They Might Be Giants - C/D, S/D, OPO etc

I'm more interested in an overview of their ouevre/"schtick", their songwriting, and the issue of their "dorkiness" (particularly how that has limited their appeal and why that is). Also how, at least on their first three albums, they fit into that 80s tendency of nerdy white guys appropriating and using explicitly non-nerdy white guy idioms - folk, reggae, world music, dance music (see also David Byrne, Paul Simon - I wanna throw Pere Ubu's 80s records in here too for some reason).

I think they've written a lot of great songs, but have a tendency to retreat behind a wall of schtick that makes any kind of emotional connection with their music problematic. But some stuff, if you peel away the levels of forced irony and wordiness, is really quite bleak and despairing, genuinely moving even. (see "They'll Need a Crane", for ex.)

x-post um have you seen the movie about them? 100% "serious critical evaluation".

Look at cast list in link provided! Jon Stewart! Dave Eggers! Paul Simon! Sarah Vowell! Etc!

They Might Be Giants [Bar/None, 1986]
Two catchy weirdos, eighteen songs, and the hits just keep on coming in an exuberantly annoying show of creative superabundance. Their secret is that as unmediated pop postmodernists they can be themselves stealing from anywhere, modulating without strain or personal commitment from hick to nut to nerd. Like the cross-eyed bear in the regretful but not altogether kind "Hide Away Folk Family," their "shoes are laced with irony," but that doesn't doom them to art-school cleverness or never meaning what they say. Their great subject is the information overload that lends these songs their form. They live in a world where "Everything Right Is Wrong Again" and "Youth Culture Killed My Dog." A

Lincoln [Restless/Bar/None, 1988]
XTC as computer nerds rather than studio wimps--change for chord change and beat for irrelevant beat, they're actively annoying even if intelligence is all you ask of your art-pop. Except maybe on the antiboomer "Purple Toupee," side one's hooks begin and end with "Ana Ng," a beyond-perfect tour de force about a Vietnamese woman they never got to meet; until "Kiss Me, Son of God," which closes the album and could be anti-Castro if they let it, side two's are cleverness for cleverness's sake. And damned clever they are. B+

Flood [Elektra, 1990]
tunes, aarghh, tunes--please not more tunes ("Dead," "Your Racist Friend") **

Classic.

Lincoln
Flood
Apollo 18

OPO:

Tough call. I'll go with "Ana Ng" for now.

"I'm gonna die / if you touch me one more time
Well I guess that I'm / gonna die no matter what"

So these days, as a grown-up non-wacky non-fanboy, my picks would be:

Spiralling Shape. A very OTM song about novelty fixation and the race to hip, and the fact those things don't bring any happiness. "Nobody knows what it's really like, but everyone says it's great".

I Can Hear You. Recorded on an old wax cylider, it's just a small handful of two-line vignettes about different forms of communications technology, and the lengths people will go to to find new ways of just talking to each other. It can move me to tears. First time I heard it, I immediately ripped it to mp3 and emailled it to somebody, because that just made sense.

Four of Two. From the first kids' album, a little nonsense song which is in fact a sneaky allegory about how easy it is to think you'll one day meet your ideal partner, but then wake up one morning to realise that you're old and your life's flown by and it's too late...and yet to still think you're bound to meet them, soon.

She's An Angel. A very sweet and simple first love song, which is amazed and shocked by the way it feels, and is too shy to say "I really like you", so hides behind random tangents and adolescent surrealism...but doesn't manage to hide its real message very well, in the end.

Till My Head Falls Off. Drug addled suicide note. Which rocks.

Dr. Worm. Possibly their most archetypically TMBG sounding chorus ever, and the words are about a nice old man who's always wanted to be a famous jazz drummer and thinks he still can be, one day, if he just practices a bit more. Beautiful.

I could probably go on for a while, but I won't.

Nowadays, their childrens albums are about fifty billion times better than their "real" ones.

oy

"road movie to berlin," from "flood," was the first song my wife ever saw me sing in public...we've been married over 13 years now. I totally credit John and John of TMBG. Thanks, nerds!

-chadly con Queso

I wish no particular harm on TMBG. Flood is a nice album.

I'm conflicted about "Shoehorn with Teeth": either it's meaningless and infuriating or it's wonderfully oblique. I can't make up my mind.

Wonder if anyone's heard their newer records? The Else was surprisingly good. Very straightforward but just a good rock record. I actually kind of enjoy the kids stuff. I'm a dork.

I mostly bumped this to say that "Narrow Your Eyes" may be their best song ever. The lyrics on that one kill me - "I get off the bus/ride past our stop/and though I'm late/I can't get off/I just can't bear/to tell you some lies/so narrow your eyes" **shudder**

i've heard most of their later albums and while there are definitely some good songs here and there, the children's albums are by and large better than the 'regular' albums. also the bonus disc for The Else is more fun than the proper album.

but yeah "Narrow Your Eyes" is great, they can kill you with occasional sincere moments.

I'm a dork.

also this sentence is just kind of assumed when you're posting on a TMBG thread, no need to type it

Yeah I was surprised by the amount of effort they put into those kids albums. They remind me of the earlier stuff but with somewhat dumber lyrics. I don't know if they're better than The Else but some of it is very good. "Can You Find It?" and "C is For Conifers" are just oddly touching, I guess

the kids stuff is fun. for the most part, not all that diff (musically at least) from their regular stuff. and kids do indeed love it.

the bonus disc for The Else is more fun than the proper album

Oh, fer sher! "Why the Christ, why the Devil, Why did you grow a beard?!?"

Of the later stuff, "Mink Car" is brilliant but "The Spine" is their absolute nadir, just completely unredeemable.

Oh, and Tyler I wanna party with you, always find you on my fave threads. :-)

Really really liked "Brain Problem Situation", "We Live in a Dump", "Yeah, the Deranged Millionaire" and "Cast Your Pod to the Wind". I don't think it's better than the main disc but it's a great bonus. TMBG were really a band built for these types of podcasts.

Agree that "The Spine" is the worst. I mean it is fairly decent in spots but I really hate how every song on the first half sounds like every other song on the first half. I really liked "Broke in Two"

haaa right back atcha, gerald. and i agree about the spine -- i remember listening to that a bunch and deciding it really was *bad*. or just completely lifeless.

So these guys are releasing a new album this year and will be touring the US in September. Which is when I was thinking of visiting. They've already announced a few cities and SF and ATL are among them so now I am really really wondering I cant only get over but get to see the beloves Johns live again woo!

Here was my review:

"John Flansburgh, attempting to describe why "Sensurround" was left off of Factory Showroom: "For me, I think of every song as its own thing. I think it's interesting to see the shape of an album after it's put together; you can create a different listening experience depending on how you stack up the songs. The most discipline that we ever apply to an album sequence is avoiding like-sounding songs. If we have too many mid-tempo songs, we'll leave a couple of them off. Or if we have a better example of a song than another, we tend to leave the second-rate one off." Ignoring the fact that I find “Sensurround” to be perhaps the best song of the Factory Showroom era, I really do like the sentiment behind this statement. So it's a little disappointing to find them pretty much ignoring their old values - here comes The Spine, a disc that fills nearly the entire first half with mid-tempo rockers, of which only “Experimental Film” makes an impression. No, none of these songs are bad in isolation, but stacked one after another gives the album a really bland feel, completely atypical of what we’ve come to expect from these guys. The experimentation is toned down – there’s auto-tune on “Bastard Wants to Hit Me”, and one song that’s reminiscent of Flood but only about half as catchy (“Stalk of Wheat”). Other than that, they’ve almost fully transformed into your typical rock band, although the lyrical puzzles are still abound – Linnell sings about resignation from life (“Memo to Human Resources”), drug addiction (“Thunderbird”), and bizarre strings of cause-and-effect relationships (“Wearing a Raincoat”). The unfortunate thing is that the lyrics are the really the only interesting parts of them. I’m not exactly sure what happened here – maybe they purposely decided to write a more “adult” album to offset the kids’ one – but this group never really did the “mature adult rock” thing in the first place. The saving grace of the album is that side 2 has a few legitimately great tracks - “Museum of Idiots” gets by on a strong and punchy horn section, “Damn Good Times” is an energetic slice of power-pop with an accelerating guitar solo ending, and “Broke In Two” rides a wonky guitar line into the stratospheres of catchiness that this group was always capable of. But other than those tracks (and “Experimental Film”), there’s little on here you’ll want to hear again. So give it credit for those few great songs and making an album that’s at least listenable all the way through, but you know the band can do better than this. It's funny to hear them sing on "Stalk of Wheat" that they're "out of ideas", but less funny when it actually seems true."

