Tag Archives: they might be giants

#1452: They Might Be Giants – Unpronounceable

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In 2015, They Might Be Giants revived their Dial-A-Song service. Now, instead of calling the number on your phone and hearing a TMBG song on the other end, they were releasing a new song every week of the year and uploading it to their YouTube channel. It was an exciting time to be a They fan. I can sort of remember ‘Erase’ arriving in the first week of ’15. I tried to keep up with the releases as they came around, but I think I stopped about three weeks in when ‘Music Jail, Pt. 1 & 2’ popped up. Not because I didn’t like the song. I just had university stuff going on, and I didn’t have the mental room to take in new TMBG material. By the time that uni year finished, my second, there was so much music that I guess I thought it was too late to properly get into the schedule. ‘Unpronounceable’ was one of the tracks released during this time. I missed it. But I’d see that it was ranked highly on the This Might Be a Wiki Song Ratings list when I’d visit the website. It was considered to be a top-ten Giants song of all time for a brief moment. So I had to check what all the fuss was about.

The song has no introduction. John Linnell’s voice starts it all off with the band alongside him. With a spacey echo/delay effect applied to the vocal, he sets a scene where a narrator is speaking to someone that leaves them awestruck. So much so that time seemingly stands still in their presence. This enigmatic figure leaves, the narrator snaps back into reality. But they go on to realise that they’ve completely forgotten the name of the person they were talking to. Or at least heard it, but can’t seem to recall how to say it. A very universal situation. The person the narrator was fascinated by appears to be someone they liked or wanted to know a little better, and they’re left in a state of depression due to their inability to remember the person’s name. The narrator wishes they were able to relive and analyse the conversation via watching it through videotape, but know this is impossible. Even if they were able to, they’d be hypnotized by the figure’s face all over again. Someone out there had to write a song about forgetting a person’s name as soon as you’ve finished speaking to them. If anyone was going to do it, it had to be They Might Be Giants, especially John Linnell. He seems to be able to make a song out of the most commonplace circumstances, adding a little absurd twist in the process.

It may have been recency bias that the song was ranked so highly among TMBG fans near the time of its release. But it’s 11 years old now, and it still sounds just as great as it did in 2015. Think it has everything you want in a They song, which is a great melody and relatable subject matter with an unusual spin. I think the hidden genius behind ‘Unpronounceable’ is in its rhythm. It’s quite stop-starty, and the impact comes in the brief silences that occur throughout. They let the delay in Linnell’s vocals really fill the room in the verses. The rhythm’s also exhibited most prominently in the opening-closing gated track in the instrumental section, which was apparently a real focal area during production. John Flansburgh has a brief lead vocal moment too, which is nice. It’s always cool to hear both Johns on a track, even if it’s a case where it’s predominantly written by one of them. Yeah, not sure what else I could add here. Just another power-pop gem by the band, a genre that the band tend to lean into nowadays. I’m all for it. If you want to find ‘Unpronounceable’, it was released on Glean, the first of three albums released through 2015-16, made up of tracks that were released during the first four months of that Dial-A-Song revival. Not my favourite of the band’s, but good listening all the same.

#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.

#1378: They Might Be Giants – Till My Head Falls Off

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‘Till My Head Falls Off’ is the second song on They Might Be Giants’ 1996 album, Factory Showroom. That album’s most known for being the band’s last on major label Elektra Records before they left quite acrimoniously and went on to make their own record label to release their material on. I got ’round to listening to the album myself in late 2010 or so, when I decided to properly get into They Might Be Giants’ big, big discography. Back then, ‘Till My Head Falls Off’ was another TMBG song that was high in the song ratings list on the band’s Wiki website. I heard it probably the once and understood why. Album opener, ‘S-E-X-X-Y’, was the only track to be released as a single. And it’s not like a song’s designation as a single is meant to signify its greatness or anything, but ‘…Head Falls Off’ seems like the very obvious single choice if you were to compare the two. Though maybe the band knew this and went with the more unconventional option, anyway.

After ‘S-E-X-X-Y’ begins things on a funky, ’70s-spy sitcom kind of deal, ‘Till My Head Falls Off’ arrives as the faster power-pop number. Emphasis on the word ‘power’. The track’s essentially a live take, with the two Johns and the band behind them going at full blast, and what we got was the last recording of the band going the fastest they could until the recording equipment couldn’t stands no more. The track concerns a neurotic narrator who, in the first verse, has a bit of a freak-out about some missing Advil tablets, and then wonders about their misplaced notes in the second. Despite their tendency to succumb to anxiety at times, look at themselves in the mirror and think about what they see, they seem to take great pride in the person that they are. The person’s gonna keep on going until the day they die, or till [their] head falls off, as John Linnell sings in the massive choruses. A song of self-assurance for the worriers out there. Sometimes I think Linnell may be singing about himself subliminally on how he’ll be doing this songwriting stuff until he’s gone. If that’s the case, makes it all the more endearing.

I guess another notable thing about Factory Showroom is that it was the first album of They done where the band had a second guitarist in the group. Alongside John Flansburgh now (then) was Eric Schermerhorn, in the role of lead guitarist. Flansburgh provides the anchoring rhythm in the left channel, while Schermerhorn gets the freedom in the right to provide some guitar feedback, those string bends during the choruses and the frantic guitar solo during the break. Here was the new band configuration at its rawest, and they were giving the goods thick and fast. Being the John Linnell composition it is, there’s melody abound, very memorable, easy to get stuck into your head even if the words he fits in them are arriving at a mile a minute, all culminating in those wide-open choruses where – you’ll see in the live video – he practically opens his jaw at its widest to deliver the jubilant high notes. It’s just another good They Might Be Giants song, I don’t know what else to say. I think we’ve reached the end here.

