Song of the Day: They Might Be Giants, "Till My Head Falls Off"

I don’t think they were ever my favorite band (none of their albums are in my top 100 list), but there was definitely a period of my life when I was a very intense apologist for They Might Be Giants. It’s possible I heard “Birdhouse In Your Soul” on the radio earlier but I know the first time they made a serious impression on me was a 1991 episode of Tiny Toon Adventures that featured animated music videos of “Particle Man” and “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” I was raised on a steady diet of “Weird Al” Yankovic and Dr. Demento compilation records, so initially TMBG appealed to me as a novelty act who made songs that were sort of funny. They very much seemed like they were of a piece with other bits of junk culture I also loved at the time (it’s easy to imagine the makers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 being huge fans, for example), and it helped that the songs were insanely catchy (not only does it discuss a bit of art history, but “Meet James Ensor” is also an earworm).

My appreciation of them curdled as I got older. I don’t know at what point I decided I didn’t want any humor in my music, but it happened, and I tapped out with TMBG around the time they started making music explicitly for children. (Around the same time, probably my second or third year in college, I also began to reject Barenaked Ladies, a band I had stood up for but decided they were no longer worth the tomfoolery.) But lately I’ve rediscovered them a bit thanks to my own son. He didn’t find the band on his own, but when he asked me a bunch of questions about the sun I realized I was just quoting (scientifically accurate!) lines from “Why Does the Sun Shine?” a cover of an old educational folk tune from the ‘50s I heard on TMBG’s live album Severe Tire Damage. I played him a few of their songs and they didn’t do much for him, but I found myself getting sucked back into the thrilling pop purity of “Birdhouse In Your Soul,” “Don’t Let’s Start,” and “Ana Ng.”

They didn’t play what I thought of as punk music, but obviously they were punk as hell. The short songs, the esoteric arrangements with unusual instruments, the whole Dial-A-Song concept—they maintained a brand of indie integrity I found very appealing even as I recognized the mainstream embracing them (to a certain degree, at least). I saw them play a couple of times, and they ripped as a live act (by the time I got around to them they had been performing for nearly 20 years, which will get you pretty good at it). The clip above is a live performance of a banger from 1996’s Factory Showroom (probably their second-best pound-for-pound album behind Flood) called “Till My Head Falls Off.” This aired on Comedy Central’s Viva Variety, a kickass send-up of ‘70s style variety shows as a post-The State project for Thomas Lennon, Kerri Kenney-Silver, and Michael Ian Black. I was 15 years old when I watched this on TV, and the image of John Flansburgh tearing the strings off his guitar at the end was seared into my brain forever. It just looked so cool. “Till My Head Falls Off” is a goofy song but these guys made it seem intense and fundamental, and that’s true of the best of TMBG’s work.