Tag Archives: they might be giants

#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.

#1123: They Might Be Giants – Rhythm Section Want Ad

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They Might Be Giants’ first album from 1986 is my personal favourite by the band. It’s not like the debut is where they peaked and everything else that followed paled in comparison. It’s just that the record very much shows the two Johns at their most eccentric, kind of brash and unapologetically unconventional, before they dialled things down a bit and went for a more warmer tone on their sophomore effort. The most avid TMBG fan will tell you that even though the first album is great, its second half may just get a bit too strange for its own good. I’m all for it, though. Tracks like ‘Chess Piece Face’, ‘I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die‘ and ‘The Day’, as unique as they are, wouldn’t be ones to bust out at the social gathering. You’ll get to the album’s last track and you’ll think, “Well, after all that, how could this record possibly close out?” It does so with one of the band’s greatest songs in their whole discography.

Before co-founding TMBG, John Linnell performed as a keyboard player in a short-lived new wave band The Mundanes. You can see him here, usually in the peripheral area when the camera is focusing on the guitarists or lead singer Marsha Armitage. Linnell left that band to form a new one with his good friend John Flansburgh, and with this exciting new venture was inspired to write a lyric acting as something of a mission statement. According to Linnell’s former bandmate John Andrews (another John), Linnell spontaneously started singing it one day while they were working together – not too long after forming TMBG. So here the Giants were, a new band for the 1980s, a musical duo consisting of an accordion player and a guitar player, no drummer, no bassist. But surely no band could be a band without a rhythm section, right? Well, no. And Linnell and Flansburgh were here to show you how it could be done.

Alongside the mission statement aspect of the song, the lyric reads as a big tribute to the ’80s in general, albeit with some witty remarks on how artists and musicians would usually get the short end of the stick. Like how poets and their fans will come together across the street from a corporate office where the real ‘pros’ are working.But Linnell says tells us to forget about ‘the man’, shouting out MDC and Menudo, Eurythmics (who, as it says in the lyric, someone thought the two Johns must be into – that wasn’t the case), general bands with girl lead singers… It’s a call out to the styles of the era, where people could use hats as megaphones, or have hairstyles made of bones. Seems like anything could be done in the ’80s. And now here were They Might Be Giants, a new band to add to the melting pot. Linnell embarks on a rapid-fire vocal delivery, matching the bustling/blistering pace of the music and making for one of his most engaging vocal takes. Expressive as ever, each lyric he provides appears to possess a different melody, rising and falling constantly before leaping to a height for the title mentions and eventually culminating in the track’s final word. It’s such a damn fun song. A damn fun song to close out a damn fun album. It couldn’t have gone any better.

#1116: They Might Be Giants – Reprehensible

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This’ll be the last time I talk about They Might Be Giants’ Long Tall Weekend, I swear. No, really, it will be. It’s funny. Last time I wrote about a song from there before this ‘R’ section started was in 2022, and now two tracks off it arrive in relatively quick succession. Well, it’s been a trip. I think I more or less gave the gist about the context of Long Tall in the last post I did for it, but never gave the goods on how I came to listen to it initially. I actually think it was late March 2011, so hooray to 13 years of knowing it. I’d decided to go through TMBG’s discography starting late 2010; it had been a long time coming because they’d already been one of my favourite bands for years. Don’t think Spotify existed back then. It at least wasn’t popular to the extent it is now. But there was this website called we7.com that served the same sort of purpose. Long Tall was on there. I listened to it and once again, the Giants didn’t let me down. It was another fine album, I wasn’t surprised.

‘Reprehensible’ is the ninth track on there. Like ‘Certain People I Could Name’, like ‘Rat Patrol’ and ‘They Got Lost’ (a song I don’t like as much, but hey, what can you do), it’s a song that was recorded during the making of the band’s 1996 album Factory Showroom, but was left off for reasons that only the band would be able to explain to you. When I first heard it initially, I had the feeling that it was John Flansburgh singing it, though at some point I did wonder whether it was someone else. It isn’t. It’s definitely John Flansburgh. But the way he sings here is unlike any way he does on any other TMBG track he’s carried out lead vocals on. Would it be described as baritone? I’m not sure. Whatever it is, he sings it all low. Really from the belly too, so it has this breathy aspect to it that adds a depth and booming quality to it. It’s really cool. He would never sing so low on an album after Long Tall Weekend, maybe this song took it out of him. It’s most likely down to aging though.

The song is something of a showtune from the perspective of a bad, bad person who relishes in the fact they are indeed terrible. It’s a person who in their words has undergone ‘unerasable acts’ and committed ‘unspeakable crimes’. It’s also a person who’s lived for 10,000 years, in previous lives/times, so maybe it’s not a person at all. It’s an entity to say the least. Probably the devil, thinking about it. The soundscape is dominated by an enveloping horn section. If you think there’s something off-sounding about those horns, you wouldn’t be wrong, as they’re actually not real horns, but synthesized ones created by the use of a Mellotron. They almost drown the vocals out in those pre-choruses. They do add to the jazziness of the whole affair, though, already established by the swing feel, piano and brushes on the drums from the song’s very beginning. Flansburgh owns the track so well with his vocal presence and melody. So much so that you may be surprised when I tell you that John Linnell wrote it.

