Dinner Bell

From This Might Be A Wiki

song name	Dinner Bell
artist	They Might Be Giants
album	Apollo 18
year	1992
first played	Sep. 12, 1992 (22 known performances)
run time	2:11
sung by	John Linnell, John Flansburgh sings backup at the end

"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.

Watch it on - Recorded live on July 1, 2006, with vocals by Robin Goldwasser and Julia Greenberg.

Current Rating

Dinner Bell is currently ranked #39 out of 797. (272 wikians have given it an average rating of 9.00)