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TMBG's new Cloisonné video: Suits Me!

Oh boy!

This is so worth the wait.

TMBG haven't made an official music video showing all of them, faces and instruments and all their lovely selves since 2001. That was for their Grammy winning Malcolm in the Middle theme song "Boss Of Me" which depicted them becoming the disposable playthings of the kids in the show.

In that video they got pelted by paint balls and Flans was dumped in the trash. Could have put them off making videos featuring themselves for the rest of their natural lives!

We're blessed that they're back with a vengeance. In smart and sexy suits, too, looking and sounding the absolute bees knees!


They've re-recorded Cloisonné, one of the finest, if not THE finest song ever to emerge from Mr Flansburgh's creative imagination, in the key of D. So instead of just the familiar version from new album "Join Us", we get a fabulous brand new recorded version to enjoy.

What's a sleestak? If you don't know by now, treat yourself to an education courtesy of the lovely Johns!

*************** FAN ****************

 

Eyes at stage level swivel swallowed giggle

Watch man bones close rocking zipper wriggle

Dream yourself liaison later wait for chorus

Up with crowd pogo lunge inner fangasm

Mind's thrill spilling all to blog buddies

Snatch his blind impersonal smiles closer

Figure dinner for two you and him only

Strike cut to chase fumble and stammer

Like he does when you echo his mutter

After you centre meant to memorise

The smell of shirts and strings things in lyrics

He whispered lip on lobe to only you

Stumbling but skipping through the shock night

Back to bedroom void annoyed no encore

Replay rewind loop spins some flickery fanfic

You dream you haven't written given mirror

Are you him now or your own shy self?

Aorta thumping wrists still slamming

Confetti stuck in your hood floods

Flutters into cupped body space

Where you crush it to your lips and weep

With joy except it tastes like stricken

Join Us: My favourite tracks (so far!)

Join Us has been on almost continuous play on the iPods of many fans including my own (when I can wrestle it back from my Mum - see last 'Pinwheels' blogpost!) since it came out last month.


I've so enjoyed seeing other TMBG-oholics lists of their favourite songs from the new album in order from favourite to least favourite. I'm never that good deciding between things I enjoy - typical dithering Nine-with-a-one-wing! It can vary from day to day. I see all sides to every argument. And then weigh it all up again!


This album certainly seems to me to be the best of the lads' albums to date for listening to all the tracks right through without being tempted to skip any (comparative!) turkeys. John Flansburgh's songwriting has improved endlessly over the span of their career, and he can certainly now hold his own in the company of John Linnell's fantastic melding of lyrics, rhythms, melodies and harmonies, evident from their earliest days.


So here goes. No tracks I dislike or skip. Many that are stuck in my head and bring a warm glow when ever the opening notes strike up.


I know this list is quite different from many others I've seen from other fans. For instance, I've yet to hear anybody raving about one of my very favourites 'Let Your Hair Hang Down'. It actually brought a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes for the sincerity and yearning in Linnell's voice at some points, the first time I heard it. It has a similar effect on me to "Broke in Two" and "Withered Hope" for some reason. Linnell insisting none of the songs reflect him in any way, but my gut somehow telling me there are tiny crumbs of him hidden deep in certain songs, that make them almost unbearably moving to a softie like yours truly.

Anyway, here are the tracks in the order I love them at this moment (please feel free to wade in with your own comments and points of view if you want to!):


JOIN US: Favourite track through to least favourite (for now!)


1. Canajoharie


2. The Lady and the Tiger


3. Let Your Hair Hang Down

4. You Probably Get That A Lot


5. Can't Keep Johnny Down


6. Cloisonné


7. When Will You Die?


8. Celebration


9. Spoiler Alert

10. Never Knew Love


11. Protagonist


12. You Don't Like Me

13. In Fact 

14. Judy Is Your Viet Nam

15. Three Might Be Duende


16. Old Pine Box


17. Dog Walker


18. 2082




Mmmmm! Now again I'm not so sure! How can those last few find themselves at the bottom of any list? It feels wrong already! 


A Linnell song at the bottom? Well, for the record I LOVE '2082'. It's just that I wonder if Linnell took his foot off the pedal just that tiny squidgeon with it, the way I feel about "Stalk of Wheat" (do I really feel that?????)
IDEK!


I love this album from start to finish and back again, so it's irrelevant really what order I put them in. None of them is ever going to be far from my heart!


Hope you enjoy it as much as I do and are already debating over your own personal favourites! Or if you're not yet a fan, maybe contemplating giving the album a spin?

Zither and thither!

Just tackled the task of perking up the springs and retuning my autoharp.

Each saggy spring under the 15 chord bars needs to be taken out and lengthened a bit to give the bars and their felt pads a bit more bounce when damping the strings.

Easier said than done! Every time I screwed down those fiddly screws again to retain the bars in place, and looked down the length of the strings, another pesky little spring was peeping out there going: "Haha, look, I've fallen over again - are you coming in to get me, sucker?"

Tuned it to itself. Then discovered my tuning fork and so needed to repeat the whole process to get it singing in tune with the fork's perfectly pitched "E"!

A kind American friend passed the lovely instrument on to me when I worked in Bolivia. They knew I loved music and had seen my guitar and accordion. Apparently they hadn't used it for years. It was just gathering dust in an attic in La Paz!

It came without a tuning key, so I had to source one when a friend was visiting me in the wilds of the Andes from the States. At that time, I didn't know anybody back home in England who even knew what an autoharp was! 


Having seen Brian Dewan opening for They Might Be Giants on his self-built electric zither a few months before travelling to South America, I was keen to give it a go!

I'll never be up to Brian's luminous, genius standards of musical experimentation, but my humble little zither always brings a smile to my face and reminds me of those heady days when the altitude made an instrument you could sit down to play a very appealing prospect!

They Might Be Giants' "Tubthumping" cover brings a smile to my day!

They Might Be Giants covers Chumbawamba


No apologies for blogging today about my favourite band who can always bring a smile to my day.


TMBG always put life's craziness into perspective for me with their integrity, sense of the absurd, fascinating and irresistibly earwormish musicality, combined with their ethos of fun, exploring the fine line between sadness and joy, laugh and scream.


 And so much more, as fans already know! All this, as well as new generations of kids being taught the alphabet, numbers and science singing along to their amazingly catchy and informative children's songs.


Can't wait for their all-original new album "Join Us" out on the 19th. Tubthumping won't be on it, of course, (this is just them having a blast enjoying the challenge of covering a song they didn't have to write themselves!) but their own wonderfully intricate, clever, funny, thoughtful, life-enhancing stuff will!


Previews, to give us a taster of treats to come can be heard here, courtesy of Amazon.com:


30 sec previews of TMBG's new album "Join Us" out July 19th


Hope this brings a smile to you today also! Enjoy!

*By the way, 'Pinwheels', which was my first experimental blog, has become a real mix of stuff over the years. That's why slowly, I'm trying to start new bloglets to focus on the many different passions in my life! For those who are happy to share my unrepentant fangirling, (too late to hope I'll grow out of it, folks!) most of my TMBG/music/comedy etc obsessive stuff for pure light relief appears now on Tumblr:
http://cardedfolderol.tumblr.com/ 
There I'm aka "(Dis)carded Folderol", a nom de plume which,  for the (lamentably) uninitiated, is taken from a line in John Linnell's sublime TMBG song "Metal Detector" from their album "Factory Showroom". Fair warning: Here be allsorts!

TMBG Awareness Day video - Love and Linnellisms and a llama

 Our International TMBG Awareness Day on Tuesday 26th April celebrated the release of 4 advance tracks from They Might Be Giants' long awaited new album "Join Us" for their fans no longer (necessarily) in kindergarten.


I love their successful departure into stuff for kids, of course, not least their last Grammy nominated children's album "Here Comes Science" ("The Bloodmobile" from that album probably comes in my current top twenty TMBG tracks, even as an adult - and it may even be in my 79-year-old mum's top three!), but we are overdue for a fix of grown-up tracks filled with witty, catchy, irresistible genius such as only Messrs Linnell and Flansburgh can furnish to a waiting world.


Fellow fan Kelly Potter, who writes the wonderful blog "My Name is Blue Canary" at
http://www.my-name-is-blue-canary.blogspot.com/
came up with the great idea of asking fans to send her a short 10 second video of their why-I-love-the Johns tribute for inclusion in a compilation to be uploaded to Facebook and YouTube to celebrate the band some of us have enjoyed and been inspired by for nearly three decades. 


Glutted on publicising many serious and worthy "Awareness Days" for every disease, cause and crisis under the sun, including May 12th's upcoming Awareness Day for M.E. (the illness that has currently robbed me of my job, health, and mobility, not to mention the joy of attending concerts by my heroes on their sporadic trips across the Atlantic to these shores), I was determined not to let the occasion pass for a more zany, celebratory spot of awareness for the sheer joyful, crazy, fun of it. They are overdue for a thankyou. Over the years they have been so generous and gracious with their fans. 


Since discovering them back in 1990 and seeing them in concert then in London, when "Birdhouse" was riding high in the UK charts and they were just two guys with a guitar, an accordion, an unfeasibly large saxophone, a drum machine and some giant stamps as a stage set, the Johns and their music have enhanced most of my adult life in more ways than I can express. Crazy but true.


So I grabbed my own accordion (a purchase inspired, natch, by John Linnell, surely the loveliest man and the greatest songwriter I've been blessed to discover), a toy llama, my signed photo of the two Johns and my digital camera. The sound quality was a bit dodgy but the sincerity was real:


'Hi, my name's Joyce, and when I worked in Bolivia, the Johns sent me this signed photo with the message 'Kiss those llamas for us'. Love you, guys!'

Well, it was 11 seconds, actually, but the last second was only a bit of inane smiling that could be edited out. Looking at the whole video, I don't think I was the only fan to overrun my alloted moment in the spotlight, but I loved everyone else's contributions, as they all obviously came from the heart. They can't touch us for it!


My segment starts at about 3:08.


If you haven't checked out the band, yet, maybe you owe it to yourself to dip your toe into the vast ocean of their genius. You'll soon have some unique reasons all your own to want to wear a prosthetic forehead on your real head or contain a secret smile.