Last week, Spoon’s triumphant third album Girls Can Tell — the LP where the band truly found its style and hit its stride — turned 20. For fans of the band, that anniversary is the big one. For the members of the band, it seems like it’s pretty big, too. The band spent years recording Girls Can Tell on their own, spending years obsessively honing it, after they’d been dropped from their short-lived major-label deal. If you’d been through something like that, and if you’d translated the experience into a classic album, then you might also use its 20th anniversary as an occasion for some reflection.

In a new statement, Spoon frontman Britt Daniel talks a bit about Girls Can Tell and how much it means to the band:

Girls Can Tell was the Hail Mary pass that absolutely no one thought was gonna find a receiver. It was the record where the colors changed, trains collided, and suddenly we sounded a lot more like us than we’d ever sounded before. At the time it felt like a last chance and it also felt like the last gasp of youth, which seems a little funny now considering how shaped it was by oldies radio, the Supremes, the Kinks, and Eleanor Friedberger’s cassette of Get Happy. The big idea behind Girls Can Tell was to take stock of the band’s MO from inception until that point, to carefully consider all the things we’d been trying to do and the way we’d been doing them, and then set out specifically to avoid all of it. To instead come up with some new songs that were actually about where I was at and how I was feeling! Songs that knew no cool rules. Songs that cried themselves to sleep at night and got up and shook themselves by the collar the next morning. It was the record that sorted out how much fight we had left in us. It came out February 20, 2001.

Today, Spoon have shared their original demo for “Lines In The Suit,” one of the best tracks from Girls Can Tell. Britt Daniel recorded it at home in 1999, two years before the album came out, when the song itself was only half an hour old. The solo-acoustic version of “Lines In The Suit” doesn’t have the sparse architecture of the finished take on the song, but you can already hear the pinched swagger in it. Check it out below.

And here’s the version that Spoon released on Girls Can Tell:

Daniel has also shared a Girls Can Tell playlist — “all the tracks from the album plus songs I was obsessed with and forcing on my bandmates at the time.” That playlist has stuff like Elvis Costello, the Everly Brothers, the Crystals, and the Beatles, and you can check it out below.