Tag Archives: snowball

#1227: They Might Be Giants – Snowball in Hell

1 Reply

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.

#1226: Test Icicles – Snowball

Leave a reply

This song here’s the third and final one songwriter Rory Atwell conjured up to be included on For Screening Purposes Only, the only album made by dance-punk trio Test Icicles. As time goes on, there’s more chance of their name being forgotten. But it’s posts like mine that I hope will be found years from now for people to check them out. Short story from my POV, I didn’t think much of them when they around and I was younger. Then a few years passed, I rediscovered the album and found it was actually pretty good. ‘Snowball’ marks the start of a run in the LP that I consider to be solid, solid tunes.

I look at Spotify and, even though it’s not representative of all music listeners worldwide, I can’t look past that ‘Snowball’ is one of the least played songs on the album – only getting more plays than the interlude, closer ‘Party on Dudes’ and ‘What’s Michelle Like?’, which on original copies of the CD was a hidden track. I guess the song does take a while to get started. Atwell adopts an exaggerated vocal at points to sing his lyrics. Kinda like a bird squawking. It’s a thing he does in all his penned songs, but I’ve come to think of it as him portraying some sort of persona. And speaking of the lyrics, they’re not so much about anything but they conjure some good imagery. But it’s all of those reasons, plus the riffs and general energy that have always attracted me towards it.

I think it’s only taken me until writing this post to get to grips with the timing of the drum pattern and guitar that makes up the song’s introduction. The way those drums are played have never correlated with my sense of timing for the longest time. It does literally start on the first beat of the bar though, so as long as you count starting with ‘1’, then you’re good to go. The whole “band” drop in after a bit – band in quotes because the rhythm section is a processed one – and it’s then Atwell goes on to sing about a string of various situations and scenes, from a dog looking for a bone and a son of the East who can’t kill the Witch to the eventual snowball the song’s named after and a hurdy-gurdy that Atwell implores band member Sam Mehran to play before then telling him to turn it off in the choruses. It’s a strange song. I like it a lot.