The Beast and Dragon, Adored

Spoon lead singer Britt Daniel told Pitchfork the story behind the opening track to Gimme Fiction: "I had the idea for a title: 'The Beast and Dragon, Adored.' That was supposed to be the album title, actually. Since it was one of the last songs we recorded for Gimme Fiction, the idea was that I would go back and mention as many of the other songs on the record in the song. So it mentions 'I Summon You.' 'Learning my scene' was from 'The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine.' In a way, it was also just a song about the making of the record, because we'd been away for a long time and I had gone down to Galveston, Texas, and done writing by the seawall. I had to find this feeling. It was a really hard record to make. I had writer's block during part of it. Maybe it was because it was the first time we'd really had some success. It felt different. Maybe I got distracted. There were a lot of late nights in Austin. The beast and dragon were in the title of some French piece of art from the 16th century. They were signs of the apocalypse, and I had grown up hearing a lot about the apocalypse. My dad is Catholic, and my mom is non-denominational Protestant. My parents split up when I was 8, so I would go to the Catholic church with my dad and the Protestant church with my mom. Once I went off to school, I wasn't going to church anymore, but my parents kept me at it as long as they could."

The band practiced their stealth skills when they needed a grand piano. Daniel explained: "We had more of a budget than before but we still didn't have access to a grand piano, and 'The Beast And Dragon, Adored' needed one. So we did the thing I'd done a few years earlier for Girls Can Tell where I snuck into the piano lab at the University of Texas music building. They have all these soundproof rooms, maybe 50 of them, with pianos for music students to come and practice on, and nobody guarding them. So me and Mike [McCarthy, producer] took some mics and mic stands and snuck in."