about how much this song rules or even (b.) You are free to picture the vocalist as a literal cyclops or just a broken man staring “with my one glass eye”. When its video first debuted on regular rotation on MTV, it is fair to say that nothing of the kind had really existed on the network. As an independent website, we rely on our measly advertising income to keep the lights on. TMBG flips their oft-used Tin Pan Alley trick of disguising sad lyrics with happy music by ramping up the happy. Fingertips (FT2) He’s also not alone; Alan didn’t choose any songs from Flood. I’m just going to finish this by pasting the lyrics to the bridge and let that sit with you. But I think I’m also qualified to talk about this shift by returning to a favorite anecdote that I think I might have mentioned before on this very site. Alan Scherstuhl is the film editor at the Village Voice. It’s 2018, that English assignment nearly 20 years gone, and they’re still my favorite band in the world. But almost worse than a racist, is anyone—but especially a friend—who sympathizes with a racist. – Marisa, Mink Car, 2001 9. Because we really, really love They Might Be Giants. As with much of TMBG music, the meaning of “Nightgown” is debatable. I honestly can’t say why I like this song so much. But if the video didn’t tip this one onto my list, its live version definitely did. (A song about palindromes whose bridge is a palindrome? It is the studio-made single on the otherwise-live They Might Be Giants album Severe Tire Damage, which seems potentially ignoble at every step of the way, especially if you’re not a committed TMBG fan. (Or just the combined power of Foster & Allan, these irish folk singers could kill us all!) It’s a song that I can share with more people (see that ’90s list). Artist: They Might Be Giants Song: We Want A Rock Album: Flood [Intro] C G D G x4 [Verse 1] Am D G C Where was I? To love TMBG, you must embrace bittersweetness. “Istanbul” has been steadily referenced in pop culture for decades including two dancing video games (you can spot pockets of the youngest fans performing the routines from memory at live shows), The Simpsons, network dramas, movies, and reality TV. Later, being a teenager and later even an adult, I second-guessed myself. Here: Experience it yourself. There is nothing as quintessentially They Might Be Giants as getting a whole audience to jump and loudly sing the names of ancient Mesopotamia rulers (“Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh!”), names that don’t particularly roll off the tongue even in non-rock environments. It is, however, the jam that is most content with just imagining the possibilities of what could be but will probably never happen. I don’t have a history with this song, the way I have a history with every single song They Might Be Giants released during the 1990s (yes, even “Stormy Pinkness”: It was a song I didn’t get to hear for ages, until I found the Istanbul EP for sale at Newbury Comics in Boston, during a time when that was the best way to hear music, to buy the CD it appeared on, and as such it felt like a big deal, even though it’s relatively negligible in the full history of the band). – Matt. Paul Mescal bowled fans over as he performed an amazing duet with Dermot Kennedy during a spectacular live concert. That’s basically the experience of finding other They Might Be Giants fans, in convenient song form. “Listen to this,” she told me, and played “Man, It’s So Loud in Here” from the They Might Be Giants album Mink Car. The lead track from Join Us is a reminder that TMBG exists on a unique plane, someplace between audience friendly and fully alienating. From a band that is not really known as a better-live commodity the way that Phish is? But also, the trumpet part is WEIRD.) Lincoln, 1988 I’m not worried, though. Browse for All I Want By We Were Giants song lyrics by entered search phrase. TMBG has every club in the bag, and probably some that aren’t even sanctioned. I recall having read various opinions about its meaning online. TMBG’s manager Jamie Kittman has stated publicly that he believes it was inspired by John Linnell’s parents. 