Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
For Spoon’s Britt Daniel, Prince is the one influence that reigns
After Prince died in April of last year, Britt Daniel bought a mammoth collection of unreleased Prince songs off eBay. The fidelity wasn’t always great and its origins were questionable, but to the Spoon frontman, a Prince superfan since he was a preteen, it was everything. The set, housed on a whopping 160 CD-Rs, contained tracks from 1980 to 1987, arguably Prince’s peak recording years. Daniel would listen to it all the time on the drive to the studio to record his band’s latest album, “Hot Thoughts.”
When Daniel was 11, a friend left a copy of Prince’s 1982 album “1999” at his house. “The first thing I noticed, I liked the songs on the radio, but my friend came over and played me the deep cuts that had all the dirty words on it. ‘Let’s Pretend We’re Married,’ that blew my mind. I’d never heard anything like that. And of course as a kid, you gravitate toward that, you want to hear that part over and over again. You want to get away with listening to it without your parents walking into the room.”
After that, Daniel bought every Prince album on release day. “I remember when ‘Purple Rain’ came out, thinking: ‘OK. Ehh, well, this guy.’ I thought he was great, but I didn’t think he was a superstar. It seemed weird to me that that guy had his own movie, but then that movie came out, and that made him huge. When ‘Parade’ came out, I went to the record store the day it came out, the same with ‘Sign o’ the Times.’ The first one I was a bit disappointed in was ‘Lovesexy.’”
Daniel, 46, began playing guitar in high school and made his way through a series of bands before forming Spoon in 1993. He learned early on that to love Prince was not necessarily to want to emulate him. Spoon has been known to cover Prince’s “Under the Cherry Moon” and his early classic “Partyup,” but they otherwise leave his music alone. “It’s not entirely in my wheelhouse,” Daniel admits. Prince songs, like Beatles songs, aren’t flexible, living things; they’re vast, immovable objects that don’t leave much room for anybody else. They can only be admired.
“A lot of me appreciating Prince is me appreciating him purely as a fan,” Daniel says. “He does a lot of things I know I wouldn’t attempt to do. I’m not going to do a dance at the solo of ‘Little Red Corvette’ and do the splits; I’m just not made that way. I’m too gangly at this point.”
Daniel always did love Prince’s falsetto, which he employs sporadically throughout his own catalogue. “I kind of always had it in the back of my mind that if I do a song where it’s all falsettos, then that’ll be a hit.”
Spoon was deep into the recording of “Hot Thoughts” the day Prince died. Daniel heard the news at lunch. “I showed up at the studio and saw everybody, and I just shook my head. I thought, I don’t know how we’re going to get any work done today, and we didn’t.”
The last time Daniel saw Prince live was in 2013, at a Samsung-sponsored club show at the South by Southwest festival in Austin. It was one of Prince’s marathon gigs, and Daniel was pretty tired; he left before it was over. “I don’t feel good about that,” he says. “He was amazing. It was a nice, small room, it was a great way to see him. He was dancing; it was a full-on show.”