She's Actual Size

From This Might Be A Wiki

song name She's Actual Size
artist They Might Be Giants
releases The Statue Got Me High (EP), Apollo 18, Flood + Apollo 18
year 1992
first played January 23, 1992 (481 known performances)
run time 2:05
sung by John Flansburgh; John Linnell sings "size!"


Trivia/Info

  • This song was apparently inspired by the band's 1990 Flood tour, during which they spent a lot of time driving around looking in rearview mirrors and at the phrase 'objects may appear larger than actual size' that appears on it. Flansburgh: "There's a country western song that talks about seeing someone going away in a rearview mirror. I thought that was a really succinct way of talking about leaving somebody behind. It turned into kind of a brag song about a woman who leaves everyone behind by the virtue for being super cool, so happening that they're intimidating." (XS Magazine, April 1, 1992)
  • "This song is about scale, and sexuality, and, uh...relationships." - John Flansburgh, Feb. 10, 1992
  • "When I listen to 'She's Actual Size', I would be lying if I said that it didn't make me a little disappointed, because the later performance versions of it have so much more spirit than the recorded version. It was very tentative at the (recording) time because it was just finished. [...] It's not so much the arrangement, but the confidence we have when we perform the song. It's frustrating to hear the "definitive" version of the song—I think it's a solid song—to be a timid performance." - John Flansburgh in an interview with Consumable Online, 1994
  • Linnell wrote the horn charts for this song.[1]
  • In live performances from the late 1990s until the early 2000s, Flansburgh and Dan Hickey would usually stop in the middle to perform the infamous "Dial-a-Drum-Solo" skit. A live version of the song with the skit appears on Dial-A-Song: 20 Years Of They Might Be Giants.

Song Themes

Cities, Language, Mind Control, Hypnotism, Mirrors And Reflections, Money, New York City, Not In Major Or Minor, Religion, Supernatural, Shapes, Size, Spoken Word, Swing Feel, Transportation

Videos

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She's Actual Size is currently ranked #534 out of 1005. (95 wikians have given it an average rating of 8.16)