The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
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