They Might Be Giants (Song)

Trivia/Info

• John Flansburgh, Throttle Magazine, August 1990:

A really, really old song. We actually recorded that in 1985, originally. We thought about doing it for the second album as well. Basically, we didn't want to put it on the first album because it seemed too weird. It just seemed perfect to have our theme song on our third album. It's a very complicated song, actually. When we did it originally, we recorded it on a four track and we just did millions and millions of overdubs and created this very tracked-out, complicated arrangement. And since we started working on an eight track, we tended to strip things down a little bit more. So when we came back to "They Might Be Giants," we found ourselves trying to recreate something we did pretty effortlessly on a four track, but when we were actually trying to use big, studio recording techniques, it became an incredibly complicated piece to put back together again. There's a ton of vocals on it, two guitars, two trumpets.

• Flansburgh in a 2009 interview with Rolling Stone:

While we'd have a tad more street cred to cite Black Sabbath, I think we were really trying to make some of 'Hey Hey We're the Monkees' our own with this one. I think including it here was a way to telegraph to all who might care that we were very much going to carry on as we had started — which is to say complicated and impossible to pigeonhole.

• The "hang on tight" vocal samples originate from a cassette featuring Dr. Dave Breese, an Evangelical Christian pastor and radio broadcaster on "Dave Breese Reports", which was also broadcasted on television as early as 1979^[1]. The original tape They Might Be Giants sampled is currently unknown, but Flansburgh said of the samples^[2]: "It’s from a kinda fake, budget version of a self-improvement program that was on a cassette we bought for, probably, 10 cents in some junk store."
• Like "Now That I Have Everything", the drum track on the original recording of this song was originally sampled from a DrumDrops album, specifically 1979's DrumDrops Volume One by David Crigger and Joey D. Vieira. The track is titled "Bluegrass Country", and can be listened to here.
• Dr. Benjamin Spock (not to be confused with Mr. Spock from Star Trek) was a pediatrician who wrote the best-selling The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. His grandson was Dan Spock^[3], a childhood friend of the Johns who in the early '80s performed in the bands The Functionaires with Bill Krauss, and The Blackouts with John Flansburgh.
• On the "TMB Songs" list from 1985, this song was originally referred to as "They Might Be Giants Theme".

Song Themes

Altered Voice, Hair, Lies And Deception, Music, People (Real), Questions, Self-Reference, Size, Songs With Samples, Temperature, Water, Weather

Videos

• Live performance at Warsaw, Polish National Home, Brooklyn, NY, taped for Gigantic (A Tale Of Two Johns). Watch it on  – Recorded live on August 5, 2001

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