Album: Apollo 18
Year: 1992
They Might Be Giants followed Flood with a 1991 compilation of early singles, cleverly entitled Miscellaneous T, on which landed my beloved “We’re The Replacements” as well as “Don’t Lets Start,” but the rest of it left me cold, as did their next studio album 1992’s Apollo 18, for reasons that I cannot comprehend now.
All I know is that I didn’t listen to it again for 30 years, only recently sticking it into the mix as I belatedly realized that hearing it with my ears and my situation now might help uncover songs that I’d ignored at the time. And yup, things like “See The Constellation,” “The Statue Got Me High,” “My Evil Twin” and especially “I Palindrome I,” are smart, fun and catchy. My only excuse was that in 1992, I was dumb and unfun for much of the year. Certainly unfun enough to not fall in love with a song that started like this:
Someday Mother will die and I’ll get the money
Mom leans down and says, “My sentiments exactly
You son of a bitch”
It’s also possible that I’d assumed that Flood was a one-off in terms of TMBG records I would like start-to-finish, and there wasn’t a “Birdhouse in Your Soul” or “We Want A Rock” anywhere on Apollo 18 to drag me into the rest of the record. Or something. Because how else could I miss a double-time call-and-response chorus full of palindrome sentences like the chorus.
I palindrome I (I palindrome I)
I palindrome I (I palindrome I)
And I am a snake head eating (Snake head)
The head on the opposite side (Snake head)
I palindrome I (Man o Nam)
I palindrome I (Man o Nam)
“I Palindrome I” features a circular music structure, naturally, and some really nice lead guitar from John Flansburgh. So I don’t know what the fuck I was on about. Maybe it seemed slight in the year where I was living through Nevermind and Achtung Baby! and Use Your Illusion II hangovers and dominated the landscape and my favorite records were Automatic For The People and Copper Blue and Harvest Moon.
“Son, I am able,” she said
“Though you scare me.”
“Watch,” said I “beloved,”
I said, “Watch me scare you though,”
Said she, “Able am I son.”
In any event, I totally and completely ignored They Might Be Giants for the rest of the decade, and I haven’t ever gone back — that’s on me!!! — so I can’t tell you what I think of John Henry, Factory Showroom, and pretty much any of their records for about 15 years. But not forever, as we’ll soon see.
“I Palindrome I”
“I Palindrome I” Live on Late Night With David Letterman, 1992
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