Tag Archives: lincoln

#1269: They Might Be Giants – Stand on Your Own Head

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Nearing the end of They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln, the band’s second debut album released in the September of 1988, comes the song ‘Stand on Your Own Head’. Now, I’ve always thought it was a good one, and I’m sure there are a lot of Giants fans out there who feel the same way. You wouldn’t find it being regarded as a major highlight, but it’s appreciated all the same. My view, it gets a bit of a raw deal being sandwiched between two of the album’s most well-known tracks in ‘Shoehorn with Teeth’ and ‘Snowball in Hell’. I’d go for this one over the former any day, and maybe you could tell because I’m writing about ‘Stand…’ and haven’t done a post on ‘Shoehorn’.

This one here is another TMBG track mainly written by John Linnell. I’ve come to think of the lyric as some kind of wordplay exercise, taking idioms and everyday phrases and then turning them upside down. Or “on their heads”, you might say. And you can go through it line by line. At least, almost. “I like people, they’re the ones who can’t stand”, I guess is a turn on “I hate people, they’re the ones I can’t stand”. It’s a bit of stretch on my part, seeing as that’s not really an everyday phrase. But what’s more obvious comes in the lyrics for the chorus, “Stand on your own head for a change/Give me some skin to call my own”, which calls to the “Stand on your own two feet” phrase and provides a combination of “give me some skin” and “a home to call my own”. And then there’s the “You’ve made my day, now you have to sleep in it” in the second verse, a reference to making a bed and lying in it. The other parts about smoke signals and suing for custody, I’ve still not been able to pin down. But they sound good nonetheless.

The main musical highlight in this tune is the prominent feature of the banjo, which is rarely used in any other They Might Be Giants song, if it even is at all. The band’s Wiki side credited its playing to John Linnell. I never thought much of it. I listened to a podcast one day that questioned whether this credit was correct. There are TMBG songs that have Linnell playing guitar and he isn’t all that proficient in that, so it did make me wonder whether the credit was true too. But then a few years ago, a TMBG live performance from 1988 was released on YouTube, and right there in the thumbnail was Linnell with banjo in hand alongside John Flansburgh. Though whether he’s playing the intricate part during the choruses is still up for question. If you were somewhat displeased with my own take on the song, luckily I found this track-by-track breakdown of Lincoln while writing this. Linnell’s recollection of the track might just be more useful than mine.

#1227: They Might Be Giants – Snowball in Hell

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They Might Be Giants’ ‘Snowball in Hell’ from Lincoln is a number that I remember liking almost immediately after listening through that album for the first time sometime in 2010. I had actually heard the track years before when I was an actual kid who had just got broadband in the house and was checking out this Internet radio station on a place called LAUNCH, owned by Yahoo!. Before YouTube existed, if you wanted to listen to music and watch music videos, that site was the place to go. It’s thanks to that site that I have any idea who They Might Be Giants are. ‘Snowball in Hell’ played on a station one day. Being the, I think, 8-year old I was, I promptly forgot about it. Short attention span.

But hearing it again all those years later, in context with the album and fully paying attention, it felt like a song I properly knew and had been listening to for years up to that point. There was a warmth and familiar feeling to it proceedings, it felt like a given that it would be one of my favourite songs on the album. The track revolves around this two-note doorbell “ding-dong” melody, over which John Flansburgh sings about being in a less than ideal situation spurred on financial troubles. He sings with much sincerity, backed by harmonies from John Linnell, incorporating wordplay and lyrical twists that result in a few of the band’s most memorable and devastating lyrics. “Money’s all broke and food’s going hungry”. That’s a good one. “If it wasn’t for disappointment, I wouldn’t have any appointments”. That’s a great one.

