Everything Sticks Like A Broken Record

Promotional render of the Bandbox reissue of Lincoln with zine

Everything Sticks Like A Broken Record is a track-by-track breakdown of the Lincoln album by John Flansburgh and John Linnell, featured in Bandbox Issue #103, the zine accompanying the 2023 blue vinyl reissue of the album by online record label Bandbox.

Introduction

From "Ana Ng" to "Kiss Me, Son of God," Johns Linnell and Flansburgh discuss every track on 1988's LINCOLN.

Ana Ng

Linnell

I wrote "Ana Ng" while I was crashing in a friend's apartment when I had nowhere else to live. I imagine that I had my accordion with me and not much else.

My notion was that we would use a noise gate that was controlled by the computer to turn John's guitar on and off in the rhythm track that starts the song. It was kind of an abstract idea, but I thought, "This is this jerky rhythm, but it'd be cool if it was really robotic." The noise gate is an audio device that can turn on and off an audio signal. It's either controlled by the volume of the signal that's coming in, or it can be controlled by something else. In this case, we just plugged the computer into it and had the computer do the on-and-off part.

Now, I was not very good at explaining this to John, unfortunately. We were sitting in a car in New Jersey, outside of a club where we were supposed to play, and I was telling him what I wanted to do and he thought that I was trying to say that he wasn't able to play the rhythm accurately or something like that. We got into a terrible argument about it, and it didn't get resolved until we finally went into the studio and actually tried it. Everybody loved the arrangement I was talking about right away.

John was playing the guitar and then the computer was opening and closing the circuit. Because we were using a computer that was synchronized to the tape, we could record multiple guitars doing that and it seemed like this purely experimental, fun thing.

We made up. We're friends now. It all worked out.

Cowtown

Flansburgh

"Cowtown" probably has the longest gestation period of any song that we have ever recorded. We were playing it in 1982 and recorded it in '88. It was the very first song that John and I had in our repertoire as They Might Be Giants. I think we played "Cowtown" even before we started They Might Be Giants.

The snare rolls at the beginning of "Cowtown" that sound like fife and drum corps snares... that was the kind of sound you couldn't get out of a drum machine before the Alesis HR-16 we used on Lincoln. There was just too much clang coming from the sounds of the other machine. That was an example of the big step up in sound.

Linnell

The technical feat on "Cowtown" is that, in the very beginning of the song, there are two clarinets and each is playing every other note. That was another sort of stunt, like the noise gate in "Ana Ng." The two clarinets are hocketing one note. That part is probably unplayable by one clarinet, but I could write it out for two clarinets and it's actually not that complicated.

Lie Still, Little Bottle

Flansburgh

For a while we had done an incredibly stripped-down, simple version of "Lie Still, Little Bottle," where John would play his saxophone and I would slam this tree branch onto the stage. It was almost a binary song — John doing this very repetitive "Cat Came Back" kind of bassline on the sax while I'm holding down the backbeat and singing. It was super effective live. When it came time to record it, we knew that the minimal presentation that we did live would not necessarily carry it for the whole song.

We actually dissected the arrangement of "16 Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford, which is also a song that's essentially wrapped up in a very repetitive bassline and a very slow, unwinding kind of production. We just listened to that song and took sonic elements from it.

I feel like it ended up a really successful recording because we didn't make any assumptions about how interesting the live performance was.

Purple Toupee

Linnell

There was always a sense of a playful free association going on in the songwriting. I've always been a fan of Prince and I love "Purple Rain" and "Raspberry Beret," so it was a kind of holding up a funhouse mirror to something that I was already interested in.

The music was something I was proud of because it has a sort of fugue element where the bass part is doing the vocal melody in a... you'd have to ask a music major to explain this a little better, but it's doing a sort of canonic thing with the vocal where the bass comes in playing the vocal melody, down a perfect fourth but also two beats earlier. It just was something I worked out, probably on the piano. I really felt like a genius after I came up with that.

Flansburgh

It's a perfect example of how casually John can write from the point of view of an unreasonable narrator. There's much American history in the lyrics and it's all wrong and powerfully misinformed, but it's delivered in this sort of low-key way. You have to be listening closely to notice what he's driving at.

Cage & Aquarium

Flansburgh

That was an older song that we always did as a duo. I don't think we ever even tried to reproduce the studio version. We've always done it as a duo, so it's its own unique production on the album.

"Cage & Aquarium" actually has my guitar sampled on it. There are a bunch of self-sampling things, which was very hard to do because samplers had such limited memory then. They could only sample like five seconds of sound, so you'd just get this little sliver of a sample and you could inject it into your song. All the "rr-rr-rr" sounds on that song are things that the engineer, Al Houghton, and I cooked up.

Linnell

That was John Flansburgh using the new technology of the sampler to come up with the really, really mind-bending sounds on that track. I love the way he worked.

