Fingertips

From This Might Be A Wiki
song name Fingertips
artist They Might Be Giants
releases Apollo 18 (divided into 21 segments), Dial-A-Song: 20 Years Of They Might Be Giants, Flood + Apollo 18
year 1992
first played November 2, 2000 (664 known performances)
run time 4:34
sung by John Linnell & John Flansburgh; additional vocals by Peter Stampfel, Nicholas Hill, Elma Mayer, Brian Dewan and Amy Allison


Trivia/Info

  • Fingertips is actually a collection of 21 short (mostly 5 to 20 second) songs. See the full tracklisting at the page for Apollo 18.
  • John Linnell on the song's idea from In Their Own Words: Songwriters Talk About the Creative Process by Bill DeMain[1]:
The project was to write a bunch of choruses and nothing else. In other words, I had to restrain myself from writing any other parts of the songs. I wanted a collection of choruses that's something like what you see on TV late at night, like the old K-Tel commercials. I was thinking about how you know a lot of songs from these ads, but the only part you know is maybe one line, which is half the chorus. And yet they stick in your head in the way a whole song would. in a way, these tiny chips of songs seem complete, because you don't know the rest of the song.
  • Linnell has also cited the song's inspiration to come from "a terrifying dream that my Dad told me he had had, which I then rewrote and altered until the source material was no longer recognizable."[2] A nightmare was also an inspiration behind the song "Where Your Eyes Don't Go"[3].
  • In a 1992 interview with KTEQ Radio, Linnell revealed that "Fingertips" was a much longer musical project that started in the midst of recording for Lincoln[4]: "It had lyrics that were more tied together, but it was the same idea; a lot of little choruses stuck together." By the time the recording process began for Flood, Linnell had completely written the song and demoed it for potential inclusion for the album, but it was left off due to a lack of session time[5]. Linnell recalled his process in constructing the demo in an interview published in the October 1992 edition of VOX Magazine:
It took a month to make the demo of it because I was still kind of writing while I was assembling the demo. Working at home, with a razor blade and a tape recorder, so that was kind of a chore. I actually had it ready for Flood and we kinda had enough stuff already and I felt like, "Well, I'll just forget about it for now."
  • When returning to "Fingertips" for Apollo 18, both Linnell and Flansburgh recalled their approach to recording it for the album[6]:
JL: We were trying to not waste a lot of time. The typical process for us before we had a backing band was to start with the rhythm section and then layer stuff on top of that, [but] this was a case where we couldn't just create each individual track from start to finish because that was going to take too long. We were doing the thing of, "All right, we'll do all the kick drums, [then] we'll alter the kick drums, and do them throughout the whole piece..."


JF: It was a total bear to pull together all the elements, but the fact that the demo was really complete made it easy to line everything up. It wasn't something that was up for grabs; the best way to do something like that is to have a text and then you just fill out the rest, in terms of production. We weren't deciding, "Is this good enough?" or anything like that. It was in no way subjective; it was just what it was.

JL: Yeah, I suppose that was the thing like, "What's the best version of this?" It was, "Well, nobody knows." It wasn't this established thing. The other thing I remember is we went to master the whole album and [it] was kind of a curve ball for Bob Ludwig, who mastered it. But he was totally respectful of it. He took way longer on "Fingertips" than any other track on the album.
"Fingertips" was its own set of sessions. We did three groups of sessions — about three weeks each, and then [John and John] came back [to it] in like October/November after the rest of the album was done and mixed. When we were recording it, I think probably the first 2-3 days was throwing down each individual sequence, and not really knowing where they were going [to go]. [The Johns] were trying to get a lot of it done in the little bit of time [they had], and they obviously had 32 songs to put together. Eventually I figured out what they were doing but at first it was like "Okay, let's do this song now! And this song!" We were pretty much doing each piece and putting it down really fast.


