Tag Archives: apollo 18

#1429: They Might Be Giants – Turn Around

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At some point, on this blog, things will always come back around to They Might Be Giants. Unlike two days ago’s post, the songs of TMBG have probably been in every letter series on this place. I’d have to check, but it’s probably a safe bet. There’s still a few left to go on here on their part, but it’s the last time a song, specifically from the band’s fourth album Apollo 18, will be appearing. Those first four albums where Johns Linnell and Flansburgh performed exclusively as a duo mark a little golden era in the band’s history. Apollo 18 was the last of that tetralogy. The two Johns self-produced it. Kinda sees them testing the waters of what it would sound like to be a real, full-sound, rock band ensemble, with their usual synthetic rhythm section sounding at its most authentic here, boosting the energy and atmosphere on songs like ‘Dig My Grave’ and ‘See the Constellation’. But of course, you still get those numbers in between that remind you you’re still listening to a They album. And I think it’s fair to say ‘Turn Around’ counts as one of them.

My own experience with the tune starts at a very simple place. Behind the old family Vista computer, sometime in 2010, when listening through Apollo 18 for the first time. And I don’t think it was a revisit on another day that got me thinking, “Hmm. This ‘Turn Around’ song is actually pretty good.” I think I understood it there and then on the first go. Though that might just be me wanting to sensationalize things and make a good story. I’m fairly certain that’s how it went down. If you hear the song, it’s pretty understandable as to why it would be a first-time listen, “Oh, yeah” moment. It’s really easy to sing along to/memorise. Once you get down the melodies of the first verse and chorus, you’re pretty much set for the rest of the song’s duration. John Linnell takes the lead vocal, safe to assume he wrote the thing. On ‘Turn Around’, he addresses a theme that’s a popular one in a stream of TMBG songs. The theme of death. Each verse sees an unsuspecting narrator confronted by a spectre, who then tell the respective narrators to “turn around” and look at an actual human skull on the ground behind them. Now, imagine if that happened to you in real life. You’d be reasonably spooked. But the spookiness depicted in the song is very much undermined by the swinging, jaunty tempo and the generally chipper way the music is delivered.

This is a big aside, but lately I’ve been wondering… did John Linnell hear Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ one day, maybe laugh, have a little joke about it and then proceed to write his own song based around it? ‘Cause the way the “turn arounds” are sung in both numbers are very, very similar. I think a key’s difference. Maybe I’m just a loony. Whatever the origin of inspiration, it doesn’t stop the fact that They Might Be Giants’ ‘Turn Around’ is an earworm-and-a-half. An early recording of the track is just made of the chorus looping endlessly. Say we lived in a world where Apollo 18’s ‘Turn Around’ didn’t exist and there was just a vacant melody to hum to yourself while you’re busy doing other things. That chorus alone would do me fine, could probably sing that for the rest of the day. I am glad that it was further worked on and became the song it is. I can’t imagine it without that plinking guitar line Flansburgh executes during the choruses or the dramatic entry of the extra Linnell harmonies and blasting saxophone for the last verse and chorus. They all take the track to that little upper level. Plus, I don’t think I would have ever known of the word ‘obsequious’ if it wasn’t for its use in the lyrics.

#1283: They Might Be Giants – The Statue Got Me High

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I could probably say that ‘The Statue Got Me High’ goes down as one of my favourite songs by They Might Be Giants. There was a short, very brief time when I didn’t get it that much. And that was when I was about 10 and watching the music video for the first time, on the Internet, on Yahoo’s old music service website. I don’t know what it was, there’s a lot of stuff happening in the music video and the song itself is quite busy in its structure and momentum too. I think it was all too much my little, tiny head to take in. But fast forward about five years to late 2010 when I was downloading the band’s albums and got to Apollo 18, ‘Statue’ started playing and I was into it almost immediately. I think it was the first time I’d heard the track since the attempt those years prior, but it felt like it should have been a certified favourite for all of that time.

Another TMBG track mainly written by John Linnell, ‘Statue’ is about a man who stares at a monument until his head explodes. And that’s pretty much the gist of it. There’s something about the wording of the song title that seems kinda clumsy about it. A sentence like “it got me” isn’t one you hear in everyday situations. But how Linnell sings it is where it becomes very convincing as a phrase. It’s like he’s shouting it from the highest rooftop and wants everyone to know about the situation he’s in. Or the narrator, whatever. It’s a song where I very much enjoy Linnell’s vocal performance. It’s one where he’s belting out the notes from his chest one moment and then singing in a standard baritone, sort of mirror the intensity/moments of relaxation in the music, all while maintaining these glorious melodies and recording these harmonies and backing vocals that add these layers of substance. As much as I like all the instruments behind them all, I think this song’s massive strength is in that vocal work. All so jubilant and earwormy, in general.

I want to say that I read somewhere that Linnell had a daydream depicting this scene and was inspired enough to write a song about it. Though, I may be making that up. I guess that’s how most songwriters fulfill their craft. They make up scenarios and write songs about them. But sometimes I think about how John Linnell can write songs like ‘Four of Two’ or ‘My Man’. And it’s like, yeah, maybe he just has daydreams about a person strangling themselves to death while looking at a clock, or another person suffering from spinal paralysis, and has an urge to write about them. Even the song ‘Unrelated Thing’ is about a woman daydreaming in the middle of a tremendously boring date. They’re not your typical song topics, but that’s what sets the Giants apart from nearly everyone else. And a large majority songs usually turn out good too. I just don’t know how they do it.

