ACL Interview: Divine Fits

Red River flipped on end last August when Spoon frontman Britt Daniel, who'd headlined festivals and played venues as large as Madison Square Garden, pulled into town and plugged into the soundboard at Beerland.

Capped at 150, the show doubled as the smallest public (and Austin) crowd to assemble in Daniel's presence this millennium. And it wasn't Spoon, either. Rather, Daniel had joined with Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner, New Bomb Turks drummer Sam Brown, and keyboardist Alex Fischel in Divine Fits, and they played songs no one had heard. A Thing Called Divine Fits on Merge Records didn't see release until later that month.

"There are very few chances that I'll get to do that again in my life, so I really enjoyed it – for every moment that I could," says Daniel of those first Fits shows. "I feel like I learned a lot. I learned how easy it can be to be in a band, and how much fun it is to lean on people."

Thirteen months later, the sometimes Austinite says the experience helped ready him for another run with Spoon. The local heroes return for an eighth studio album this fall, then head out on tour. After that, he'll reconvene with the Fits for another album.

"The great thing about having these two bands is that they're different," he says. "I'm mostly playing a different instrument in each one, and in one of them, I'm not writing all the words and singing all the songs. I like both. I like being able to go back and forth between the two.

"I've done it one way for so long. I'm just looking for a new experience."

Check out part two of our Divine Fits interview.