A lot of the stuff on "Fingertips" is the original sequenced stuff; it's not as mixed as well as the rest of the record. All the drums and bass sound much more MIDI, while [for] the rest [of the songs on the album], they were trying to make it sound more like a live band. I think [the Johns] had some ideas of what they wanted for ["Fingertips"]; they wanted every [song] to sound like a different group, which is why they had so many vocalists come in, and [why John and John] did so many affected voices. In the last group of sessions, we had a lot more visitors as it went along.
  • In the same interview, Edward Douglas mentioned that Kerri Kenney-Silver had recorded vocals for "Fingertips", but these did not appear in the final version. Frank Black was also considered for "Fingertips" according to Douglas, but did not record vocals for the project.
  • John Linnell on first reactions to "Fingertips":
Eugene Chadbourne gushed with enthusiasm over "Fingertips". That was nice. Likewise [American comedian] David Cross. However at the record release party for Apollo 18, I remember [music writer] Ira Robbins from Trouser Press expressing sincere, friendly disappointment with it. He had high hopes for us and we had let him down with "Fingertips".[7]
When we had it all spliced together and played it for people, the reaction was way better than expected! A lot of people thought it was funny and others sang along to parts of it.[8]
People were calling it a suite, which irritated me at first, but it actually sort of seemed like a pretty good descriptive term. It's just a kind of string of very, very short mostly just choruses stuck together.[9]
  • In a 1992 interview with Pacific Stars And Stripes, Linnell said of the recording process[10]: "It was one of the most exciting things we've done in the studio, because nobody ever got bored. It kept everyone moving all the time. We recorded them one at a time. We would record for five seconds and then rewind the tape, a very active thing. And we had all these guest vocalists come in..." He later expressed satisfaction with "Fingertips" after Apollo 18's release, stating: "I like the whole way the sequence of the record works now with "Fingertips" and "Space Suit," I think it really works in a cinematic way."[11]
  • Although individual snippets of "Fingertips" had been performed live as early as 1992, this song was first performed in its entirety on November 2, 2000 at the Bowery Ballroom, and has been a staple of the band's live show since. At a 2025 show at the Neptune Theatre in Seattle, WA, Flansburgh would mention that Danny Weinkauf played an important role in getting the band to learn "Fingertips" in its entirety.
  • According to the liner notes, Apollo 18 is "meant" to be listened to on shuffle, which means that the pieces of "Fingertips" get scattered among the other songs on the album when you listen to it. However, Linnell said in a 2025 interview with the AV Club that: "[Playing 'Fingertips' on shuffle] wasn't the original idea of it, in any case. But that was a sort of wonderful bonus thing was that we figured out we could index each individual track and then if you shuffle — because shuffling was a thing — then you get this much more mixed-up, Julio Cortázar, kind of hopscotch experience. It was fun, it was all fun."
  • On the European and Japanese Apollo 18 CDs, "Fingertips" is all one track instead of being divided into individual verses. "Fingertips" is also a single track on the Dial-A-Song compilation, the 2013 2-pack reissue with Flood, and most streaming platforms (as "Fingertips (Combined)"). In a 2021 Tumblr ask, Flansburgh said of the combined track[12]:
For some interval on iTunes, because of some entity involved not wanting to pay full publishing on all the individual tracks kept it off the site completely, and then finally a single song got posted. There were parallel issues with streaming sites for some time, but the single song seems to be the only working solution to whatever issues the short tracks kick up. Seems like miniature songs don’t count as "songs" for some platforms.
  • A project to 'flesh out' each verse into whole songs was done by a band called They Might Be Gannets. It's available as a download here.

Song Themes

Accidents, Album Lead-Ins, Altered Voice, Body Parts, Colors, Death, Drinks, Fire, Food, Friendship, Funny But Sad, Gleeful Irreverence, Loneliness, Love, Misanthropy, Non-John Vocals, Not In Common Time, Not In Major Or Minor, Questions, Strangers, Transportation, Violence, Weather, Windows

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Fingertips is currently ranked #45 out of 1085. (213 wikians have given it an average rating of 9.09)
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