#1255: They Might Be Giants – Space Suit

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If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you’ll have noticed the Giants’ stuff being a frequent occurrence here. I like their music a lot, to put it simply. 1992 marked the year that John Linnell and John Flansburgh had been playing together as the band known as They Might Be Giants for a decade. And in the same year they released Apollo 18, the second under their major-label contract with Elektra and their first self-produced record. Out of the first four albums which saw the two Johns performing everything except the rhythm section, Apollo 18 is the one sounding the most like a full rock band playing together. A bit of a precursor to what would arrive on their next album, when they actually did become a full rock band. But to cap Flansburgh and Linnell’s studio material as a duo off, they close out Apollo 18 with ‘Space Suit’, a reworking of the very first song the two made together when they created the band in 1982.

Things get a little bit hectic nearing the end of the album. One of the most notable moments on it comes in the ‘Fingertips’ suite, a collection of 21 little snippets of choruses and musical segments inspired by the jingles that play in the background of infomercials. That suite ends with the minute-long ‘I Walk Along Darkened Corridors’, which is played out to be the dramatic closer of the piece with Linnell putting on a faux-operatic voice alongside an emphatic “organ” and clarinets. But then ‘Space Suit’ comes along to properly end things in the form of a swinging, suitably spacey, 6/8-time instrumental, emphasising the ‘one man on guitar, one man on accordion’ setup the band originated with all those years prior.

John Flansburgh once had a guitar teacher in the early ’80s named Jack DeSalvo, who taught him a bunch of chords to use whenever convenient. With the chords he learned, Flansburgh went on to write ‘Space Suit’, but with its jazzy origins, it was originally titled ‘I’ll Remember 3rd Street’. The recording of the ‘3rd Street’ demo can be heard below. Much, much different from how it would turn out some years later. I can simply describe ‘Space Suit’ as an instrumental that consists of two parts, the one that has that ascending scale and the other containing the main melody, played by John Linnell’s accordion for the first time and then accompanied by Flansburgh’s vocals (buried deep in the mix) second time round. Makes it sound like the accordion itself is singing. Really enjoy when those cymbal crashes pack an extra punch about 40 seconds in. Put these all together, makes for some good listening.

#1171: They Might Be Giants – See the Constellation

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Apollo 18‘s one of my favourites out of the first four They Might Be Giants albums, which consisted of just John Flansburgh and John Linnell backed by a synthesized rhythm section while the two handled their respective guitar and accordion. It’s got a real rocking feel throughout, with the usual fake drums and bass sounding much less so than they did in albums before. Plus, the theme of space is very much reinforced by the packaging, the LP’s title and a few of the songs on there. Makes it feel quite complete in that regard.

‘See the Constellation’ is one of those numbers that lean into the whole space theme the album has going for itself and might just be one of the harder, pepped-up rockers the band have in their whole discography. Quite psychedelic too. Starting off with a guitar riff paying homage to The Monkees’ ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’, the track soldiers on with a smacking snare drum punctuated by chopped up samples of Dee Dee Ramone doing count-ins for Ramones songs. Tremolo’d guitars come in during instrumental breaks, there are these twangy synth sitar strums that arrive in the mix too. The psychedelia is laid on thick. But it works tremendously well.

Lyrically, there’s not a lot of fat to chew, but the imagery’s very nice. The first verse is directly inspired by a promotional photo of an artist who was on the same label as the Giants at the time. The second is a short snippet of a memory of the narrator trying to look up at the sky past the city lights. And the third and final verse seems to come from the constellation itself, the guy made of dots and lines, the figure to whom which the whole song is dedicated. John Flansburgh signs off with the psychedelic question, “Can you hear what I see in the sky?” And after a moment of calm, with Dee Dee Ramone still chirping at the back, the track blasts off with an explosive instrumental coda that trails off into the night. This is a very fun one. And there’s more to come from this album in the future.

#887: They Might Be Giants – My Evil Twin

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A lot of times when I’ve posted about They Might Be Giants, I state which out of the two Johns (Flansburgh and Linnell) wrote the track I’m discussing at that particular moment. “Oh, this was written by Linnell”, “Flansburgh wrote this one”, etcetera, etcetera. Well, ‘My Evil Twin’ – the fourth track on the band’s fourth album – stands out from many other songs of They as an actual sort of collaboration between the two. John Linnell came up with a bunch of music, made it all MIDI, and then gave the disc to John Flansburgh who provided the melody and lyrics on top. The result was a peppy, quite hard-rocking number about the misadventures with an ‘evil twin’ who may or may not exist.

This track’s a confusing one. Who is the evil twin that Flansburgh sings about? The lyrics describe the good times that he and this twin have, playing hangman until the early hours of the morning, vandalizing their neighbour’s property. Just a couple of examples. Then they sleep through the day and carry on their mischief in the evenings. This closeness between the two scares Flansburgh because it almost seems like they’re one person, but then at the end it’s revealed he’s never actually met the twin. Maybe it’s an imaginary friend, and it isn’t meant to be that difficult to figure out. I listened to a podcast the other day that suggested that the track is possibly about John Linnell in a secretive, puzzling way. Linnell does harmonise throughout, and then he takes the lead vocal for a short moment on the ‘My Twin’ bridge… maybe Linnell is the twin and he’s been existing all along. It’s all a bit up in the air.

Produced at a time when the duo were possibly thinking of ditching their synthetic rhythm section and getting a proper backing band to play with them live, the track sounds like it’s performed by an a four-piece band even though that’s not the case. The drums sound like an actual drum kit. The bass sounds like a proper bass guitar. But then you listen to some off the rhythms those drums pull off and realise it would be incredibly difficult for a real person to replicate. If they did, they would need a lot of stamina. But I would say it’s that combination of the real-sounding rhythm section with the TMBG approach that makes the song stand out just a bit. Same goes for many other songs from that album. Though that’s for another time.