Personal tools
The TMBG Knowledge Base

Dinner Bell

From This Might Be A Wiki
song nameDinner Bell
artistThey Might Be Giants
releasesApollo 18
year1992
first playedSep. 12, 1992 (37 known performances)
run time2:11
sung byJohn Linnell (millions of him!), John Flansburgh sings backup at the end

Trivia/Info

  • "Through the miracle of multi-tracking the big big vocal sound of Dinner Bell was achieved. Linnell did the fancy barbershop stuff, and I came in for the counterpoint voice near the end." - John Flansburgh
  • The strange sounding voice heard when the body parts are being listed ("elbow, shoulder, bicep, palm" etc) was created using a complicated process. Linnell listened to a tape of the words being played backwards, which he then attempted to imitate. For example, "elbow" backwards sounds something like "wuh-bleh." The tape of Linnell's backwards imitations was then itself reversed, creating the weirdly-pronounced words heard in the song.
  • From the tmbg.com FAQ archive: "The song does indirectly refer to Pavlov's famous experiment involving a dog's reaction to the ringing of a bell after associating the sound with food." - John Linnell
  • Covered by a-cappella group The Bobs on their album Rhapsody in Bob (2005). The Bobs did not use the reversed speech trick for the body part list, which makes it much, much easier to understand than the original. The Bobs have also covered Particle Man.

Song Themes

Addiction, Compulsion, Animals, Backwards, Body Parts, Clothes, Drinking, Educational, Food, German, Hands

Videos

 
Current Rating

You must be logged in to rate this. You can either login (if you have a userid) or create an account with us today.

Dinner Bell is currently ranked #42 out of 846. (310 wikians have given it an average rating of 9.03)
Retrieved from "http://tmbw.net/wiki/Dinner_Bell"