wasn't, it probably did kick in somewhere in the back of my mind, but I wasn't aware of it when I picked the song. It just happened real quick. It is quite different from the other songs on the record. I can see that now but at the time it seemed like, “This is what it needs. The record needs a song like this.”

“Let Me Be Mine”

Jim Eno: I mean, I love the feel of this track. I love the swing of it, you know. I just know that I'm pretty sure I was playing along with that loop. There's the loop that starts the song, which I think, I know Dave helped with that, but we needed it to be sort of filtered and small so then when the drums came in, the song would sort of open up and be bigger. So I'm wondering if this was the one, I know there was one where I played like practice pads, Dave recorded it and then filtered it all down. Could have been it. Let's go with that.

Britt Daniel: “Let Me Be Mine” started out as the demo that you hear on the deluxe version on the second disc. It was quite different from what you hear on the record. It was, you know, I think I just started with the beat for “Nightclubbing,” you know, and program that onto some rudimentary drum machine, and then got like a keyboard and ran the keyboard through a distortion pedal and just held down the keys for long notes. And that was how “Let Me Be Mine” was written. Just a very different thing from what you hear on the record. And I like that version. We call that, “The Nighttime Version.”

Alex Fischel: That was the first version of the song I heard. That was Britt's demo that he had made on his own. But yeah, it ended up being quite different from that doom synth version for sure.

Britt Daniel: It almost has a sort of like a “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” kind of guitar sound to it. You know, the (sings guitar riff) “ding, ding, ding, ding, ding,” which was a step in a totally different direction. I'm still not sure which version is better.

Alex Fischel: That one kind of felt like a big rock song to me as well in some way with those like big guitar stabs happening. I remember that Britt had like a few different versions of the chorus for that one and it took a second to settle down on.

Britt Daniel: I can't remember the lyrics on this one. It's been so long since we've done it. “Auction off what you love. It will come back sometime,” right? I think that the chorus is what, took the longest to get and we ended up with that, “You're going to take another chunk of me,” but I think that chorus is written maybe three or four times. I liked the “bathing beauties” part. That was more sort of poetic to me. “Bathing beauties lie down where I run,” that bit. But I think mostly I wasn't thrilled with the lyrics on this one. It was another thing where I think I got bored of it so it morphed and like a lot of songs on this record. And it's just always looking for a better way to do it.

“New York Kiss”

Britt Daniel: It's the oldest song on the record. I wrote “New York Kiss,” most of it for Gimme Fiction. So way back in, maybe 10 years before this record came out. And I had a way that I thought that the song should be played and I made a demo of it and brought it to Jim and we were working out our band version. And the demo has a four on the floor, you know, very dancey sort of (sings dance beat), that kind of kick drum. And Jim hates that kind of kick drum part. So we just couldn't come to an agreement on it. I kept saying, “Yeah, it really should have that, I do want it to have the sort of disco feel.” And Jim was sort of leaning more towards a rock feel. And so I said, “Okay, forget it. Let's not, let's not do it. I'll do it some other time, or I'll put it on a solo record or something.” So the solo record never happened. And many years later, I said, “Why don't we try this one again?” And that's how you get “New York Kiss” on a record 10 years later.

Jim Eno: You know, there's always challenges when we start a new Spoon record. I feel like, a lot of times our records have a lot of feel departures from previous records. So, for me, it's always challenging and fun to try to, you know, make those sound like Spoon.

Alex Fischel: That one felt very different too, like, “Inside Out” a little bit. It was very synthy and that felt very different.

Jim Eno: Some of this stuff with the keyboards is probably like, the Alex influence, you know, where it's like, “Hey, it needs something here. Let's, you know, pull out the Nord or one of Dave synths or something like that.”

Alex Fischel: I remember Eric (Harvey) came up with the like synth arpeggios and I thought those were awesome. And I played the like delayed Wurlitzer or something in the choruses, this little like counter melody to what Britt's singing. That one just felt really like locked in when we played it. I remember when we were recording it, it felt right.

Britt Daniel: I like the demo version. I think I like it a little bit more and, yeah, you asked about Dan Wilson and it was a thing where the song was written and it sat there for years and years, but I didn't have a way of, like it started off with a bang and then I just didn't know what to do with it after, you know, a chorus or two. He helped me, just sort of shape it right at the end. And I had met him through a mutual friend. When I was living in LA, he lives in LA and she had asked us to write together. We did write together and I think we came up with one song and then we also worked on just sort of finishing up this one.

Jim Eno: I didn't think this was the perfect closer. I didn't, I mean, I know a lot of people really like this song. It's not my favorite Spoon tune and usually we usually end our albums with something pretty damn good. And I think this one just didn't really ever come together for me. But it just fit at the end (laughs). I wanted “Rent I Pay” to be up front, I wanted “Inside Out” to be up up front and the record starts off pretty amazing. It's a great record, I just didn't think that it had a great last song and then we end up with “New York Kiss” being the last song. Well, that sounds kind of down doesn't it?

Alex Fischel: I loved that song. I still love that song. I wish we played it more honestly.

Britt Daniel: I get people telling me all the time how much they love “New York Kiss.” I think maybe my my opinion on it is tainted by the recording process and how it just didn't, you know, how you said it was a bit of an outlier and it's very very synthy. It just wasn't how I pictured it, but that's how it ended up. Just something about the process of it sits with me that taints my opinion of it. But at the core of it, there's a good song there.

