Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch
Who watches over you
Make a little birdhouse in your soul
It is generally believed that the lyrics of Birdhouse in Your Soul by They Might be Giants, are narrated from the perspective of a blue, canary-shaped plug in nightlight.
Was this actually a product that existed before the song? I know such things are available now, but I think many of them may have arisen in tribute to the song.
Never heard of the song or the nightlight, but it seems like a really weird thing to make up “from scratch” if it didn’t already exist.
Even if that specific combination didn’t exist, it’s certainly the sort of thing that could exist. Plug-in nightlights certainly existed, and in a variety of shapes and colors. Could one be shaped like a canary? Sure. Could one be blue? Of course. Could one be a blue canary? Why not?
Point of detail: the song predates the common place use of blue LEDs by a few years; most nightlights were either neon (orange-red), electroluminescent (green) or incandescent - which I suppose could have a blue filter
True, but you can’t really go by that, as this is They Might Be Giants, so if any band is going to make up weird things from scratch, they’d be it.
I had a nightlight as a kid in the 80s and 90s (man, I really did NOT like the dark). Mine were incandescent bulbs with a plastic cover that only covered the front of the bulb, so light would just kind of diffuse up the wall but not shine in your face. I don’t see why fancier kids couldn’t have had a plastic front cover that was blue and in the shape of a canary.
Here’s a new model that is somewhat similar to what I had, except a fancy cover in the shape of a shell. Yes, it has a 7-watt LED bulb but I guarantee you I was using the same or similar in the 80s and 90s, obviously with a different bulb.
Video:
Slate article about the song:
Wikipedia article about the song:
Performance on The Tonight Show (with trumpet solo by Doc Severinsen):
Unless I missed it, none of these links answer the OP’s question.
It may be a case of life imitating art, like red Swingline staplers.
TLDR: They came only in gray and blue until the art director painted one for Office Space.
Most incandescent night lights would have had some sort of pretty design to hide and/or diffuse the bulb. I don’t remember a “blue canary” one specifically, but there were thousands if not hundreds of thousands of designs, so it’s pretty likely that one could exist. This would also include hand-crafted stained glass diffusers and “Makit and Bakit” crafts, which could allow even more variety of color/design options
As a child in the 1980s, the night lights I remember were largely small incandescent bulbs behind curved black shades.
This picture is fairly close to what I remember, and of course the shade can have anything painted on it.
So, are you telling me I can’t actually get a prosthetic forehead to wear on my real head?
Does the song specify that the light coming from it is blue, or could it be just the device itself? Because there are things like this
Near as I can tell, the lyrics only specify a blue canary “in the outlet” and other lyrics in the song seem to support this. No mention of the light’s particular color. It’s not difficult for me to imagine such a night light existed, though it’s possible that rather than being in the literal shape (and color) of a blue canary, it might’ve been something more like a tiny lampshade with a depiction of a blue canary.
[quote=“Mangetout, post:4, topic:917252, full:true”]
Point of detail: the song predates the common place use of blue LEDs by a few years; most nightlights were either neon (orange-red), electroluminescent (green) or incandescent - which I suppose could have a blue filter
[/quote]looks like i screwed up the quote…
Nightlights were neon? That sounds like fun but is it true?
I Googled ‘Bluebird of happiness’ night lights. I got a gazillion hits.
I looked because I remember one in our house as a kid. I’m not sure how young I was when I first remember it.
The late 70s at least.
We explicitly called it the ‘Bluebird of Happiness’
Less exciting than perhaps it sounds - they were just like a mains plug with a small neon indicator lamp inside them which shone through the translucent outer casing - they looked like this (this example says LED in the title, but neon in the description, so it may be an LED emulating the way the neon ones used to look):
https://cpc.farnell.com/pro-elec/pel00952/night-light/dp/PL15884?mckv=sYnX3UeZL_dc|pcrid|426684131195|kword||match||plid||slid||product|PL15884|pgrid|100371159838|ptaid|pla-872781731721|&CMP=KNC-GUK-CPC-
Fair nitpick. I suppose what I really meant was “Was this already a thing that many people might have instantly recognised as something from their own childhood, when they heard the song in 1990?”
All the nightlights I remember from the 70’s and '80’s used the same bulbs we use in incandescent string lights. I still have them on my house, but they used to be the common bulb on Christmas trees. As such, you could get them in any color you wanted. They went into a little bulb socket attached to an electrical plug, and typically had some kind of plastic decorative shroud around them.
If anybody made it up from scratch, this band would be the likeliest to do that.
