Greetings from John and John. Factory Showroom is our latest album, and our second with a full band. Encouraged by Elektra's liberal A&R staff to take the album in our own direction, we decided to forego our usual woodshedding process. Instead, many of these songs were finished during a weekly residency at the Mercury Lounge in New York this spring and short east coast and midwest tours. Having recorded most of John Henry with the full band live, we set out to intergrate our old, highly personal, electronic way of working with our new, more organic full band sound.
Our drummer from the John Henry sessions, Brian Doherty, carries on with us, and has been joined by the awesome and notable bassist Graham Maby (Joe Jackson, Freedy Johnson) and lead guitarist Eric "Wah-Wah" Schermerhorn (Iggy Pop, David Bowie).
Thanks for checking out our latest album. Hope you like it. See you on the road.
2. Till My Head Falls Off
Performed at the breakneck tempo of "classic new wave", this song is the
harangue of an embattled old-timer who refuses to yield the floor. Chorus:
"I'm not done, and I won't be till my head falls off." Check out the rock
power of bassist Graham Maby in the breakdown section.
3. How Can I Sing Like a Girl?
This song is as much about freedom of expression as it is about how to sing
high. Its title was inspired by part of TMBG's live show where Flansburgh
had to sing in a falsetto to reproduce the sound of a sped-up vocal from a
recording called "She Was a Hotel Detective". And so the idea of having "the
right to sing like a girl on demand" was born.
4. Exquisite Dead Guy
A song of admiration for a departed hero. The title is inspired by the name
of a parlor game of the Surrealists, "The Exquisite Corpse", in which players
take turns constructing a sentence word by word without seeing what has already
been written.
5. Metal Detector
Partly inspired by a zealous guidebook to buried treasure in coastal Maine,
the perspective of "Metal Detector" is that beach recreation is frivolous
compared to the serious business of treasure hunting. We dug up the dusty
but still squawking MicroMoog synthesizer for many of the sounds on this track.
6. New York City
This song was originally recorded by a group called Cub from Vancouver.
The original version is an inspired piece of garage-grrrl rock. We took a
little bit of the garage element out, and put a little more New York New
Wave into the mix. The original lyrics were not immediately intelligible,
so some liberties were taken. (Co-op City is not mentioned in the list of
memorable New York sites.) Lyle Workman from Frank Black's band sits in on
lead guitar.
7. Your Own Worst Enemy
In a sense, the sound of this track harkens back to the earliest They Might
Be Giants recordings. All the percussion is from a tiny Yamaha sound module.
The bass is a cello plucked by Mr. Garo Yellin. The words, which visit the
themes of depression, alcoholism, and self-destruction, are the original products
of our own imaginations, although the chorus makes fleeting reference to
a popular soft-rock song from the '70's: "Precious and few are the moments
we two can share."
8. XTC vs. Adam Ant
This song is about an imaginary rivalry between these two seminal but totally
distinct early '80s rock icons. It is also definitive proof TMBG is still
hopelessly trapped in a world of pop culture references. We recorded a song
for the XTC tribute record last year, and while we were tracking it we had
to record some backwards vocal for a psychedelic section. Since it didn't
really matter what we said we recited a bunch of bands contemporary with the
lads from Swindon, including Adam Ant. The contrast between the two seemed
striking and while doing a bit of press to promote the tribute album, we cooked
up this song.
9. Spiraling Shape
TMBG wishes to make the case that not all of our songs have a single strict
interpretation, but "Spiraling Shape" is generally about the fervent embrace
and then abandonment of a cultural "bubble." It might be "smart" drugs, it
might be virtual whatever, or it could simply be spin art. Steve Light adds
his snazzy vibraphone to this swirling cut.
10. James K. Polk
This song was written with childhood friend Mr. Matthew Hill. Originally
featured as a b-side, its legacy has grown with hardcore TMBG fans, and now
has been resurrected in full hi-fi for Factory Showroom. The lyrics
are as factual as we could make them with the reference books handy. James
Knox Polk, the 11th President of the U.S., was a dark horse candidate who
unexpectedly won the Democratic nomination and the election based on his popularity
in the South with his stated goal of annexing Texas, the Southwest, and the
Oregon Territories. Once in office he fanned the flames of dispute between
the U.S. and Mexico to achieve part of this aim. (The Mexican War is still
commemorated in the expression "Remember the Alamo!") Personally, we find
his expansionist policies ruthless and unscrupulous, but the existence of
the Western U.S. is largely due to him. The spooky sound halfway into this
recording is a "singing saw," an actual metal saw stroked with a bow by Mr.
Julian Koster.
11. Pet Name
This track takes us deeper into the Memphis groove than the band has ever
been before. The song is about a slightly sleazy couple with a tenuous relationship
to each other and a suspect relationship to the world.
12. I Can Hear You
This track was recorded at the Edison Historic Site in West Orange, New
Jersey on an Edison wax cylinder recorder. We performed this and other songs
in front of a small audience, singing and playing acoustic instruments as
loud as we could into a pair of enormous metal cones, the larger of which
was perhaps twelve feet long, which fed the sound into a hundred year old
non-electrical recording device created by Thomas Edison in the 1890s. The
wax cylinder recorder carves a groove into a rotating tube of softened wax
with a needle that is vibrating from the sound pressure collected at the
small end of the cone. That is the best we can explain it. It looked very
cool.
13. The Bells are Ringing
A song about the seductive appeal of social order (as opposed to individual
freedom), and an expression of the terrifying and exciting power of propaganda.
The part of the bells is sung by Amanda Homi.