#1358: Nick Drake – Things Behind the Sun

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It always comes back to Pink Moon. There have been a few “last songs from an album” posts around recently. After this, there’s only one more to come from Pink Moon. Any fan of it will be able to correctly guess what song that post will be for. But for now, this one’s for ‘Things Behind the Sun’. The track is the longest one on Nick Drake’s third and final studio album, positioned right in the middle of it, acting more as the closing number for the LP’s first half before you’d flip the vinyl around and listen to the second. Even back when I first heard the track in late, late 2012, it did feel like I was listening to what was meant to be considered the record’s most poignant moment. This and the preceding instrumental, ‘Horn’, together make up a one-two punch of poignancy. They both sounded so much sadder than anything else than the numbers that came before. But then again, I think ‘Horn’ acts as more of the tone setter, the moment of quiet reflection before the storm of ‘Things…’ begins soon after.

Not like ‘Things…’ is this wild, raucous rock number or anything. It’s just as acoustic as everything else the album delivers. It’s a storm in terms of the tone… there’s something uneasy, disquieting about it. It’s probably the minor key it’s in for the verses. That would do it. ‘Things Behind the Sun’ sees Drake detail his disillusionment with his musical endeavours. He goes out to perform, but he doesn’t trust the people who go and watch him. And as he goes about his way, observing people on his idle travels, he sees how they act and concludes that there’s no point in trying to win their hearts with his music – the likelihood is they won’t listen anyway. It seems to me that this is a track – another being ‘Harvest Breed’ – where he more or less implies that he won’t be around for much longer, or at least has thought about the end of his life, but doesn’t want to “name the day” on which it happens or reveal that he’s tried to end it before. So until then, where the more sprightly, happier chord progressions come in, he’ll take his time, find delight in the dark humour he appreciates that makes other people frown and generally keep to himself with his head down while he carries on feeling depressed. He’s comfortable in his state of dejection. It’s all very bittersweet.

And just like almost everything other song on Pink Moon. the track is provided to you solely by Nick Drake with his weary vocal and fingerpicked acoustic guitar. Goes to show how much you can do with so little. One thing I’ve always liked about this tune is how rhythmic Drake’s playing style is. He sort of skips around from one chord to the next throughout, playing a root note or two in between. It really shows during the guitar break halfway through when he jumps higher and higher with the progression before dipping back downwards again and repeating the process again. I’ve always thought this and ‘Which Will’ – which if you didn’t guess, will be the next song – both had a rhythm that could have been infused into a hip-hop track of some kind easily, which I guess would be sacrilege to some for weird reasons, but it’s just how I feel. Then Kendrick Lamar used a re-recorded sample of ‘Things…’ in one of his own songs – unreleased, mind you – and my point was proven. But overall, it’s disheartening to listen Drake’s track and hear how let down he was by the fact – and it was a fact at the time – that his music wasn’t going anywhere, not making him the big star that he wanted to be and that people told him he could be. It happened eventually, people love his music now. If only he’d stuck around.

#1357: They Might Be Giants – They’ll Need a Crane

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‘They’ll Need a Crane’. A TMBG classic right here. It’s another track of theirs I came to know through Launch.com. Whenever it played on the radio, it was always listed as being on the band’s Dial-A-Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants compilation rather than the studio album it originated from. Same went for ‘Ana Ng’, ‘Cowtown’, and ‘Purple Toupee’ on the one occasion I think it played on there. Cue to many Christmases and birthdays when I asked for that compilation but never got it. I think it was a rare one to get over here in the UK. But unlike ‘They Might Be Giants’ where I heard the song once and didn’t hear it again until years later, ‘They’ll Need a Crane’ also had its music video – featuring two young Johns and a band of distinguished old fellas playing and rowing boats in Battery Park, New York City – available to view on the site’s video service. So, if the 2004 broadband connection was good, I could watch that whenever I wanted.

‘…Crane’ is on the band’s second album, Lincoln, the 14th track on there, and another by the band to tackle what you can consider to be an emotionally heavy subject – a tragic breakup – with catchy, upbeat music. Linnell sings about the situation of “Lad” and “Gal”. The two are together, but there’s a sadness lingering in the relationship that takes a toll. Gal sometimes says things to Lad that hurts Lad’s feelings. An argument is depicted in the song’s minor-key bridge where Gal walks away from Lad in frustration after the latter suggests to go to a restaurant where “the other nightmare people like to go”. And by the final verse, they’ve gone their separate ways with Lad looking at other women and Gal drowning her sorrows with Jim Beam whiskey. The whole situation’s likened to the destruction and gradual reconstruction of a building, both aided by the metaphorical crane that’s referred to in the song’s title.