#1372: They Might Be Giants – Thunderbird

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I’ve written about They Might Be Giants’ The Spine, or at least songs you can find on that album, many times at this point. Trying to think of a different way I could put a spin on my experiences with it, without referring to those older posts. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it’s the first physical TMBG album I owned, despite the kind of middling consensus about its quality. I may have said I got it just to hear the transition between ‘Au Contraire’ and ‘Damn Good Times’ without a gap of silence. I think I’ve said I like it a lot, may have called it “underrated” or something along those lines. It was the They Might Be Giants album the band were working on while I was finding out more about them in those early years of 2004, that might be a thing I haven’t said before. It wouldn’t be until 2009 that I got The Spine in my hands. While I don’t think ‘Thunderbird’ was a song on there I liked immediately, it wasn’t too long until it eventually burrowed itself into my head.

From what I can recall, when The Spine was the most recent or second-most recent TMBG release, ‘Thunderbird’ was one of the highest-ranked numbers from the album on the TMBG Wiki’s Song Ratings list. I think just from seeing that, it made me want to listen again and find out why fans liked it so much. I’m a guy from the UK, so when I hear ‘Thunderbird’ I think of that TV show with the puppets and Tracy Island. I did think the song was a sort of superhero theme song for a while. It sounds like one. It’s all upbeat and very driving. A power-pop tune with John Linnell providing a soaring vocal take. But then I found out that’s how the song catches you out, because the title refers to the alcoholic beverage and told from the point of view of a person who gets a huge sense of confidence after drinking it regularly. An alcoholic. I didn’t want to put ‘alcoholic beverage’ and ‘alcoholic’ in the same sentence. A happy-sounding song anchored by a not-so-happy situation. Got a Beach Boys reference in the slow breakdown and everything. As only They Might Be Giants could achieve so easily.

Until its release, ‘Thunderbird’ had been in the works for a while in the TMBG camp. The band had actually subliminally released it, in a way, in the form of ‘On Earth My Nina’ on 1999’s Long Tall Weekend. Linnell reversed ‘Thunderbird’, wrote down the words he thought he could hear, and sang them using the resulting melody line out of the backwards music. It’s definitely a way of making a song. But the band did also make a full demo of the track, also recorded in 1999. Back then, it featured an additional verse. You might say it rocked a little harder too. They performed it live between ’99 and 2001. It could have been on Mink Car in 2001. The band were really saving it, thinking about when to unleash it. I’m glad all the versions of it that are out there exist. It’s cool to note the differences. Like that demo, it really stomps. It has its own flavour. I’ve seen some say it’s flat-out better than how it finally ended up. But I really like how it is on The Spine. I couldn’t compare. I won’t. I’ll take whatever they’ve got.

#1367: They Might Be Giants – Three Might Be Duende

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Hearing They Might Be Giants’ ‘Three Might Be Duende’ today reminds me of the summer of 2011, when it was a new song alongside the other 17 that made up Join Us. When The Else had been released in 2007, I’d completely missed it and didn’t get round to listening to it until years later – I think due to it being done in the time when TMBG were doing music for children. I was unsure of how the music would sound like. Plus, I was 12. But in 2011, I was 16 and eagerly waiting for Join Us since April of that year when ‘Can’t Keep Johnny Down’ was released as the first single. This album was their big return to adult-oriented music for me. I was on holiday in the US when it was released. I got by through listening to 30-second samples of each song, I think, on iTunes. Maybe somewhere else. I liked what I heard. This guy called Anthony Fantano reviewed Join Us and gave it a five out of 10. Wonder what he’s up to these days. I returned home and downloaded the album straight away. At least once I got over the jet lag.

‘…Duende’ was probably the first song to be previewed in a way from the then-upcoming album. A 13-second clip of the band working on the tune, then known just as ‘Duende’ was uploaded to their official YouTube channel in June 2010, more than a year before Join Us arrived. Someone must have that saved somewhere. Otherwise, TMBG made the video private and it’s lost in space and time until they make it available again, which I’m thinking is unlikely.* Fast-forward to July 2011 and there’s ‘Duende’ in the tracklist, now with the longer name, ‘Three Might Be Duende’. To this day, what this song is about completely evades me. From what I can tell, each verse depicts four characters whose names are introduced in the respective first lines. It was only in 2017 that John Flansburgh revealed that the last verse was about the grim reaper. I remember an interpretation that saw the track as a tale of three people who work together to make a creative team. I think I can get that. But there are too many words put together in strange ways that’s made it difficult for me to decipher. How they sound together is what what makes the song great to me.

This song is one of the few in the massive TMBG catalogue to feature vocalists other than the two Johns themselves, with singers David Driver and Michael Cerveris respectively taking lead vocals on the second and third verses. John Flansburgh covers the other two. Sometimes I was sure it was him singing all the way through even if the liner notes told me otherwise. It’s not like TMBG would lie, I don’t know what I was thinking. Driver has a this sort of gritty tone to his voice which makes a great contrast to Flansburgh’s straight delivery in the first verse, and Cerveris’s bassy voice in turn makes for good contrast with Driver’s. A great range of vocals on show. Also, a key change happens as every verse comes along, going from G sharp to C sharp to F sharp to straight B for the celebratory ending. I think that’s pretty cool. Altogether, it’s a wordy song – that I don’t think even TMBG expects anyone to fully take in – paired with music that’s constantly shifting, set to a marching rhythm and sung by three distinct vocalists. I just don’t know what more you’d want. Does the job for me.

*The video’s right here.