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Interpretations:Hide Away Folk Family

From This Might Be A Wiki

I believe this song may be about changing times and how sad it is that people have to lock their doors and always be worried about what others will do to them if they're not careful. Hideaway folk family, is basically saying, lock the doors and stay safe common families. Someone's gonna get ya', obviously referes to the increasing crime rate and that you and your family could be robbed or hurt if you're not careful. "Sadly the cross eyed bear's been but to sleep behind the stares", is a reference to how nobody wants to help eachother out anymore I believe. It's of course derived from, "Gladly the Cross I'd bear".

To me,this seems like to be a song about spousial abuse.

I've not much to say except this song strikes me as being about paranoia, whether justified or not.

According to They Might be Giants, its "about a family that has to hide away"

I always thought it was about a hostage situation, and "abandoning all hope" had to do with Stockholm Syndrome. --- I always thought it was about someone coming to get the family and the mother hides the child underneath the stairs only to later find out the villian is going to blow up that house not come inside it

Now that I think about it, that's a really weird interpretation I wrote a while ago. o_O BALEETED.

NEW INTEPRETATION! It's about... paranoia. Like, they're all scared that this is going to happen or whatever, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. I've always been convinced that the backwards singing at the end is the family's last moments. However, this could be what's going through their minds: not their death. Very, very scary yet really cool song. ^_^ Wow. Creepy. --Lemita 19:32, 27 Jun 2006 (MDT)

Again, a Holocaust song; the family is hiding away because of the Nazis.

I think its about the holocaust as well.

Like another song from the same period (Purple Toupee), this song is making fun of leftover hippies. --Nehushtan 05:27, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

No one seems to have mentioned that the lyric "hide away, folk family" is a play on words derived from a children's toy that was available in the 1970s and 1980s. The toy was called the Hideaway Folk Family. It was a little plastic cottage that hinged open and hidden inside there was a little family of folks. My recollection of this toy is located in the vastly remote recesses of my memory, but I seem to remember that the Folk Family was comprised of Weeble-like figures dressed in earthtones. It reminded me a little of the Fisher-Price barn that opened up and held barnyard animals. So, one of the Johns noticed that the name of the toy, Hideaway Folk Family, sounds like an ominous admonition, "hide away, folk family!" and they parleyed that idea into a song. Any young adult of the 1980s would know the Hideaway Folk Family toy and would get the joke. The rest of the lyrics are just complimentary to the central turn of the phrase. --Chadd

There's an innocent nice Christian family being shown to believe the worst in people and live in a state of fear and distrust. magbatz

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