I stil havent got round to hearing some recent albums. I love "Sensurround", its a great song.

i've heard most of their later albums and while there are definitely some good songs here and there, the children's albums are by and large better than the 'regular' albums.

"The Spine" is their absolute nadir,

agree with all this

i covered "narrow your eyes" for a fan-assembled TMBG tribute album when i was like 16

At parties some of us have been known to break out into spontaneous acapella barbershop renditions of "Kiss me, son of god".

i'm not a theory expert, but even his songs without complex chord progressions have hyperactive, tricky melodies (i'm particularly thinking of "she's an angel," which only uses I IV V in E (the simplest guitar chords imaginable) but manages to use every note in the scale in many different interval combinations. it's also kind of weird how the intro and verse of the song is built around the V chord, which adds a mounting sense of unease and tension before the comedy of linnell's situation comes through with the tonic in the pre-chorus and chorus

i'm realizing now that there's a minor chord in the chorus of that song but whatever. the chorus melody could be a bach minuet.

If we're doing "John Linnell as unrecognized songwriting genius of the late 20th / early 21st c." then I am once again asking you to listen to his incredible solo record, State Songs

https://www.theymightbegiants.com/state-songs

oh i very much include State Songs in my assessment of him

literally once every six months i look up its release date so i can think about pitching a 20-year anniversary piece somewhere (to be rejected, of course). and every time, i realize (again) that i missed it.

apologies if this has been posted before, but i watched it a while back and really enjoyed it. the grainy quality gives it a serious "unearthed treasure" vibe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozYJ7zi8cyk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga9nI_qeQa8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6igO_fLQbSE

I assume he has been asked 100 times over the years if he will ever do another record of state songs. Anyone remember his answer?

I loved how he performed other "State Songs" during those shows like "North to Alaska" and "California Uber Alles"

my copy of I Like Fun arrived today, man does "By The Time You Get This" feel very relevant right now

new album finally came in the mail, only listened once but I really liked it. maybe the only TMBG album where I thought every song was good on the first spin.

I just found out that apparently if you join their fanclub at the highest tier they will record a custom ringtone for you with your name in it. I guess when you have the ability to write a tune in 15 minutes you might as well make some money off it

their first 3 releases are the best but they lost me after that pretty much except Can't Keep Johnny Down is good!

as usual the new album made me Google a bunch of stuff, "If Day for Winnipeg" is a pretty cool slice of history. weird to hear them doing overtly political stuff like this now

I think they're completely excellent up to and including John Henry, and there's lots of rad stuff in amongst the rest, but it's definitely an "in small doses" thing for me past that point.
I say that as someone with all the releases including bonus CDs and whatnot, and for some reason even a member of the current Instant Fan Club.
I've moved on, but they're still a nice place to visit.

thats all accurate

idk if I just burned myself out on the early stuff when I was younger but I actually get more mileage out of the newer albums these days. Join Us, Nanobots, Phone Power, I Like Fun, Book...maybe the high points aren't as great but overall I think these albums are more solid track-for-track. in part I think this is because I get to see them live a lot, and hearing the new songs alongside the old helps you appreciate how good some of them are. I actually don't think their songwriting has changed a whole lot in the last three decades.

that said getting into those first 4-5 albums as a teenager is the sort of thing you can't really replicate, idk if I'll ever again just slam an album on repeat for a few weeks the way I did with Flood and Apollo 18. but when I'm in the mood for them I always seem to pick something new

So I'm guessing you guys would say NOT to buy that package of BOOK

I have the BOOK of BOOK and it's very pretty and has recent lyrics and things in arty fashion.
It's definitely a fan thing. I am not quite at the level but enjoy the fun inherent in the Instant Fan Club.

this bit from a JL interview is fascinating (the getting pulled off YouTube part...I didn't know it could do that):

We seem to specialize in finding complicated things to do, although sometimes we do simple things, and that works really well. Last year we learned how to play one of our songs, “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love,” backward. We taught the band to play all the notes in reverse order, and John and I learned to sing the song phonetically in reverse order. It took weeks. But not only did we pull it off, we played it live just just before the COVID lockdown started up. We were on tour and we got to play it a few times. Somebody took a video of it, and then whatever the robot is that figures out what songs are under copyright heard our backwards version and could tell what song it was, and tried to ban it from YouTube. Once we start touring again, we’re hoping to revive it, because we spent so long learning how to do it.

sheesh...right after their first post-pandemic show

An important message from John L. pic.twitter.com/S3YHMdrH7N

— They Might Be Giants (@tmbg) June 9, 2022

Oh no, poor John F. When I'm back in the US, I really hope to see these guys again

Oh man, that tour is cursed. I was going to see them Saturday for a show that had been postponed mutiple times due to COVID.