We were working in this tiny control room, and it was so hot in the summer that the computer just burned out and this enormous column of smoke started pouring out of it. It was this old-fashioned Macintosh computer that looked like a little TV set. We smelled this awful smell and everyone was like, "What is that?" Suddenly, all this smoke started pouring out of the computer and it just blew up. We were fastidiously backing everything up on these little floppy discs as we worked, so all the work we'd done was preserved.

Where Your Eyes Don't Go

Linnell

"Where Your Eyes Don't Go" was based on a bad dream that I had as a child, in the mid-'70s, about my mom.

I think it was about my mom coming into the room, and then there was some kind of mocking demonic snowman behind her that she couldn't see. Every time she turned around, it would pivot around and still be behind her back where she couldn't see it. That was the initial idea and then I went from there.

Flansburgh

Absolutely magnificent song. A classic John Linnell expression and the little Perry Mason homage at the end is really fantastic.

Piece Of Dirt

Flansburgh

There was this idea in experimental theater in the early 20th century called the V effect, which is taking something with very heightened emotional value and using it to hold you away from what might seem sentimental. It's also called the alienation technique.

The thing that's curious about "Piece of Dirt" is that it might be the V effect in reverse, where I'm singing the song in an unrelatable, put-on voice. I think I'm channeling a little bit of Robert Goulet or something and singing this very self-pitying set of words, but you still can get drawn into the message of the song. I guess, ultimately, the song turns on how sad the lyric is in the bridge, where it's like, "A woman's voice on the radio can convince you you're in love / A woman's voice on the telephone can convince you you're alone." It's hard not to get drawn in.

John and I have spent a lot of time sitting in diners, listening to Muzak or the commercial country station getting piped in. When you hear a really sentimental song like that, it's always interesting and surprising when it actually affects you — when you start believing it. In spite of the melodrama, in spite of the theater, in spite of the artifice, in spite of the remoteness of the approach, it feels emotionally true. That's what we were trying to capture.

Linnell

I get emotional when I hear that song. I don't know why. I don't even know what the song is about exactly, but I think it's such a beautiful expression of sadness. It has a lovely, lovely melody and chords and the words just tear me up.

Mr. Me

Flansburgh

"Mr. Me" is kind of the flip side of "Piece of Dirt." It's almost impervious to all critique, like, "Hey man, I'm just here on my sad sack trip and that's my story and I'm sticking to it."

Pencil Rain

Linnell

Once again, I suspect that I began with a kind of warped version of a Prince song. You'll notice "Purple Rain" as "Purple Toupee," so clearly I was going back to the same well and trying a different version of the same thing. But "Pencil Rain" was a very different vibe. I suppose it's an example of one of these songs where the title generates the somewhat nonsensical lyric that it's about — maybe a way of making it surrealist in the simplest way. For some reason, there's an army of people who are being killed by the pencils underneath. Actual military soldiers being killed by pencils. I don't know what that's about. I think I was just free-associating.

Flansburgh

There was something singular about "Pencil Rain" when we performed it live; it would unwind over the course of the song and you could see people getting drawn in. It's such a slow song that it really makes this declaration like, "You're going to have to hang with this." And then it builds up and builds up. It's a very effective arrangement.

The World's Address

Linnell

A forgivable pun, I hope. Because it's trying to be two things at once. It's the address of the planet Earth, which is a sort of peculiar concept — things have addresses on Earth, but what is the address of the world? Then the idea of the world as a dress... a place that's worn, but also a world that's worn out. That was the kind of wordplay that I was attracted to when I was that age.

Flansburgh

John's keyboard chops on this are so amazing to me. He's one of those guys who can just jump into a style of playing. You just wonder how much woodshedding he must have done to be able to play in that style. I don't ever remember him having to practice. He's such a powerful musician.

When we started They Might Be Giants, I couldn't even sing and play the guitar at the same time.

I've Got A Match

Flansburgh

What gets introduced on Lincoln is these very melancholy songs. We were really not living domestic lives. The band had really taken over. Not a good time in the life-partner department.

Santa's Beard

Linnell

We had friends who were performance artists and often were on the same bill as us. They were called Watchface, and there were seven of them. They were brilliant. We did shows in little clubs together in the East Village in the mid and late '80s.

We would play, and then Watchface would go out and they'd do what was then called performance art, which could be anything. It was just people on a stage — sometimes with props, sometimes by themselves, either reciting something or interacting with one another. In the case of Watchface, they had choreography and kind of chanted. They'd pick a topic and do a whole show of these rhythmic chants.

Everybody loved them. The show was really captivating and very intimate because we were in these little rooms. They did a whole show about the store Woolworth's, and part of the show was reciting everything that you could buy in the Woolworth's, which was at the time this amazing miscellany of stuff.

It was the kind of store where it wasn't just groceries or drugs or hardware. It was this vast array of things that you could get. I don't know why, but John and I were really struck by this part of the show where one of the characters just yells out "Santa beards!" as one of the things you could buy at Woolworth's. This woman was doing a gruff, Santa-sounding kind of voice and saying, "Santa beards!"

