Chess Piece Face
From This Might Be A Wiki
| song name | Chess Piece Face |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | They Might Be Giants, Then: The Earlier Years |
| year | 1986 |
| first played | October 19, 1985 (77 known performances) |
| run time | 1:21 |
| sung by | John Flansburgh |
Trivia/Info
- John Flansburgh has stated that this song was initially inspired by a coworker of his at Macmillan Publishers in the mid-1980s, who had a disfiguring genetic disorder. He explained in a 1987 interview: "This guy I worked with had Elephant Man's disease. It really affected me, because I could barely stand to look at him. I tried to wonder what his life would be like. Everything he does is defined by his appearance. The song came out of that wondering, though it's not exactly about him. It's the closest thing to a sincere, sad song on the album." When asked in 2017 if he knew what became of the coworker, Flansburgh wrote: "[He] left that job in 1984... no one knows."[1]
- In a 1989 interview, Flansburgh elaborated on the song's themes:
["Chess Piece Face" is a] real "there go I but for the grace of God" song... It's about people who have to go through life with something that's a total burden, that is the way they see everything. Like, if you're really fat, you walk in the room and everybody looks at you like you're a really, really fat person. It's the ultimate sort of civil rights song, because it's sort of personal. There's never going to be an "ugly person's rights" or a "shy person's rights."
- John Linnell and John Flansburgh discussed the song in a 1990 interview:
- Linnell: "I feel least proud, in some ways, of the lyrics to 'Don't Let's Start' and 'Birdhouse [In Your Soul]'. The way that songs are set up to be blockbusters, it's hard to do the most specific stuff, the stuff that seems the most meaningful to us. I think of 'Chess Piece Face' and 'Whistling In The Dark' — songs with a lot more going on in them, because they have such a specific mood that they're giving off. You have a strong sense that they've been done correctly and that they're really saying what they're trying to be saying."
- Flansburgh: "Also, they might seem like more singular songs. When you do a song like 'Chess Piece Face', you're on your own. You're dealing with songwriting on your own personal terms. When you're writing a pop song, it's like you versus the entire Lennon-McCartney catalog."
- The discordant portamento notes at the beginning of the song were created using a Casio CZ-101 synthesizer.[2] Linnell recalled in 1996: "We were pretty heavily into the Casio scene at that time."[3] The band spoke about recording the song in a 2021 interview with the Record Roadmap podcast:
- Linnell: "This was a time when we were using all this pretty inexpensive gear but really trying to get the most arresting, amazing sounds out of it. I think that was the old CZ-101. You turn the [portamento] rate all the way down so it takes forever for the note to slide either up or down. In this case it does both, and that's the thing that's so trippy about that recording."
- Flansburgh: "The notes are actually crossing each other, so it has this very mentally-ill quality to it. It's not a musical sensibility that anybody would gravitate towards naturally. I think so much of what we were about was really undefined and exploratory. In general I'm not a very sentimental person, but the thing I really enjoy about our first album is how free of outside influence most of it is."
- In most live performances, Flansburgh sings the final lyric as "All hail Chess Piece Face."
- The titular character of "Chess Piece Face" has also been referenced in the songs "Rabid Child" ("Chess Piece Face and The Big Duluth call her every day") and "Hey, Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had A Deal" ("You know the Rabid Child is still tuning in / Chess Piece Face's patience must be wearing thin"). In "Rabid Child", both "Chess Piece Face" and "The Big Duluth" are CB radio handles used by characters in the song.[4][5]
Song Themes
Body Parts, Dreams, Games, Oblique Cliches Or Idiom, People (Imaginary), Questions, Recycled Material, Sailing
Videos
- Watch it on
(Static upload of the song)
Current Rating You must be logged in to rate this. You can either login (if you have a userid) or create an account with us today. Chess Piece Face is currently ranked #918 out of 1085. (178 wikians have given it an average rating of 7.21) |
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