Feel so lucky I got to see them back in March of 2020, when it was just an uneasy air of “this may be the last thing we do for the next few weeks”

It was a great show by the way. The Flood set was good but the second set was even gooder. All the best to Flans.

Damn this sucks

I am thinking about their feelings and about fan disappointment, but my hard-headed son asked a good question; is this going to be OK for them financially? I have no concept of what the business of being They Might Be Giants looks like.

I kind of feel like Gloria from the Dial-A-Song answering machine: "But what kind of money does he make? It don't make no sense. Well, he don't make any money, right?"

I am purely speculating here, but I would hope/guess/think they will be fine. Smart guys, at it for many years (hopefully they learned long ago and have been doing it right for a long time), made many licensing / royalty deals, played many sold-out shows, etc.

The two Johns, I mean. The rest of the band obviously would be different.

They had already (re-)re-scheduled the 2020 Flood tour into a series of 2-3 week regional tours stretching into 2023, to limit the financial liability of any one mini-leg getting cancelled by covid. In that light, it seems plausible that this will be a major financial hit to the business and their band/crew seasonal employees.

They Might Be Broke

Sad to hear about John F, hope he recovers quickly

Someone uploaded the recent show to D1m3adozen, and included this link, which may be of interest -

"PS, I've got a google drive fulla older (mostly TMBG) cassette bootlegs I've recently obtained and digitized. I don't have enough time in the world to try and put all on here individually. Feel free to share these wherever. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1H9ICuR0cjVNBph3kbuqWzEomc2EGQAqQ "

very good link, thanks!

I'm listening to a Jan & Dean compilation I made years ago but never put on again until now...I grew much more familiar with They Might Be Giants in the interim, and listening to these Jan & Dean cuts now it sounds like they both could've been the same band had they never aged and left behind surf and California culture after moving to Brooklyn. Their musical sensibility and even the physical character of their voices sound eerily similar. It's even more amusing when I realize the biggest TMBG fan I personally know lives in Pasadena.

Free download:

Please enjoy this download of us performing Flood live in its entirety while on tour in Australia. Downloads are instant and the sound quality is surprisingly high! "Dead," "Birdhouse in Your Soul," "Your Racist Friend," "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" and all the other perennial favorites!

remember when Johnny Fever had the idea that TMBG should be Colbert's house band (after Colbert left Colbert Report)?

that was genius.

Colbert doesn't deserve 'em

They would be a good house band, but I'm glad they just do their own thing (which I'm seeing again next month). The closest we'll get is the Daily Show theme

I was thinking about the etymology of the word 'autism' (from the Greek 'autos' meaning 'self') and it got me thinking about They Might Be Giants as an autistic band in a literal sense, like almost all of their songs seem at some level to be about this fraught connection between the self and the world? Between the objective world that exists outside of your perception and the world as you perceive it from your body - the possibility/impossibility of a perspective outside of the self.

(I think other lyrical concerns are downstream of this, like the obsession with death - of the world still existing when you don't - and the obsession with failed attempts at communication, obsession with 'outside' forces controlling the mind and/or body, this reversal that sometimes happens in their songs where instead of the perspective of a person looking at objects/the world you instead get the perspective of objects/the world looking at a person, songs that are about the song itself). Does any of this make sense?

also does anyone else mentally bracket TMBG together with Lana Del Rey? Death, dissociation, old-timey Americana etc

That resonates with the little I know of them so far, and makes me want to listen to way more.

(To soref's first/longer post above, specifically the question "does any of this make sense?")

