Girls Can Tell is the third studio album by American indie rock band Spoon. Intended as a stylistic departure from the band's previous work, Girls Can Tell features classic rock and new wave influences absent on their major label albums. The album was released on Merge Records on February 20, 2001. Spoon frontman Britt Daniel described the album as "a turning point stylistically, and it was a turning point in terms of us being able to put out a record and not feeling like as soon as it came out the wheels fell off the cart." Girls Can Tell, up to December 2009, has sold slightly fewer than 100,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Background After the band was dropped from their major record deal with Elektra in August 1998, Spoon finished the first version of Girls Can Tell in May 1999 with ten songs. Spoon frontman Britt Daniel moved to New York for a change of pace from Austin and to work temp jobs while drummer Jim Eno, stayed in Austin, designing semiconductor chips. Despite Daniel thinking the album was the band's best, the band's lawyer and manager reported no interest in the record week after week, a personal low point for Daniel. He later described the record as the band's hardest to record, given the emotional toll of his indigence, lack of external interest in the record, and the length of time it took to create. Daniel thought this emotional vulnerability came across in the record. The only interest came from Mike McCarthy, who would come to produce the record's second incarnation, and Matador Records's Gerard Cosloy. The second version reworked "Anything You Want" and "Take a Walk", removed the band's spurned songs about their Elektra A&R rep, and added "Everything Hits at Once", "Believing Is Art", and "10:20 AM". After writing more songs, Daniel and producer Mike McCarthy returned to Austin and began working on a new album in Eno's garage studio. The band eventually signed with Merge to release the new album, entitled Girls Can Tell. According to Daniel, Girls Can Tell was intended to be a departure from the band's established style: "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 to