#1092: They Might Be Giants – Rat Patrol

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Until 2007’s The Else, They Might Be Giants’ 1996 album Factory Showroom had the distinct characteristic of being the album by the band with the fewest tracks on there, a mere 13, compared to the 18, 19 or even 38 that fans had become so used to. I’ve built it in my head that the reasoning for the reduction in numbers was a reaction to Showroom‘s predecessor John Henry, which had 20 tracks, but was also almost an hour in length – almost a double album in TMBG respects. They Might Be Giants recorded many more songs than those that eventually appeared on Showroom, a few of appeared a few years later on 1999’s Long Tall Weekend, the group’s equivalent of Physical Graffiti in that it included new songs and oldies from previous album sessions that’d been left on the cutting room floor. ‘Rat Patrol’ was one of those Showroom outtakes.

Before ‘Rat Patrol’ ended up being the two-minute minor-key, almost heavy, hard-rocking Linnell-sung composition that it is, the original demo recorded for it revealed much more simpler beginnings. Sometimes played on their Dial-a-Song service, the recording is John Flansburgh singing the lyrics a capella in an kind of showtime-y fashion. Clearly a lot of fleshing out needed to be done. Flansburgh once stated that the track “caused quite a bit of division-even among those within the inner sanctum of TMBG”. Why it caused the division, we’ll never know. But somewhere along the way, decisions were made to let John Linnell take the lead vocal (Flansburgh sings in unison with those high-pitched backing vocals) and turn the track into a thrilling ride with dueling/harmonising guitar lines and dramatic piano/guitar vamps.

According to the band’s great Wikipedia-esque fansite, the ‘rat patrol’ phrase was taken from an American TV show of the same name that aired between 1966 and 1968. Not the first time that television has influenced a song or two by the Giants. And I’ve always sort of imagined this track being the very dramatic theme song for a TV show that’s waiting to be made. It probably wouldn’t work too well though. There’s something very menacing and almost frightening about this track. It’s also described in a TMBG document as ‘witchy rocker’, and I can understand, it is quite spooky. Like that lingering falsetto note by Linnell at the end that echoes off into the distance and eventually into silence. I wouldn’t want to hear that at night when I’m walking home alone. It’s a shame this didn’t make it onto Factory Showroom. I’d have had it as a hidden track after ‘The Bells Are Ringing’ to bring a more mysterious end to proceedings. What do I know about album sequencing, though.

#1078: They Might Be Giants – Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head

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Man, look at those fresh-faced Johns in that music video. I reckon I was about 12 years old when I saw the clip for TMBG’s ‘Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head’ for the first time and thus heard the song too. Would have been 2007, and YouTube was up and running at this point. Not the big deal it is today. Was a lot more humble and much more innocent back then. At 12, the Giants had been around in my life for probably three and a bit years at that point. And it was hard to find music videos by them online without really having to look for some websites. Now all of them were on this “new” site, and ‘Puppet Head’ was a well-liked song according to the band’s wiki. Became an instant hit in my book and another to add to that list of tunes I already knew that really made TMBG stand out compared to any other band/musician/artist I usually listened to.

I distinctly remember stopping and starting the video numerous times, just to keep replaying the image of the two Johns jumping in time to the track’s opening drum pattern. It’s quite hypnotizing in its own way. Plus, it’s quite the visual to start things off with. Once I realised that this was the duo’s first ever music video, it made sense that the first scene had to lure viewers in somehow. In fact there are many dance moves here (which were a signature in those early TMBG videos) that I kept on rewatching. Just made the two guys all the more endearing. But you want to know about the song, that’s why you’re here. Well, John Linnell originally wrote it – lyrics and music – but was unhappy with how his verses turned out. He gave it to bandmate John Flansburgh who “filled in all the blanks”, resulting in one of the best TMBG outcomes, a collaboration between the two band members in comparison to the usual where one or the other will write the entire song.

From what I can gather from the lyrics, I think it’s simply about a person who doesn’t like their job, wants more out of life. Maybe a little loving to help soothe the pain. And all of this could happen if someone would only put their hand inside the titular puppet head. The talk about zombies and this puppet head puts things into a bit of a surreal area, but I think that’s just a way of making the understanding a little harder to achieve. Well, I think they did that quite successfully. But like a lot of other TMBG songs, it’s a bunch of fun to sing along to. The track was released as the second song on the band’s first album from 1986, but with a different mix from that in the music video. The snare hits are drenched in reverb, someone suggested to make the song a little sharper in its key, and the tone overall is a little brighter. It does fit in alongside the other 18 tracks on that record. When I sing it out of the blue, my pitch usually goes to that of the video’s. But honestly, this is one of those rare occasions where I like two separate released mixes of a song at about the same level.