Hope That I Get Polled Before I Die: THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS 1982-2002 POLL - Voting, Campaigning, Discussing

(BTW, if you folks think this is a lot of songs, I'm past 300 tracks in the 2003-2018 list, and haven't touched the studio albums, EPs or subscription services yet.)

i think my ballot for that one might just consist of "can't keep johnny down"

I'm about halfway through listening to all the 82-02 songs I'd never heard. here's a couple gems I'd never heard:

Welcome to the Jungle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsY31bzymkk
Mrs. Train https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9w6itI4HUY

this thread is bananas. in a good way, of course.

anyway: is there a more appropriate place (on ILM) to discuss / read discussion of I Like Fun? did I miss it around the release date?

I dunno if enough people listened to it; I have yet to hear I Like Fun or whatever the previous one was. maybe when we do the 2003-onwards poll

mrs train gets stuck in my head a lot

this is definitely one of those bands that seems to struggle to get their best songs on the LPs. I remember making a "best non-album songs" compilation that wound up being like 70 tracks long

otoh it's cool that their b-sides aren't just dumping grounds. but some of the 12"s are just insane. They'll Need A Crane in particular... hard to imagine someone could be an album-buying fan of this band and never hear Nightgown of the Sullen Moon or It's Not My Birthday or I'll Sink Manhattan.

I should say the worst songs are Flans-led - they credit everything to both of them, right? I wonder how much collaboration happens

Saw a recent interview with Linnell saying that they collaborate on writing more these days, but it seems to be giving each other a drum pattern or a bridge to play with, rather than sitting down in a room. One assumes (given the evidence of early versions of songs) that they do plenty of arranging together, but they've always talked of songs as being written by one or the other, despite the credit policy.

Given how much commissioned work they've done in the last 20 years, it could be that they write music and score and jingles together, and think of that differently from writing songs? I'd be interested in an interview that dug into their process.

For those who think Flans has lost it after 96 or whenever (I've never listened to Them picking out whose songs are which), it might support your theory that he's taken on WAY more additional work within the band in this century; with social media, curating and hosting the podcast, making videos on his laptop, etc.

xxxpost the new one is their best album in many years, imo

when I first got into this band at the age of 11 or so I had no idea there were actually two singers. nowadays it's pretty easy for me to tell whose song is whose, even before the lyrics kick in. the one that baffled me for years was "Puppet Head", because it's very clearly a Linnell-style song but Flansburgh sings it - apparently he turned the lyrics over to Flans because he couldn't come up with anything and that's why he wound up singing it instead.

xp to sic I went digging to see if the Johns talked about their collaboration process after I posted that, found this bit in an avclub interview:

AVC: Has the collaboration process between you and John changed much over the years?

JL: I think it’s always different. Everything we do, we try and come up with something new. John and I have come up with various ways of collaborating over the years, and it’s kind of pleasant and fun to have that possibility that we could come up with some completely new way of working together. In the past, we’ve done things where one of us cooks up a bunch of samples, or an instrumental track, or a lyrics sheet, and passes it to the other person. We’ve done a lot of different versions of that, and some of them have been successful. On Join Us, there’s some of that. There’s is a song, for example, where I had a chorus and verse, and I didn’t like the verse, so I erased the vocals on the verse and gave the whole thing to Mr. Flansburgh, and he cooked up a completely different melody and lyric for that section. That’s the one where one of us sings the chorus and the other sings the verse. That worked, I thought. That’s the song “Never Knew Love.” We’re always coming up with different ways of working together, and I was pleasantly surprised by Flansburgh’s new material. I think he’s changed in certain ways on this project. It’s this late in our lives, I can say his lyrics have opened up into a whole new interesting area that I don’t know whether I can define, exactly, except that I and other people are recognizing that this is a new way that he’s cooking up lyrics that is pretty cool.

Oh damn, I bet this is the interview you already mentioned whoops

It's not!

Two ways running this poll has affected my behaviour IRL this week: giggling pointlessly at the opening titles for Vertigo on 70mm, and buying a ticket to go to another country to see They Might Be Giants in a few weeks.

Flood Show 30/11/2000

I thought this was in Aus but I had to check my old old OLLLLD blog from 2001 and the show I saw was in Dec 2001, at which they did all of Flood (plus Fingertips, boss of me and a few other things). All this time I thought it'd been a spontaneous first time they'd done that! Bah.

favorite part of that show is how they forget the order of the tracks

The released show was the first time they'd done it; your show was was the fifth total, but two of those had been by "Sapphire Bullets" as support act.

