Birdhouse In Your Soul

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Music video
Screenshot from the music video
A page from the official sheet music of "Birdhouse in Your Soul", printed in April 1990 in England
song name Birdhouse in Your Soul
artist They Might Be Giants
releases Flood, Birdhouse In Your Soul (EP), Direct From Brooklyn, Dial-A-Song: 20 Years Of They Might Be Giants, A User's Guide To They Might Be Giants: Melody, Fidelity, Quantity, Flood + Apollo 18, 50,000,000 They Might Be Giants Songs Can't Be Wrong
year 1990
first played November 24, 1989 (1469 known performances)
run time 3:20
sung by John Linnell


Trivia/Info

We're not really into writing songs with secret meanings or coded messages. I mean, for example, "Birdhouse In Your Soul" is a song about a nightlight. That's it. It's written from the perspective of a nightlight serenading the occupant of its room. The thing is, there are so many syllables in the songs that we have to come up with something to fill the spaces. So it ends up being kind of Gilbert and Sullivany.
  • Linnell recalled writing the song in a 2009 Rolling Stone interview: "The melody and chords were cooked up years earlier, and the lyrics had to be shoehorned in to match the melody, which explains why the words are so oblique. I mean beautiful." Linnell wrote the music in the mid-1980s, when he was living in Manhattan.[1] It wasn't until after he moved to Brooklyn in 1988 that he started writing the lyrics. He stated in a 2021 interview:
The lyrics were stream of consciousness. I was in my apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and wrote it from the perspective of a night light serenading the occupant of its room. I wasn't thinking too hard. It was just intended as a dummy lyric, but it ended up as the finished song. People seemed to find it really innocent or charming.
  • The title was inspired in part by Charles Mingus' 1959 song "Better Git It In Your Soul". Linnell explained: "I don't know exactly what [the Mingus title] means, but it just felt like a good collection of words. So, I just took it in a slightly weirder direction with 'Birdhouse In Your Soul.'"[2] The sentiment of the song might have been inspired by the 'bluebird of happiness,' a common idiom stemming from the widespread belief in bluebirds as heralds of good luck.
  • This song is the highest-charting single of the band's career. It reached #3 on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart and #6 on the UK Singles chart. The band have given a few in-depth interviews about the writing and recording of this song, including a 2021 interview with The Guardian, a 2021 interview with Songwriting Magazine, and a 2022 interview with the podcast The Story Behind the Song.
  • This is one of four songs on Flood that the band recorded with producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. The pair had heard a short early demo of the song and were excited by it.[3] On their suggestion, the song was extended and worked into a pop single. It remains the most amount of time the band has ever spent recording a single song.[4] John Flansburgh spoke about recording the song in a 2016 interview:
'Birdhouse' got the best out of everyone. Clive and John [Linnell] hashed out an expanded arrangement that had cool transitions. It had the producers' exciting trick of using acoustic instruments and the bold playing of session players, and also blended in our version of sampling and sequencing, so a lot of the power of our approach stayed in the mix. At Winstanley's insistence, it was the very first time I played through a Marshall amplifier, which I didn't understand the function of until then. He really used that distorted slab of midrange guitar breaking out of the Marshall to move the track to a different, more pop place.
  • The song's bridge interpolates elements of "Summer in the City", a 1966 song by the folk-rock band The Lovin' Spoonful. The references were inspired by the intense heat during the recording of Flood in the summer of 1989.[5] The car horn-like trumpet samples in the bridge of "Birdhouse in Your Soul" recall the traffic sounds sampled in "Summer in the City", and the songs use similar rhythms in their chord progressions. Part of the bridge of "Summer in the City" is also incorporated into live performances of "Birdhouse".
  • John Flansburgh explained the trumpet sounds in a 2021 interview: "I sampled the trumpet part from a very successful record, but to get round the copyright laws we got the trumpet player in and paid him for two days' work while he performed it again, note for note." The original samples were from Frank London's trumpet solo in LL Cool J's "Going Back to Cali" from 1988, and London used similar plunger mute and growl techniques when recording his parts for "Birdhouse".
  • Producer Clive Langer recalled recording the song in a 2016 interview:
We were working in a new area with them and their computers. They came in with one beat, and we gave them another: an extra da-boom-ba in between their boom and kick. I wanted [John Flansburgh] to play heavy guitar notes behind it. Weaarahwah! It's the sort of thing I'd been doing with Madness. Oddly, 'Birdhouse' sounded like a Madness record, especially when it went into that avant-garde brass. But the Johns had this stuff anyway, naturally.
There was a point where the song was turning into quite a production with all the bells and whistles on it. And for very selfish reasons, I was like, ‘Hey, guys, this song still doesn’t have a guitar.’ ’Cause I was just thinking if this is going to be the song we’re going to be touring on for 14 months, it would be nice if I had something to do on stage besides shake a tambourine, y’know? Alan Winstanley had the brainwaves to bring in one of those huge Marshall amps, that are as tall as you are, and I had never played one before. I plugged in, and it just sounded insane and bombastic and wild. I just played the bass line, and it’s very much the sonic glue of the song that you hear now. I was so relieved, and he was so generous to figure out a way to have me participate in this thing. Now it seems like my part is like the rhythm spine of the song, but that was not a given at all, and I think that people who were less kind would have just pushed me out of the room.
  • The Longines Symphonette was a classical music radio program that aired from 1941 to 1958. It was sponsored by Longines, a watch manufacturer. In the 1960s, Longines established a record label named the "Longines Symphonette Society." Alarm clocks, record players and watches were also sold with "Longines Symphonette" branding. The song could be referring to any or all of these. Linnell admitted in a 2009 interview: "I didn't find out what the Longines Symphonette was until after the song was released. It rhymed with 'infinite' (sort of)."
  • The song's video was directed by Adam Bernstein. It was the sixth music video that he directed for the band, and it reportedly had a budget of $82,000.[6] The majority of the video was filmed inside the New York County Surrogate's Court and Hall of Records building located at 31 Chambers Street in Manhattan. Flansburgh designed and created the William Allen White glasses props for the video.[7]
  • Live performances of the song are played in a higher key than the original recording. The song was recorded in the key of C major but is played live in D major. Official sheet music was released for this song by Warner Chappell Music Ltd. in England, and printed in April 1990. A PDF scan is available here. It was able to be purchased for $4.00 shipped in TMBG's catalog at the time.[8] The arrangement is in C major and displays a few minor discrepancies in the melody, harmony and chord inversions in comparison with the original song.
  • The band has been selling blue canary-shaped nightlights periodically since 2012. They are currently in stock at TMBG Shop. Blue nightlights were also sold in 1990 as promotional items for Flood, though they did not resemble blue canaries.
  • References to the song in pop culture:

Song Themes

1964 World's Fair, Animals, Beach, Bells, Clothes, Colors, Death, Friendship, Hearing, Letters Of The Alphabet, Loneliness, Mythology, Numbers, Oblique Cliches, Occupations, Oxymorons, Paradoxes, And Contradictory Statements, Recursion, Religion, Sailing, Screaming, Size, Sleep, Stories, Trade Names, Transportation

Videos

  • Watch it on Vimeo.png
  • Watch it on Youtube.png - Tonight Show performance

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