Flansburgh

I was always surprised that Watchface never emerged from the East Village because, of all the acts that we worked with — and we worked with hundreds of performers over those years — they were just the best. You didn't have to know anything about them or the format to be completely entertained by their show. It was like they were a cheerleading squad, but the cheers were these sort of rhythmic riffs on contemporary life. It was just extraordinarily funny and strange and unique.

You'll Miss Me

Flansburgh

This is a super contentious song in our repertoire. A lot of people hate it and I can kind of understand why, because it's a really unlistenable song in a certain way. There's a very manic, very teeth-gnashy kind of impulse in the song.

The thing that was always strange to me was that when we did the song live, it went over really well. You could feel that it excited the crowds, but that song was essentially impossible to export to a finished recording. We did a version with Hilly Kristal, the owner of CBGB, singing the lead vocal. That was a mistake.

We just couldn't crack the code. The cumulative effect of it was just too much. There's something about that song... it's like turning a faucet on and having the water hit you in the face. It's too edgy.

Linnell

We programmed the drum machine to do all this rhythmic stuff that was really hard to play. You could just make up the most bizarre rhythms on the drum machine and then it would reproduce it.

The production of "You'll Miss Me" was the enjoyment of it. John had these verses and then we had all this framed chaos going on behind him. It was structured by the drum machine, but then other instruments were sort of playing along, playing the same rhythms or playing things that went along with it. That was our idea of fun.

They'll Need A Crane

Flansburgh

The video for "They'll Need a Crane" is really strange. We were the young guys in a band with elderly men, which is a really odd conceit for a video. I don't even know what we were driving at, but it was shot really cinematically.

I can't really recall playing it on Letterman that well, although I do remember Will Lee and me talking about how annoying it was that guitars didn't stay in tune. I'm sure Will Lee has played in tune for his entire life, but as a guitar player, I can tell you it's always been a painful struggle for me.

I remember him saying, "The G string, man... it's impossible. It just doesn't work." There's the old joke that guitar players spend half their lives tuning and half their lives playing out of tune. So yeah, I think the guitars might be out of tune on that recording.

Shoehorn With Teeth

Linnell

Delightfully odd production on that one. The notion of it was based on a friend of mine from New York who perversely would... I think he initially made an art object where he took a plastic shoehorn and glued little teeth to it as kind of an absurd art object that just came out of his imagination.

But then it got weirder because he would go into shoe stores and ask, "Do you have any shoehorns with teeth?" Just to be a weird provocateur and a nuisance, I guess. The shoe salesman would be like, "I don't know," and they'd go and pull out a box of shoehorns and they're like, "What about these?" He's like, "No, none of these seem to have any teeth."

There was an abstract idea in the production, which was having all the music stop for one beat and have a little glockenspiel make a ding. That was inspired by an old advertising jingle for Salem cigarettes. The jingle went, "You can take Salem out of the country but..." There'd be this mysterious, unexplained pause in the song and then a little ding. Then they'd say, "You can't take the country out of Salem." It was so mysterious. What was the ding for?

Stand On Your Own Head

Linnell

There's this expression "stand on your head," which means to be upside down and holding yourself up, but then "Stand on Your Own Head" kind of implies that someone else has been standing on your head and they should stand on their own head instead. That was kind of the gag. The rest of the lyrics have a similar messing-around-with-language quality. "I like people / They're the ones who can't stand," instead of, "I like people / I'm the one they can't stand." That was the kind of writing I was exploring.

Snowball In Hell

Flansburgh

I love the production on this and I love all the extra stuff. The whole breakdown section is such a hard left turn. It's just a psychedelic impulse. I'm always excited when we do something that's really just off the grid.

Linnell

John had a motivational tape, which we just sampled and put right onto the recording. [Producer] Bill Krauss found it and gave it to him. It's a dialogue between Joe and Paul, where Paul is a very hardworking salesman and Joe is kind of a slacker. You listen to it and you're supposed to side with Paul, but of course, everyone identifies with Joe when they listen to it. Joe is enjoying a cup of coffee like he should be doing, rather than going out and busting his ass trying to sell whatever it is they're selling.

Kiss Me, Son Of God

Linnell

We were playing on bills with other bands in the East Village, and it was truly an exciting time.

We loved seeing the Ordinaires. We played with them in the same little tiny clubs. They were an enormous band. They had nine members or something like that. We were a two-piece, so it was thrilling because they were this big orchestra and they did these elaborate arrangements. We actually got them to come into the studio and play all the parts for "Kiss Me, Son of God." It was the beginning, I guess, of us doing work with other musicians where we felt like, "Well, what does this track need, or what would be interesting?" And then we'd fantasize about who else we could ask to play on it.

I feel like we were growing a lot at that time. We were learning how to engage with other artists in fruitful ways. This song really shows the direction the band was heading in the future, as well.