Ah, the first They Might Be Giants song to appear in the ‘S’ section. An appearance by the group was bound to happen at some point. They’ve occurred in almost every other letter. One of my favourite bands. Appreciated their music for a long time. It’s a story I’ve told in nearly all the other TMBG posts that have come before, so to not sound like a broken record those previous two sentences make up the summary. The band’s album Lincoln, their second, released in 1988, is one I got to know fairly well once hearing it in full for the first time in late 2010 or so. It contains a few of John Linnell and John Flansburgh’s highly adored compositions. You get ‘Ana Ng’. You get ‘Cowtown’. It also contains ‘Santa’s Beard’, which I’m not sure is as rated among TMBG fans. But I like it. So here it is.

What the track is, is essentially a twisted take on that old song ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’. Replace ‘Mommy’ with ‘My Wife’ and you’ve got the message. I feel the lyrical content is the main reason why the song is currently ranked #737 out of 1010 on TMBG’s fanmade Wikipedia site. I guess you can never really be in the right frame of mind to hear a song about a man being cuckolded by jolly old Saint Nick. But it’s just a song and obviously nothing to take very seriously. It’s a harmless bit of fun, a sub 2-minute power pop tune with rollicking guitars, spindly keyboards and a synthetic slap-bass that makes its presence felt within the mix all throughout.

Well, I guess all that’s left to talk about is John Flansburgh’s vocal. He does sing this one really well, got that gritty rocker feel to his delivery. He could really get some power on those notes in those earlier years, and ‘Santa’s Beard’ is a good showcase of it. Especially on those ‘breaking up my hooooome’ lines in the choruses, and particularly at the end where he holds that ‘home’ out for longer, with the word transforming into a growling tone that disappears in the exploding final chord. Or penultimate chord that’s then followed up by the final beat that properly closes the song out. Yep, yep. It’s some good listening. Maybe not so substantial in the running of the album, depending on who you ask. But it’s a guaranteed good time whenever this one comes on.