A newly released demo of Spoon’s “Inside Out” points to the band’s earlier era — and shows the evolution of the track. In this simpler form, it sounds closer to Spoon’s more straightforward music on their breakthrough records, Girls Can Tell or Kill the Moonlight.
Britt Daniels plays the piano on the demo, crooning the lyrics with a little bit of grit in his voice. The whole thing lasts less than two minutes, as opposed to the album track, which was one of the longest on the record.
When Spoon put out They Want My Soul five years ago, “Inside Out” was one of the highlights. It’s a deeply textured song, which the band built from layer after layer of synthesizer, emulating strings and Asian-sounding harps. Frontman Britt Daniel’s lyrics about love’s fragile nature seemed to float atop the hypnotic orchestrations.
Daniel talked about the song earlier this year for an installment of Rolling Stone’s “My Life in 15 Songs” franchise, where he explained how the band built out the arrangement. “A lot of that was Alex [Fischel], who was fully in the band by that point, and what he can do on keyboards,” Daniel said. “I wrote the song on piano, played it for my girlfriend at the time. She was not impressed, but I was like, ‘Something is happening here.’ That piano part ended up being what Alex played with the harp sound.”
He also explained what the song meant to him: “The lyrics are a combination of that law of physics that says ‘Time gets distorted when there’s intense gravity’ and how that related to this relationship I was in, and what that meant in a breakup. That relationship gravity that pulls people together.”
To mark the release of their “best of” comp, Everything Hits at Once, earlier this year, Spoon are slowly rolling out rare versions of the songs on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next month. They’ve previously released recording session footage of Gimme Fiction’s “My Mathematical Mind” and a live performance of that same album’s “I Summon You.”