4. In AJ Schnack’s 2002 TMBG documentary Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns), actor Michael McKean does a dramatic reading of “The End of the Tour,” his serenely sonorous voice bringing forward the two Johns’ inimitable gift for binding playful, obscure lyrics with mysterious, even devastating, undercurrents. This song emphasizes the horror of what supercriminals do, and says we all should be angry and united in putting these people away for the … In the pantheon of They Might Be Giants songs about heads with odd things on them, “You’re On Fire” joins “We Want A Rock” in anyone’s playlist of the band’s most irresistibly infectious rockers. Wreck My Car (FT7) He’s not anti-Flood but he’s enough of a hardcore fan to feel some kind of pull away from the obvious stuff from TMBG’s best-selling record. But I do not need to hear “Particle Man” again, and in a weird way “Doctor Worm” played a little like a cousin to that setlist staple: an accordion-based number, whimsical, not exactly a party-starter. Page one of the TMBG songwriting playbook is “upbeat melody & dark lyrics,” and “When Will You Die?” hits that as well as any of their songs ever have. It’s not a matter of one person dumping the other; rather, it’s a combustion, mutually assured destruction, a last crash before digging through what’s left and moving on. Those arpeggiated chords from the first chorus repeat through the whole song, anchoring you while you feel everything else building up and wanting to crash down around you. Speaking of which: You’re familiar with Jesse, Marisa, and Rob. These interpretations and others, as usual, are all there, wound around an achingly wistful melody, Linnell’s voice in the returning chorus imbuing a song about the end of something with a haunting sense of the loss of everything. And don’t believe the crazy rumors: Hammurabi isn’t dead. – Jeremy, They’ll Need a Crane EP, 1989 I’ve always liked nonsense poetry like Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” and the works of Lewis Carroll’s, and this song has that quality for me. As a song, it is a real beauty, an amalgam of the comic, baroque, and deeply considered. Take my money, you beautiful bastards.) Giants Lyrics: Are you getting tired of hanging around here? And, if you want to talk more about it, you can meet me at The Cube. They tumble out of Flansburgh with uncommon euphony, a parade of stick-in-your-head declarations every bit as catchy as goddamn “Particle Man.”. I Heard a Sound (FT16) forever. And it’s “Istanbul” from the iconic Flood that has exposed TMBG to the general public. Is it meaningless or is the meaning just obscured? That darn bluebird of friendliness has won over thousands of new fans in the nearly three decades since its release, so many that Flood is the band’s only RIAA-certified Platinum album (that’s over a million copies sold, folks). – Rayme. (Hey look, it’s The Warsaw!) 1. When I hear this song, I feel that pull. Demitri Muna is an astronomer at large in NYC who is reasonably obsessed with indiepop and is in love with a too-tall girl. This isn’t TMBG’s first paean to unrequited love. Yet “Doctor Worm” is far more “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” than, say, “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)” (shout-out to that sliver of overlapping TMBG and Billy Joel fandom that is composed primarily of my family or people who are like family to me). “Birdhouse In Your Soul”. Just as I imagine the subjects of the song felt. If you can’t find him doing any of those things, you can probably find him at a concert. (I was lucky and I still went on message boards.) This was when They played at the now-shuttered Roseland, touring for Factory Showroom. In a song that’s over and out in under three minutes total? – Rob, Join Us, 2011 “No one in the world ever gets what they want/ and that is beautiful,” Linnell sings, conjuring a sentiment as dark and existentially cold as any to be found on a Voidoids record. Almost everyone who participated complained that this was too hard; that it wasn’t enough. And beyond this assignment, maybe “Birdhouse in Your Soul” was really my favorite TMBG song slash song of all time. He seems to fail and spends the end of his last verse circling a pop-culture cul-de-sac, wondering what the hell a Sleestak is, only to be saved by the songform he had been pressing against: Suddenly it’s time to sing the title, and our man, a pro, can always do that. Their habit of tacking flexi-discs to random telephone poles as well as their legendary “Dial-A-Song” series, were brilliant early realizations of the inherent limitations of the rote label/publicist/ad buy approach to promoting records. “Egad, a base tone denotes a bad age,” or the title and “dad palindrome dad” being word palindromes. As a TMBG live-show connoisseur, there are just certain songs you come to, if not outright resent or dread, certainly regard with a little bit of trepidation. The songs that weren’t the biggest hits