I “met” They Might Be Giants during the summer of 1990. I’d heard the name before, and to tell the truth, I was a little put off by it. I’d never heard the music, but the name made me leery.
It changed when I was twenty, spending a few weeks home from college. My favorite band at the time was Jefferson Starship (whom I still like.) My sister and I decided to drive to Pittsburgh, which is about an hour and a half by car south of my hometown. She asked me if I’d ever heard of They Might Be Giants, and then put a copy of Flood into the tapedeck. We were heading from the Shenango Valley Mall to route 60 when it started. In the mall parking lot, “Birdhouse in Your Soul” started, which grabbed me right at my core. I’d never heard any song like this! This was the greatest piece of music I’d ever heard in my life! Is there such a thing as a perfect song? I think so. And “Birdhouse in Your Soul” is it. Here it’s fifteen years later, and I still think so.
As soon as “Birdhouse” was finished, I did something I never do with an album: I hit rewind and played it again. Then a third time. My sister got annoyed and told me we had to listen to the whole album. Okay, I let it play through. “Lucky Ball and Chain” is a good tune, and I dug it, but then “Istanbul, Not Constantinople” came on, and I was similarly thunderstruck. This song was one that already had mystical significance to me. I remember my mother singing “Istanbul” when I was a kid, and I remember wishing I could find a copy of it. As a kid (as now,) I was a geography fanatic, so this song just spoke to me. They Might Be Giants’ cover was not only fantastic, but it was also connected to my past by a golden thread. This one I had to rewind a couple more times, until she got annoyed, and I somehow managed to let the rest of the album play through.
Since then I’ve purchased every They Might Be Giants album ever made, and have pounced on each new one as it came out. I’ve seen them in concert many times, I’ve seen People are Wrong, I saw Gigantic in the theaters and own it on DVD. I’ve chatted with John Flansburgh’s wife and I’ve shaken the hands of both Johns.
Something about this band touched me from the first time I heard them, and something continues to touch me. They’ve never cut an album that’s as good as Flood, but that’s kind of like saying you’ve never made as much money in a single day as you did the day you won the lottery. So many songs touch me in so many ways, in light ways and in profound ways. “James K. Polk” is a straight-up history of the presidential campaign of President James K. Polk, and I’m delighted to no end that they wrote such a tune. Who else would? Other songs like “The Spiraling Shape” and “Museum of Idiots” have shown themselves to be strangely pertinent to my life when I first heard them. Sometimes it feels like the Johns sit around the studio thinking, “Hmm… what songs would Chance want to hear?” I’ve never felt so utterly connected to the works of anyone else.
