Wednesday, July 31, 2024 - They Might Be Giants & A Collage
The CotD & An Overview of a >40-year-old Band
They Might Be Giants
I’ve been meaning to write about this band for a while. Elsewhere, I promised brief playlists and explanatory essays for bands I know more than average about, and I invited you to help me settle my feelings about a different set of bands, the ones I don’t like but think I should. A few folks have shared playlists, and you can check out my essay on Black Flag (thanks, Sam!). More of those on the way.
It was difficult for me to winnow down to a playlist to 6 TMBG songs, but those are the parameters of this exercise. These playlists are:
Idiosyncratic: they feature favorite songs and not necessarily the best or most popular songs
Short: because if you aren’t familiar with a band, or are dubious of them, a long list isn’t going to help
Idiosyncratic and short are also adjectives that could describe a lot of TMBG’s songs. I first heard the band on Tiny Toons when I was a kid. There was an MTV-parody episode where they made videos for various songs featuring the show’s characters. I’m not sure how many songs they did in that 22-minute episodes, but two of them were TMBG.
Then, a couple weeks or so later, a neighbor kid who was friends with my brother was over. He had TMBG’s third album, Flood, on cassette. I was like, “that’s that band!” This was 5th or 6th grade, so the earliest of the 90s. I dubbed the tape and began listening obsessively, and soon after I started buying their tapes and CDs. TMBG was the first band I found on my own and fell in love with. I had been into music before this, but all of that had come through my mom’s teenage record collection and oldies radio. This was a contemporary band!
Here’s what I’m going to give you: a) an overview of the band, b) a rundown of the songs I chose, and c) a reflection on my relationship with the band. Read, listen, and then decide for good and all whether you like this band.
Overview
The core of TMBG is two guys named John. They’re the songwriters and singers. For the first 10ish years of the band they were also the sole members and they would perform with prerecorded backing tracks. That configuration—especially in the 80s and earlier 90s—is pretty unusual for a rock band. And the unusual nature of the line-up was aligned with the atypical lyrical content, sounds, and song structures to be found on their albums. One of the things I immediately loved about the band is that on a given album, the songs are be all over the place stylistically, yet they always sound like them. The albums were also peppered with other non-song recordings. Short jingle-like ditties, answering machine recordings, etc. The adventurous diversity of the sounds and content on the albums is/was compelling.
For the John Henry album in 94, they started touring and recording with a backing band. Guitar, bass, drums, and sometimes horns. I saw them on this tour, my first real concert. Fast forward 30 years and the backing band line-up is pretty stable, though the horns still come and go. The changes in the band’s sound and approach to writing evolved along with the line-up; they became, for better or worse, more recognizable as a rock band.
More on that in the track rundown, which is beyond the paywall of sleep. Here’s the playlist of six of my favorite songs.
CotD: All Poise, No Noise
Subscriber NSFW collage: Elephantine Trinity
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