‘They’ll Need a Crane’ has one of those melodies you feel you must have heard before somewhere. When I first heard the song way, way back, I thought it was one I knew like the back of my finger. I would have been eight, but I think I had a grasp of what a good song sounded like at that somewhat negligible age. The tune’s from 1988, but it’s like it should have been around for much longer. Gotta thank John Linnell once again for this one. And John Flansburgh too, because why not. Only makes sense that the song was released as a single during the band’s Lincoln era in February 1989, four days before Valentine’s Day, funnily enough. I don’t think that’s coincidental. The band played the track for their network television debut on Late Night with David Letterman around the same time. But I’m gonna embed a 2011 performance of it just for comparison’s sake with the music video at the top.

#1356: They Might Be Giants – They Might Be Giants

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The song ‘They Might Be Giants’ by the band They Might Be Giants is another by the group that I discovered at a very early age, one that stuck with me for the longest while, and then eventually one that I sort of revisited while also going into it with fresh ears years down the line. If you’ve read another They Might Be Giants post on here where I’ve mentioned this website Yahoo! used to run back in the day called Launch.com, the story there is very much the same here. That was the site that introduced me to They Might Be Giants when I was eight years old or something. I frequently used the internet radio service on there, tracks by TMBG would show up at the same kind of rate, and a lot of the time I liked what I was hearing. ‘They Might Be Giants’ was one of ’em. Heard it in 2004. Didn’t get to listening to the album it was on until 2010. I was always asking for TMBG compilations in those six years for gifts with little success. So when I discovered the art of downloading in 2009-10, I went to town.

The band’s self-admitted theme song was written much earlier than 1990 when it was released on the band’s third album Flood, their major-label debut on Elektra Records. John Flansburgh and John Linnell had initially recorded it in 1985 for possible inclusion on what was to be their self-titled debut record, but left it off thinking the theme song on the first album would be ‘too weird’, and thought about recording it for their second album Lincoln too. When it came time to making Flood, the band were now on a major-label, they enlisted seasoned producers to help them, they had the bigger budget, and they had the, I assume, better equipment for the recording process. So it only made sense to revisit ‘They Might Be Giants’ with all this at hand. But even still, Flansburgh recalled it being an incredibly complicated piece to put together again because of the elements contained within the music. Particularly on the vocal front. There’s a lot of ’em.

I think I once watched an interview with the two Johns where one of them explained their band name as a remark someone might say upon looking out of a window and seeing these strange presences in the distance. “Hmm, they might be giants”. Along those lines. So ‘They Might Be Giants’ explores peculiar alternatives that these presences might, ranging from in-jokes like “Dr. Spock’s back-up band” to the nonsensical “rain” or “heat” to the possibly conclusive answer of “big, big, fake, fake lies”. John Flansburgh takes lead vocal. John Linnell provides a lot of the backing. Not sure who between the two delivers the deep “Boy” vocalizations. I’m thinking Linnell. The “Hang on tight” samples are from a self-improvement cassette tape the band acquired for a miniscule amount of money. Everyone’s chanting ‘They Might Be Giants’ by the song’s end, and by the sound of the sudden vocal change, the actual giants might be getting involved too. It’s a triumphant number, and also acts as a bit of a call-out to their fans. You see, with the major-label move, there were those that were worried that the band were gonna change. Sell out, as they would say. Their theme song placement was a tactical move of reassurance that they weren’t. At least not for a while.

#1355: The Who – They Are All in Love

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This marks another instance that an album will be represented for the last time on here too. I’ve covered three tracks from The Who by Numbers before, and the presence of ‘They Are All in Love’ today makes it the fourth and final one. Only a third of the album, if my calculations are correct. But even though I may only find that fraction of the record enjoyable to a degree that I’d want to hear it over and over, I’d listen to the thing the whole way through if someone, anyone, out there were to put it on. The lyrical themes are a bit of a downer. It wasn’t labelled ‘Pete Townshend’s suicide note’ by a critic just for show. But if you just want a good rock album with no constructed concept and strong performances, …by Numbers isn’t a bad shout. Out of all those old ’70s rock bands to exist, you may as well go to The Who if that’s the particular type of record you’re looking for. They don’t do too bad on the concept side either.

