I Left My Body
From This Might Be A Wiki
| song name | I Left My Body |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | I Like Fun, Dial-A-Song (2018) |
| year | 2017 |
| first played | December 30, 2017 (80 known performances) |
| run time | 2:36 |
| sung by | John Linnell |
Trivia/Info
- John Linnell stated "consciously, with that song, I was sort of, in my mind, ripping off those Iggy Pop albums that David Bowie produced."[1]
- Linnell also said this about the partial inspiration for the song:[2]
There’s this movie with David Niven where he dies in a plane crash and goes to this enormous, bureaucratic, Kafka-esque heaven where people are going up and down escalators. I love this trope that you have to go to talk to somebody behind a desk and go through all this red tape for a second chance.
- John Flansburgh on the writing and recording of the song:[3]
John Linnell wrote that one. Obviously, it’s about being disoriented, which seems like a pretty relatable notion right now. Something about the lyric reminds me of Russian novels where the character can’t tell what’s real. It’s kind of from a dream, but it is very familiar and kind of prosaic, but that’s just my interpretation.
The recording was pretty straightforward, although the guitar tracking for no good reason was kind of rough. I am well aware of the expression "It's a poor workman who blames his tools," but we didn’t have a ton of equipment in the studio at various times. When the call was made to record the guitars, I only had my pretty thrashed back-up telecaster that lived at the studio available. I figured out as we went along that guitar was essentially un-tunable so there was a lot of odd compensating in the way I played it just to not have it sound like a solid wall of sour notes. I'm not even sure if the finished result isn't still a fair bit funky, but it does sound big.
- This song was released on October 22, 2017, along with the track listing for I Like Fun.
- On November 21, 2017, the band announced[4] a fan-made video contest, following the success of previous video contests for "Can't Keep Johnny Down" in 2011, "Am I Awake?" in 2014, and "Erase" in 2015. This time, rapper and known TMBG fan Open Mike Eagle served as judge, with the prizes being $1,000 each for two runner-ups, $3,000 for the grand prize winner, and a suite of Red Giant video plugins for all three winners.
- The winners were announced in March 2018, with videos by Victor Fitzsimons and Sascha Loffl selected as runner-ups, and a video by David Kreutzer chosen to receive the grand prize. Open Mike said:
After much consideration the grand prize goes to David Kreutzer. Despite the desperation in the password they chose (you know what you passworded), the heart displayed in this clip was impossible to overlook. The narrative arc is compelling as all heck and the direction and performances are infectious. This is the video that I believe the band would have made for this song.
- Days after the winners were selected, it was discovered that the music video Kreutzer submitted was recut from a previously released short film he had completed three years earlier called Song of a Fifth Grade Samurai. In response to TMBG fans writing in to point out that the video selected for the grand prize was a pre-existing completed work not created as a music video, John Flansburgh wrote a response in the TMBG mailing list a few days later, acknowledging frustrations "that the video did not qualify as an original work because the footage was culled from a short film Mr. Kreutzer had previously made", but stating that the video did not break a contest rule and was "found effective on its own merits by the judge and by many viewers." Flansburgh also stated that "if we are to do contests in the future, we might need to make a more tedious set of rules regarding found footage [and] repurposed footage", but this ended up being the final time They Might Be Giants had a crowdsourced music video contest.
- The winners were announced in March 2018, with videos by Victor Fitzsimons and Sascha Loffl selected as runner-ups, and a video by David Kreutzer chosen to receive the grand prize. Open Mike said:
- Tungsten rings are noted for their extreme hardness and high resistance to scratching.
- Linnell sometimes sings "Dr. Bronner's soap" instead of "bat repellent soap" when performing live.
Song Themes
Age, Animals, Artificial Body Parts, Bad English, Body Parts, Intelligence, Espionage, Lists, Memory, Oblique Cliches Or Idiom, Occupations, Reading, Recursion, Religion, Supernatural, Screaming, The Senses, Weapons, Writing
Videos
- Watch it on
- grand prize (director: David Kreutzer) - Watch it on - winner #2 (director: Victor Fitzsimons)
- Watch it on - winner #3 (director: Sascha Loffl)
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. I Left My Body is currently ranked #166 out of 1112. (144 wikians have given it an average rating of 8.84) |