Good posting. They strike me as a surrealist band in the classic early-postmodernist sense, taking simple elements and recontextualising them without explanation or overt purpose

their newest album in particular is full of this kind of thing. I don't know if "I Lost Thursday" was intended to be a COVID-era thing but it definitely feels that way. the other thing I'd add is an obsession with time and how it relates to memory, that sort of thing is all over the place in their catalogue. their lyrics often scan as goofy and I think a lot of their fans tend to read more into them than is actually there but at the same time they've got some amazing lyrical puzzles like this, which I think is as great a rumination on consciousness and memory as anything:

https://tmbw.net/wiki/Lyrics:Less_Than_One

also notable is "I Broke My Own Rule", which I always did think of as an autistic sort of song; it's about that obsession with things that you know are only important in your own mind, and how when you try to ignore them some fabric of your reality comes apart

their lyrics often scan as goofy and I think a lot of their fans tend to read more into them than is actually there but at the same time they've got some amazing lyrical puzzles

when I see fan interpretations that I see as someone reading too much into their lyrics it's usually because the fan is proposing answers to these puzzles that you mention, but more often the point seems to be that these are puzzles without answers, or mazes that lead round and round with no exit, just endless recursion. Confusing the map with the territory and trying to correct but finding you've just constructed another map.

I don't think its just the lyrics that are "autistic" but also the music itself, at least a lot of the time. I wish I knew how to describe this but there's just something in the way they write pop music, the chords they use, the way they use syncopation - it's a bit abnormal, they write songs the way I used to write songs on piano, except they're way better at it of course. You hear it more in Linnell than Flansburgh, but they both have it (Flans I think is more just a clever songwriter and student of pop in the vein of Andy Partridge). It's hard to come up with specific examples but like the way the vocal melody in "Experimental Film" keeps jumping up to meet the key of the background vocal, idk who else writes songs like that exactly. But even the verse melody...it's not exactly the same from one measure to the next. There's one note that jumps down an octave. Maybe someone else can put it better. But their music is full of that kind of thing.

I was wondering why this band seemed to attract so many folks who are on the spectrum. I'm in a TMBG discord and most people there seem to be pretty open about it. I dont think words like "quirky" and "weird" quite describe it. It's a different appeal than say, the Barenaked Ladies.

Linnell himself has acknowledged this: https://www.tumblr.com/killhitleragain/711358355817578496/thinking-about-this-interview-where-john-linnell

From my experience, in every single TMBG fan space I've been in there's some sort of running joke about everyone in the server/forum/page etc. being autistic (I am no exception lol). A lot of their music deals with common autistic emotions - paranoia, mistrust, confusion, overwhelming & unmanageable bursts of emotion, being in situations you find absurd but everyone else finds normal, and (on the positive side) singing about things not really deemed songworthy or of general interest (Mammal, 2082, James K. Polk, Linnell's whole State Songs project - I could go on!). Also just the obscure and circitous way they approach subjects appeals to me a lot.

great post

beautiful, really

I was thinking about the etymology of the word 'autism' (from the Greek 'autos' meaning 'self') and it got me thinking about They Might Be Giants as an autistic band in a literal sense, like almost all of their songs seem at some level to be about this fraught connection between the self and the world? Between the objective world that exists outside of your perception and the world as you perceive it from your body - the possibility/impossibility of a perspective outside of the self.

^this too

flanny is so charismatic and adorkable in this performance that i almost kinda wanna jump his bones? didn’t know he had it in him. it just came up in my youtube feed a few weeks ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXdfi09cy8

I wouldn't say their music is "completely stripped of emotion", they're just specific and unusual emotions that you suspect some people don't have

re: “numerical fascination”, “way of ordering things” i do remember a couple of big tmbg fans in my middle school who were not into any other bands at all except maybe the beatles? left brained mathlete types. i remember one of them telling me he was going to buy “the beatles anthropology” when it came out :)

But often there's a kind of autistic quality that I like, where it seems to be completely stripped of emotions. It almost has some numerical fascination, a way of ordering things that appealing that doesn't seem emotional or personal.

I hadn't seen this quote before, but I think this is kind of what I was trying to get at as a feature of their songwriting (particularly Linnell's). But also that what he describes as not seeming personal can somehow simultaneously be very 'personal' in the sense of being contained within the self and not relating to interactions with other humans. Like someone who is relatively uninterested in or unable to pursue relationships with other people but is very interested in 'things' or apparently dry lists and statistics, things that are both impersonal but also very personal in that they're a closed loop with no other people involved. And there can be a great deal of emotion wrapped up in these things and lists etc, this complex inner world that is not necessarily visible to other people, so there isn't a contradiction between saying that "there's an emotional resonance to everything" and this fascination with autistic, numerical 'ordering', almost like a direct connection to the world unmediated by other people.