Until two weeks ago, they'd had a Reverse Flood Show up for free download for two and a half years, recorded either at the Corner in Melbourne or The Zoo in Brisbane in 2013.

I just spontaneously claimed out loud that "I built a little empire out of some crazy garbage called the blood of the exploited working class". I got funny looks.

That line's been playing in my head a lot these last weeks, too.

This Mono Puff album is better than I remembered!

Which one? I'm not a big fan of either but they each have a couple standout moments

"Unsupervised, I Hit My Head" is the kind of fun energetic song that Linnell usually sings

Unsupervised

The big one is The World's Address, written by Linnell but sung by Flans. I think there are more examples

I really liked Unsupervised at the time; listened to It's Fun To Steal yesterday for the first time, and it's really not up to par.

Linnell on writing: "We write pretty independently, and we've had a number of tracks in the recent past where we've collaborated. There's one shining exception, which is the song "Mink Car" off of Mink Car we actually wrote sitting at a piano in this Leopold and Loeb sort of way. We don't really ever do that."

Just sent my ballot off. Making the first pass I had 96 tracks, but ranking them was near impossible and I didn't think too much about it. The song that ended up being my #1 surprised me. I think this band's strength is their breadth and variety rather than their quality on single songs, so it's harder to rank songs above others

recall interviews saying that they write a lot of uncredited stuff for TV and commercials, sorta as a 'day job')

Lots of ads and TV themes and such in the 2003-2018 list, but here are four ads they did for Diet Dr Pepper in 2001.

https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/21591/chimps/diet-dr-pepper

https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/21592/holland-globetrotters/diet-dr-pepper

https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/28111/retirement-village-people/diet-dr-pepper

https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/19921/xga/diet-dr-pepper

So I started this list because hell why not, I'm an actual sized TMBG fan and whatnot but I thought dammit I'll probably only be able to come up with 20 or 30 songs... oh crap theres heaps argh.

Luckily I tapped out after Mink Car so thats where I'll stop (and Im interested to note much of my faves are the LTW/Factory Showroom era!).

BTW sic - it occurs to me to ask if you had a hand in a certain ragey TMBG spesh on TeeVee in the early aughts? :) (I still have it all on video!)

I just sent mine in - ranking 100 songs is tough, tbh after 40 or so I just started listing stuff. But I stand behind it

I'm listening to lots of the 1988-94 B-sides for the first time rn and bemoaning the never-existed-ness of the Superfueled Freakcicle compilation

30 years since I first heard it and I still get goosebumps from "Don't Let's Start" every damn time

oops I accidentally downloaded over 200 Dial-A-Songs from the 20th century, and now might need to extend this poll by a couple of months to see if they unlock any of the eligible songs for me

Gonna send soon, I would say the top 40 or so are ranked, then there's a group of "next 30" and a group of "next 20" which are pretty impossible for me to meaningfully distinguish

Are we just going to end up with a jillion tracks each with a couple points? :)

Sent!

Are we just going to end up with a jillion tracks each with a couple points? :)

I think there'll be a decent amount of conensus near the top but some surprise high placers! Basically because that's what happens in every poll!

I mean never forget that the ILX REM poll had big canonical hits in positions 2-5 and "Harborcoat" won

it was before my time but wasn't the REM poll done in some weird run-off format so that only two songs from each album could place?

been slowly putting my ballot together for this. i still find TMBG to be a kinda frustrating band because they're so good at writing off-kilter pop songs but a lot of the time they're much more interested in being way more off-kilter than i really care for so listening to a whole album is a strange experience

^ Agreed. I was surprised to find than even Lincoln, which probably contains some of their highest highs, contains more than a few tracks I just didn't want to sit through at all nowadays. (That said, I think I already remembered it as the patchiest of the first few LPs, so...)

yeah i fucked up with the REM poll by using the album poll thread results as the basis for a short list of eligible songs. it was kinda early in the days of these things, but not really early enough that i should have thought that was a good idea. the countdown is still a pretty dope REM playlist tho imho.

even Lincoln, which probably contains some of their highest highs, contains more than a few tracks I just didn't want to sit through at all nowadays

haha yeah I now have "Cage and Aquarium" stuck in my head and I really dislike that song.

this is the dawning of the

i think apollo 18 might be their most consistent album, but it doesn't quite reach the same heights as the previous ones

Flood is definitely most consistent for me, even the totally throwaway songs are great

finalizing a ballot now. ranking is hard.

he ended up sad!

finalizing a ballot now. ranking is hard.

I've got 70-some selected and not sure where anything goes after #1

sent a 40+ track ballot

oh shit this is today