The song is also notable for the breakdown, over which dialogue taken from a how-to-organize-yourself cassette plays. Given to him by album producer Bill Krauss for his 25th birthday, Flansburgh went on to find that the tape didn’t contain much in the way of advice. But he, Krauss and Linnell all found it interesting enough to let it have its own little snippet in ‘Snowball’. Permission wasn’t asked to use it. No one’s threatened to sue. And its inclusion goes down as one of many memorable moments in TMBG’s discography. Back in June, a cassette of rough mixes from the Lincoln sessions was found in the archives of a university in Canada, and a work-in-progress ‘Snowball in Hell’ was found on it. As you can tell, the mix is a bit different. The acoustic guitar is given more prominence, a different model drum machine is present and more snippets from the self-help cassette are used. It’s the same song in essence, but sometimes I prefer this rough mix to what ended up on the album. It’s certainly a different approach. All the more happy to know it exists.

#1154: They Might Be Giants – Santa’s Beard

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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.

#1076: They Might Be Giants – Purple Toupee

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Here’s a little thing I’m not sure I’ve actually shared on here. My dissertation for my final year of university was based on ‘Modality and point of view in the lyrics of They Might Be Giants.’ That’s right. You know how I like this band so much? Well, I do so much that I wrote 10,000 words about them in an academic study. I used the lyrics of the first verse of ‘Purple Toupee’ under the ‘Methodology’ chapter, where I had to describe the tools I used in order to carry out the study, just to give an example of what kind of narrative voice John Linnell may have been conveying in the song. Actually really enjoyed working on that final paper now I think of it. If anyone wants to read it, don’t be afraid to comment – I’m willing to share.

But of course I was a big fan of the song way before it came to writing that dissertation in 2017. I got to listening to TMBG’s sophomore album Lincoln, on which ‘Toupee’ is the fourth track, about seven years prior to that. The track was a clear highlight from that point. But even from visiting This Might Be a Wiki since I was about nine, I knew that the song was highly regarded among TMBG fans because it was consistently in the higher numbers of the song ratings list that’s on that website. The song was chosen to be a single in ’89, and was meant to be released alongside three other B-sides, but that release fell through and it was instead released as a sole promotional single instead.

So with my whole spiel about narrators in the first paragraph, I might have left you asking why I chose lyrics from this track in particular. Well, it’s because the track is sung from the point of view of a character living in the ’80s who has a bit of warped/hazy recollection of momentous political events that happened in the ’60s. From one line to the next, he’s throwing references to “Selma and some Blacks”, “the book depository where they crowned the king of Cuba” and “Martin X”. But this narrator is completely confident in recalling these events, even though we know they’re completely wrong. Then the chorus comes in referring to the titular phrase, influenced by a combo of Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘Raspberry Beret’. So all in all, the track’s meant to serve as an ’80s reaching out to the ’60s type track, but being all tongue-in-cheek about it. The song’s a whole lot of fun, and takes a bit of an unexpected turn for its ending. Always a good time when it comes on.

#874: They Might Be Giants – Mr. Me

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‘Mr. Me’ from TMBG’s Lincoln is a whole ball of fun. It has quite a cartoon-ey feel about it in its delivery. I read a comment somewhere that likened it to the music you’ll hear in a Mario Kart game; just from the knowledge I’ve gained from playing Mario Kart DS, the comparison isn’t too far off. Those high whistle-like noises and trumpet sounds are very reminiscent of the sounds from those games. And in general, the track is just propelled onwards by these crazy drum-machine rhythms which give an odd, but strangely addictive bounce to everything that’s going on.

But then you see the lyrics, and it’s clear that it’s about the titular character who may just be suffering from severe depression. Mr. Me’s been feeling this way for a while, depression is the track is symbolised as a ‘misty sea’ that ‘Me’ has been lost in for some time, and the track is something like a cry or a call for someone to help ‘Me’, but to also be careful that they don’t become depressed as well. So, you know… very polarising elements of a song are present here. Have to say though, a song about a really sad man never sounded so upbeat and cheerful before. It wouldn’t be the last time the band did something to this effect too. They always seem to do it so well.

To sum up, I enjoy it. This is a track that is over in under two minutes, so there’s not much else that I can think of to say. John Linnell sings it, he does a good job, John Flansburgh provides the catchy ‘yo yo-yo’ backing vocals which are very hard to forget. Just a short sweet burst of happy/sad music. And to close out, here’s a live performance of the song from 1987.