Hide Away Folk Family
From This Might Be A Wiki
| song name | Hide Away Folk Family |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | They Might Be Giants, Then: The Earlier Years, Best Of The Early Years |
| year | 1986 |
| first played | February 3, 1987 (91 known performances) |
| run time | 3:21 |
| sung by | John Flansburgh; John Linnell sings back up |
Trivia/Info
- John Flansburgh discussed this song in a February 1988 interview with Spex magazine:
In a certain sense, it's about fear, but in a pretty abstract way. The fear isn't really identified. It's a kind of something-is-going-to-happen-but-you-don't-know-what song. Folk songs usually have a story, but with this one the story was left out, and only the atmosphere remains. [...]
To tell the truth, I stole the title. A friend of ours did a performance called 'Frieda', where she put a Barbie doll head on her head so that it looked like a two meter tall Barbie doll. And in an interview she was asked to name the titles of their future hits. One of them was 'Hide Away Folk Family'. I asked her for permission to use the title, she said, 'No', and then I wrote the song anyway.
- The title of the song was taken from the name of a children's toy. The "Hideaway Folk Family" was a seven-piece set of nesting dolls first marketed in 1983 by Chadwick-Miller Inc. and sold primarily through mail-order catalogs.[1] The band acknowledged the toy as the inspiration for the song at a 1997 live show.
- The band wrote about the song's bridge in the Then: The Earlier Years liner notes:[2] "To achieve the odd vocal rhythm of the astrology report in Hide Away Folk Family, Flansburgh's voice was blasting in his headphones on a 2 second delay, a technique inspired by a visit to Boston's Museum of Science, while the 'backwards' singing at the end was carefully worked out and rehearsed." Flansburgh later described the experience as "highly disorienting".[3]
- John Linnell spoke about the "backwards" singing heard in the song's outro in a 1996 Pitchfork interview: "It's just me and John [Flansburgh] singing forward. We're just going 'nyahp, nyah, nyip, nyahp,' that's all it is."
- Linnell recalled recording this song in a 1987 interview: "On that last chorus, there's a backward Casio CZ-101 as well as the forward accordion. So some funny synthetic elements are blended into the accordion, although on that particular song it all becomes a single sound." The same keyboard was also used for the song's 'whistling' sounds.[4]
- When performed live, the audience is typically ordered to "scream as if you're in Hell!" during the bridge. This is one of the few audience participation bits that has persisted over the band's career.
- The phrase "Sadly, the Cross-Eyed Bear" is a variation on a well-known Christian pun, based on a mishearing of the hymn lyric "Gladly the cross I'd bear" as "Gladly, the cross-eyed bear." This is an example of a mondegreen.
- Lesley Down is a British actor and singer who starred in a number of films and TV programs from the 1970s and 80s.
Song Themes
Animals, Backwards, Clothes, Death, Doors, Eyes, Falsetto, Long, Long, Not In Major Or Minor, Oblique Cliches Or Idiom, Paranoia, People (Real), Plans, Puns, Reading, Recycled Material, Relatives, Religion, Supernatural, Screaming, Sleep, Spoken Word, Transportation
Videos
- Watch it on
- 1987 performance taped by Joy Farm from the Gigantic (A Tale Of Two Johns) DVD - Watch it on – Recorded live on June 17, 1990 at the Town and Country Club, London UK
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. Hide Away Folk Family is currently ranked #344 out of 1059. (220 wikians have given it an average rating of 8.52) |
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