Hey, it’s post number 800 of this series. That’s decent. That’s a big number. Nice that it arrives close to the 8-year anniversary of this entire blog. I’ve been doing this for so long, geez. But we keep going, no stopping this train.

‘Mammal’ is the fifth track on They Might Be Giants’ fourth album, Apollo 18. I think it’s one of the most subtle tracks by the band you’ll ever hear. It just goes along in its own way, with John Linnell’s vocal really being the main melodic point. The programmed rhythm section is very steady, and there’s an organ that fills the soundscape. John Flansburgh’s guitar lines enter here and there. All in all, there’s no instrumental aspect that would make your head spin. I think it may be because the lyrics concern a very broad topic. Life. Humans and animals, how we’re similar to one another and what not.

I’ve been listening to this podcast where two guys are talking about They Might Be Giants, album-by-album, track-by-track in great detail. It’s a good one. They covered ‘Mammal’ in an episode. In it, they talk about why John Linnell may have written a song like this. From what I gathered, it’s because the animal aspect of it is something that no one really wants to learn about, and yet here they are having to listen to a song about them. It also gets mistaken to be an educational song which sometimes annoys Linnell, but people have used the lyrics to answer exam questions in the past, so it is to a very small extent. Sort of.