Anyone who’s ever made a mix for a friend knows how hard it is to distill your favorite band’s output down to a bite-sized 10 songs or so.
Spoon faced the same predicament when it came time to compile “Everything Hits at Once,” its new greatest-hits album.
“It wasn’t an easy process,” Spoon frontman Britt Daniel tells The Post. “It was hard narrowing it down from how many ever songs we have, 103 or something, down to 12. You gotta think about what this is about, and it’s about being a brief introduction to the band.”
The Austin, Texas, band boiled nine albums and 25 years down to 12 tracks — plus one new song, “No Bullets Spent” — for the compilation. Daniel said some parts of the band’s catalog jumped out at him while he was selecting the songs.
SpoonZackery Michael “I went and listened to all the records, and there were albums that stood out to me. One in particular, I remember thinking that ‘Girls Can Tell,’ wow, that was really a moment, that was a great record. I just hadn’t listened to it the whole way through in so long, I had just been sort of sampling,” he says of the 2001 album. “Every now and then you hear something somewhere, but to sit down and listen to that album, I hadn’t done it in so many years, it really struck me as — it was a turning point for us. It’s just a great record through and through, and for sure there were certain songs I heard come up and thought, ‘why don’t we play that one live?’
“Then there’s a song like ‘The Infinite Pet,’ which I heard back, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, OK,’ ” he says with a laugh.
Spoon announced last month that bassist Rob Pope, who was with the band since 2006, was leaving and would be replaced by Ben Trokan in time for a summer tour co-headlined by Beck and Cage The Elephant. The tour comes to Forest Hills Stadium on Saturday.
“We got two of them last year that we turned down, and I’m glad we did because then this one came up,” Daniel said of other package tours. “I can’t tell you who it was, that would be insulting. We did get offered a couple of tours for this summer last year, and I kept saying, ‘Nah, we probably should work on new music,’ but this one came up, and Matt [Shultz] from Cage called me himself and invited me, and I thought that was a classy move.”
When the tour wraps up, Spoon will get back to work on an album of new material, the follow-up to 2017’s “Hot Thoughts.” Daniel describes the new music as “a little more spontaneous sounding, a little more rock ‘n’ roll,” but adds with a chuckle, “maybe we’ll make a dub record.” He said they should be done with it by the end of the year.
From its founding in 1993 through the mid 2000s, Spoon built a fan base on the back of touring and strong reviews. Commercial success eventually caught up, with three straight albums — “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” (2007), “Transference” (2010) and “They Want My Soul” (2014) — making Billboard’s top 10.
“I think when people hear the music, they like it,” Daniel says. “We’re the kind of band that people know is going to put out a record that you kind of need to listen to. It’s gonna be good. It’s not as much about a temporary thing with a hit single, it’s not as much about a thing that’s a temporary style. It’s the real deal.”