Jim Eno: Well, I remember we were down to the wire and I think “Inside Out” was the last song we mixed but Dave does this thing where he sort of likes to work by himself for a while and then invites us in. It's a little bit nerve wracking because like we're not allowed to hear it and sometimes it takes him maybe like, I don't know seven hours or something before we can get into the control room. And so we're sort of sitting around like, “Okay, what's it gonna sound like?

Is it gonna be good?” And I remember we got into “Inside Out” and it was late and you know, we just had to like make a few changes and things like that. He was at a point maybe at that time, you know, where he was like, “If something doesn't have some distortion on it or saturation, it just doesn't feel right to me.” So that's why there is like a lot of subtle things happening I feel like in the mixes that has Dave's fingerprints all over it. And I would ask him like, “Hey where is that distortion coming from?” And he's like, you know, “I'm not exactly sure. I'm running it through this, and then it's going through this mono tape machine, you know, and then it's going back through this, and then I have this Shure mixer that I put it through.” So he's just like throwing it through stuff and hoping to create a cool vibe, and I feel like that's, you know, Dave and his experimentation.

Britt Daniel: Yeah, I felt really, really happy with this one when we were finished with it. Well, we didn't know for sure if we were going to get off of Merge, but it was an option. I mean, we always did one off deals with Merge, so we could always have gone and done it, done the next one with someone else. We were paying for all those records to be made ourselves. And this time, yeah, it happened. We'd had a good run with Merge and it was at least time to at least see what else was out there.

Jim Eno: You know, a lot of times we would sort of shop things around or just like send out where we were at to different labels. And I think we just felt like this would be an opportunity to maybe get, yeah, I don't know, try something different. I felt like that was part of it. A lot of this record was, “Let's just do something different, maybe.” So, you know, looking for a label where you feel like the people get you and can work the record well, I feel like that's important, you know? But we tend to, like, record and complete the record before we let people hear it, because we're the ones that control the sound of the record, and that's how we like to do it. For me, a lot of times records are influenced by how the recording process went. And, I mean, I feel like this was a super fun record to make. I feel like I was excited to get back out on the road after, you know, not releasing a Spoon record for a while. I feel like we were really proud of it. We felt like it was a great record. I remember just being really psyched about it.

Alex Fischel: Yeah, I was pretty thrilled. It was just like, I felt like it was a dream for me. It was like, you know, it was all I ever wanted to do. And I was doing it with people that like I had grown up listening to. So yeah, I was super excited, super proud. I had always, like, wanted to work with Dave, and got to go work with Dave at his studio, and, you know, I didn't know this at the time, but, you know, was going to continue working with him on other things in the future, and I was thrilled. I was buckling in, and now here I am, twelve years later.

Jim Eno: They Want My Soul, it sort of was like a sound departure, you know, but I feel like we were leaning into keyboards more, and Alex more, and then also Dave Fridmann's style is all over it. So I feel like it's good to switch things up especially when you have the number of records that that we've released, you know, and I do feel like this was a departure, but I think it's a great record.

Alex Fischel: I think there's like a shift in the sound a little bit. It maybe sounds a little bigger. You know, a lot of things changed, like it was a new producer, I was new. So there was probably like a freshness and an excitability to the whole process. They Want My Soul will always mark a really, specific and exciting time in my life where I was brought into this group and it changed everything.

Britt Daniel: They Want My Soul, it's one of our best records. And because we took that break and because we brought Alex Fischel into the band during that break, it sort of set the stage for everything that came after it. I don’t know if it’s us 2.0 or 3.0 or something, but it's the new version of the band and the band's capabilities. It was a real turning point.

Outro:

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Spoon. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase They Want My Soul, including the recent deluxe edition. Instrumental music by Charlie Don’t Shake. Thanks for listening.

Credits:

"Rent I Pay" - Produced by Dave Fridmann and Spoon

"Inside Out" - Produced by Dave Fridmann and Spoon

"Rainy Taxi" - Produced by Dave Fridmann and Spoon

"Do You" - Produced by Joe Chiccarelli and Spoon

"Knock Knock Knock" - Produced by Dave Fridmann and Spoon

"Outlier" - Produced by Joe Chiccarelli and Spoon

"They Want My Soul" - Produced by Joe Chiccarelli and Spoon

"I Just Don't Understand" - Produced by Spoon

"Let Me Be Mine" - Produced by Joe Chiccarelli and Spoon

"New York Kiss" - Produced by Joe Chiccarelli and Spoon

All songs written by Britt Daniel ©2014 Precious Fluids (BMI), except “Outlier” written by Daniel / Eno / Harvey ©2014 Sell the House Sell the Car Sell the Kids (BMI) / Top to Tail (BMI) / Infernal Revenue (ASCAP)

All songs mixed by Dave Fridmann, except “I Just Don’t Understand” and “Let Me Be Mine,” which were mixed by Mike McCarthy.

Recorded at Sunset Sound (Los Angeles), Public Hi-Fi (Austin), Tarbox (Cassadaga) and the Catacomb

Engineered by Dave Fridmann, Joe Chicarelli, Jim Eno, Britt Daniel, Brad Bell, Matt Gerhard and Graham Hope

Mastered by Howie Weinberg

Episode Credits:

Intro/Outro Music:

“Julie Money” by Charlie Don’t Shake from The South Will Take Your Blues Away

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam