Wednesday, July 2, 2014

They Might Be Giants! Free! Live! Album!


When I picked up Nanobots a few months ago, I was unprepared for the household mania for They Might Be Giants which I unleashed. I like to put a They Might Be Giants album on while I'm working. I like to NOT know the lyrics, so while it's roiling around in the background, every once in a while a phrase or lyric that I hadn't noticed before will float up like a bubble. I listened to Stone Cold Coup d' Etat probably a dozen times before I heard the Tennyson quote, so then it was like an extra present!

Now we have five They Might Be Giants albums, and my kids have taken them over. (But not the kid's albums, I offered to buy them, but they feel children's albums would be beneath them.) From the albums we have, they are busy making their own mixes. We only get about four radio stations, and three of them country music stations, which just makes me feel sad and embarrassed for humanity, mostly. I'm really really grateful, since we live in a cultural desert, that my kids have found music that they really like. That makes them curious and excites their imaginations. They are older children, seven and ten, so they get a great deal of the humor. They love wordplay. We have conversations about how the lyrics, being elliptical or oblique, seem to make the songs more expansive, and seem to suggest many different things all at once. My younger son demands that we play They Might Be Giants at dinner, and would sit with all the CDs stacked at his plate, so he can peruse them over his meal; but I won't let him because he will get food on them. He may be the only seven year old that knows what duende is, but can't put his shirt on frontwards.

If you, like me, have let a quarter century elapse before giving They Might Be Giants a try, you can rectify this at no charge. They Might Be Giants are giving away every song on their first album recorded live on tour in 2013, which is a really swell thing to do.
They Might Be Giants entire first album recorded live on the 2013 tour! - See more at: http://www.theymightbegiants.com/firstalbumlive/#sthash.xsbfMdug.dpuf

They Might Be Giants First Album Live

Above is my cover of the cover art on They Might Be Giant's first album, originally created by Rodney Alan Greenblat.  I've been working on it during lunch for the last few days. Acrylic on paper, 12" x 24". I will probably give it to my boys to put in their room when it's done. Below is one of my short people, reading me the songs on Album Raises New and Troubling Questions.



No comments: