Piece Of Dirt

From This Might Be A Wiki

song name Piece of Dirt
artist They Might Be Giants
releases Lincoln, Then: The Earlier Years
year 1988
first played December 31, 1987 (46 known performances)
run time 2:00
sung by John Flansburgh, John Linnell harmonizes on the title


Trivia/Info

  • When asked to name any particularly special songs in 2010, John Linnell said:[1]
There are certain recordings where after the fact we thought, "Wow, what an interesting, rare thing that was..." "Piece of Dirt" from the Lincoln album was this odd thing which came together in the studio and was very different and kind of beautiful and rare. It was the result of John and I collaborating in the studio, going back and forth and giving each other material and it was unlike anything we had recorded before.
  • An alternate verse of the song was included in the Lincoln liner notes and reads as follows: "Piece of dirt, I made it prettier today, piece of dirt, it was that or just complain." These lyrics have been used live on at least one occasion.
  • At a March 15, 1995 show, John Flansburgh said of Piece of Dirt, "Here's a song that I was looking through the files about a year after we released the Lincoln album, and I found another set of lyrics that were really a lot better, so I suppressed them. And we're just going to have to deal with the traditional lyrics." Flansburgh has also told a similar story about "Snowball In Hell" from the same album.
  • The Blue Avatar released a solo rendition of this song in 2015. Watch it on Youtube.png . In this version, the man at the end of the song is "creepy" instead of "spooky".
  • The first verse may be a reference to the lyrics to the song "See No Evil" by Television, which goes "I wanna fly, fly a fountain. I want to jump, jump, jump, a-jump a mountain."

Song Themes

Jumping, Loneliness, Love, Mind Control, Hypnotism, Problems with Liner Notes, Sailing, Telecommunication

Videos

Current Rating

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Piece Of Dirt is currently ranked #298 out of 1005. (111 wikians have given it an average rating of 8.58)