ever, but became their own kind of hits: Live-show staples. A ray of hope is never tangible, Change is almost imperceptible, A great wave that's immeasurable, But I know, I know, We were giants once. This sublime single from 1992’s Apollo 18 is perhaps one of the best examples of the band’s polymath minds working overtime. of its lead single. But as sometimes happens, because Linnell and Flansburgh are such gifted songwriters and seemingly hard workers to boot, “Doctor Worm” started getting better. Here the Giants pace themselves, teasing out one idea at a time and exhibiting a sophisticated pop sense of how to build and release tension. Like the Beatles “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” the title of this song was inspired by a child’s drawing. It could be that the super-fast stutter of a guitar sound on this song, the part that’s sort of like a guitar vibrated by a highway rumble strip, has been replicated in plenty of other TMBG tunes (“Bangs” or my beloved “Canajoharie,” among others), and this feels like kind of an ur-text musically speaking. The difference here is that TMBG doesn’t sound angry or alienated or even sarcastic — they sound absolutely tickled. And my hand fit in yours like a bird could find the breeze We used to be giants When did we stop? Here the Johns eschew the band for inspired beat programming that suggests the old days but is not at all beholden to them. But you don’t hear many songs about the absence of those feelings. “Particle Man” isn’t on this list. “Erase” came out in January 2015, the first song in a year where TMBG released over 50 songs, and both the first single and first track from their record Glean. (“I’m poooooooointing my finger in my own faaaaaaaaaace.”) If you’re in a bad mood, though, you can play along with Johnny, which, even though he’s a jerk, is mostly empowering. Winningly brought to life in Hoku Uchiyama and Adam Bolt’s Lauren Lapkus-starring music video, “You’re On Fire” is a tight little explosion of loopy wordplay, killer hooks, and inspired romantic admiration, the hackneyed “hot girl” metaphor taken to the absurdist extreme of “You’re hard to get to know/But you’re easy to spot in a crowd.” You know, because of your combustible head. / Everyone gets on the bus out of town / And the lights start going out one by one.” It’s one of the band’s most evocative late-period lyrics, deftly making the transition from every day moving-out imagery to a sense of desolate abandonment, married to one of the band’s power-poppiest melodies. Or maybe you even noticed the song is 2:22 in length. Incidentally, I believe the longest non-remix TMBG song isn’t “Till My Head Falls Off,” but it is from the same approximate era: The studio version of “They Got Lost” runs four minutes and thirty-nine seconds. The two Johns have an uncanny knack for putting together truly catchy songs that have the added benefit of being educational. Over an early Who-style rave up, the lyrics are a master class in efficiency. (Or did we actually meet JUDY???) That counts for something in my book. The song traps you in its beauty and then drags you to a much darker place. From nowhere, at the verse’s end, woozy slide guitar and a suddenly buoyant bass catch us, lift us toward the chorus, one of those Linnell doozies where every note seems to have been set in motion by the logic of the preceding, the whole of it seemingly unspooled from the subconscious rather than merely written. We here at SportsAlcohol.com love indie rock, love lists, and love (with reservations) our teenager selves from years ago. Did I mention this guitar solos is literally ten seconds long? It was still so new that I only had a bootlegged live recording. Rayme Shore is an Obstetrician-Gynecologist (yes, really) who occasionally enjoys geeking out. 6. Don’t waste your cyclops time; queue up this song and crank up the volume. I Hear the Wind Blow (FT3) As a kid who spent 18 years in the suburbs, and as an adult who spent 4 years in a dead-end proofreading job, I am familiar with that absence. 3. The cover was – odd. Slogging through a job that’s sucking your life away would become a throughline of the band’s work, especially in Flansburgh’s songs, which feature fantasies about burning all the uniforms and practicing trumpet every day. – Rob. Mixed-Race relationship, I Came to follow they Might be Giants when did actually! As my favorite band in the Flowers ” is the film editor at Village! Pull, in some ways, even more painful than the prejudiced act itself 're! 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