I remember really not rating ‘They Are All in Love’ when I went through …by Numbers the first time in about 2012 or so. The waltz timing and the dainty piano among everything else on the album made it stick out like a sore thumb. Made it difficult for me to take it seriously, so I never gave it that much attention. But as the years have gone on and I’ve relistened here and there, I’m at the point now where I’ve realised that the tune is essential to the themes of frustration and irrelevancy that thread through the album. When John Entwistle’s half-joking take on getting into the music business with ‘Success Story’ is finished, we zip back to Pete Townshend’s problems with ‘…in Love’. He finds himself being the outsider to pretty much everything that surrounds him and succumbs to his feelings of irrelevancy as he becomes the old man – at the age of 30 – in the young man’s game of rock and roll. When he writes (and Roger Daltrey sings) “Where do you walk on sunny times” or “Where do you fit in (blows raspberry) magazine”, he’s really asking himself “Where do I etc etc.” As a writer, you’ve got to address the audience in some way, and with the second-person narrative, he does easily. But it makes it the more hard-hitting when he switches to first-person in the final verse with the lines, “Goodbye all you punks, stay young and stay high / Hand me my chequebook and I’ll crawl off to die.” It’s a sucker punch.

So who’s the ‘They’ that are in love as the harmonies so delicately lay out in the choruses? To me, I don’t think it matters. ‘They’ could be anyone. The main implication from the lyric is that while everyone else is in love, Townshend on the other hand, isn’t, with anyone or anything. And no one’s loving him either. A downer, to say the least. And this carries on until the album’s end where he tries to force himself into liking the simple things in life while feeling like rubbish (‘Blue, Red and Grey’) and contemplates who he can really trust in his personal life (‘How Many Friends’) to the point where he flat out states he’s lacking direction (‘In a Hand or a Face’). Might be one of the most overlooked streaks on a Who album, those last four tracks on …by Numbers. So it goes to show the 17-year-old I was in 2012, underneath the unserious-sounding music lay a strong song that was actually very serious in its lyrics. The sprightly piano on here is easily the highlight, brought to you everyone’s go-to session musician Nicky Hopkins. He carries everything with those fingers.

#1354: They Might Be Giants – Thermostat

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This entry for They Might Be Giants’ ‘Thermostat’ makes it the last representative from the band’s 1994 John Henry album that’ll ever appear on this blog. Makes it nine songs from there in total, just less than half the overall number. We had a good run. One of the first tracks I ever covered here was from there, it goes back a long way. Speaking from my own point of view as They Might Be Giants fan, I know John Henry is a big fan favourite. Mine, not so much. Maybe in the middle somewhere for me, which in a discography of 23 studio albums doesn’t mean all that much. I have my favourites on there, but I’m never compelled to listen to the thing from front to back. It was the first one made after Johns Flansburgh and Linnell expanded their duo setup into a full band with a real bass guitarist and drummer. They sounded like a proper rock band, but it feels like there’s a little less variety. A lot of horn sections on display throughout, if you feel any way about those.

And talking about horn, there’s quite the presence of them on ‘Thermostat’. Unlike a few other numbers from John Henry – ‘Meet James Ensor’, ‘Destination Moon’, ‘AKA Driver’, which I’d known of since at least 2004 through a different set of circumstances – ‘Thermostat’ was one I came across when I was properly getting into the band’s discography in 2010/2011. Was really into my pirating albums from various websites phase around that time. Streaming wasn’t around, it’s all you could do. Anyone remember mp3crank.com? Going off-topic. As the 16th track on a 20-track album, ‘Thermostat’ comes at a point where, on any other album, you would probably be wandering how the whole package would end. But luckily, the song keeps things rolling to keep your focus going. I think, initially, it was its chorus and melody that caught my attention. The act of controlling the temperature on a thermostat is sung to you by John Linnell quite comprehensively. The fact that it’s about a faulty thermostat in a car that’s in the process of crashing didn’t set in till a bit later.

What I’d consider to be the focal point of the entire track is Linnell’s vocal and melody. He’s such a master of the latter, I don’t know how he does it. Like, he uses an entirely different melody for the second verse than the first. That’s not something you get a lot. But then there are other aspects in ‘Thermostat’ that I pick out and think, “Hey, that’s quite cool’. Like how John Flansburgh plays only three notes on his guitar that ring out during the choruses. How the chorus itself is technically in 10/4 timing. Or that slight phasing effect on Linnell’s voice during its last moments. It’s a solid album tune. The song hasn’t been played live by TMBG since 1995. I don’t know if that means something. I think people would get a kick out of hearing it, even if it might not be considered to be the biggest highlight. But I know if there’s any group of people out there who appreciate their favourite group’s deep cuts, it’s They Might Be Giants fans.