Cowtown

Trivia/Info

• This was one of the band's earliest original songs, written in 1981 or 1982. It was the first song that John Flansburgh and John Linnell learned to play together,^[1][2] and they performed it at their first live show.
• Linnell introduced the song at a 1992 Boston show: "This song was written right here in the fair city of Boston, something like 15 years ago." This suggests that Linnell had started writing the song in the late 1970s or early 1980s, before he moved to New York City in 1981.
• The song predates They Might Be Giants as a band.^[3] It was written for a short-lived trio that Flansburgh and Linnell started with a mutual friend. Flansburgh explained in a 1996 interview with Pitchfork:

Linnell wrote the song "Cowtown" when I was in a sort of pre-They Might Be Giants project with him and this other guy, who's a writer in New York. His name is Dave Lindsay. [...] Dave Lindsay played bass and I played guitar and Linnell played keyboards. We had this project that we rehearsed for like a month and had a bunch of songs including "Cowtown" and then it just didn't come together for whatever reason, I'm not really sure.

• Flansburgh explained further in a 2015 interview:

"Cowtown" is probably the very earliest song that we worked on as They Might Be Giants. In fact, we played as a trio with this fellow Dave Lindsay, who's actually Arto Lindsay's cousin. [...] David was a standup bass player and we jammed with him a few times, rehearsed with him a few times. And one of the songs that we put together - that John and I put together - was that song "Cowtown." It's really Linnell's song, but I contributed some lyrics. But "Cowtown" is really like the original They Might Be Giants song. It's a pretty light-hearted song. I think the lyric that I contributed was sort of vaguely inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey... it's pretty hard to explain.

• When the trio dissolved and Flansburgh and Linnell started working as a duo, they originally planned for "Cowtown" to be released on a flexi-disc alongside an unreleased track titled "My Father's Son", as mentioned by Linnell in a 1988 interview. While this flexi-disc would never materialize, they would eventually release the Wiggle Diskette, a flexi-disc featuring the songs "Everything Right Is Wrong Again" and "You'll Miss Me".
• John Linnell on the clarinets heard in the song's intro for Everything Sticks Like A Broken Record, a track-by-track breakdown of the Lincoln album featured in Bandbox Issue #103:

The technical feat on "Cowtown" is that, in the very beginning of the song, there are two clarinets and each is playing every other note. That was another sort of stunt, like the noise gate in "Ana Ng." The two clarinets are hocketing one note. That part is probably unplayable by one clarinet, but I could write it out for two clarinets and it's actually not that complicated.

• John Flansburgh would also mention the snare rolls heard in the intro for Everything Sticks Like A Broken Record:

The snare rolls at the beginning of "Cowtown" that sound like fife and drum corps snares... that was the kind of sound you couldn't get out of a drum machine before the Alesis HR-16 we used on Lincoln. There was just too much clang coming from the sounds of the [Yamaha RX11/15]. That was an example of the big step up in sound.

• The scream in the instrumental breaks is the Fairlight CMI stock sample "SCREAM2". Flansburgh talked about the samples used in the song in a 2022 Tumblr post: "I think they are from a stock library that came with either the Akai sampler or the Fairlight… might even be a combo plater of a horror movie scream and something else…"
• In live performances, the screaming sound is either performed by clarinets, or by Marty Beller triggering a sample. Usually The Audience accompanies this with actual screaming.
• The lyric "The yellow Roosevelt Avenue leaf overturned" is a combination of various phrases ("The Yellow Rose of Texas", "Roosevelt Avenue", "a new leaf overturned").

Song Themes

Animals, Cities, Colors, Friendship, Not In Major Or Minor, Oblique Cliches Or Idiom, Puns, The Senses, Sleep, Sea, Songs With Samples, Streets

Videos

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Other Links for “Cowtown” [edit] Site Format Price Link iTunes AAC 1.29