I Like Fun (Song)
From This Might Be A Wiki
| song name | I Like Fun |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | Dial-A-Song (2018), I Like Fun |
| year | 2018 |
| first played | January 17, 2018 (84 known performances) |
| run time | 3:00 |
| sung by | John Flansburgh |
Trivia/Info
- In a 2018 interview with the Wisconsin Gazette,[2] John Flansburgh noted:
The [album] title is taken from a song, and the song itself is a good example of how things aren't quite what they seem. The song is really about being sort of trapped in a world of prescription drugs. It's a very light-hearted song, but it's kind of about enjoying getting high, which is not something that people tend to take lightly because of all the reasons that it is dangerous.
- In a 2018 interview with Billboard,[3] Flansburgh described the recording process for this song:
For people not familiar with a Mellotron, it's the first iteration of a sampling device. It's an octave and a half and each note plays its own discreet tape. You know, it's the sound of the flutes in the Beatles' "Fool on the Hill" and "Strawberry Fields Forever." It's a familiar sound. Rock stars in the late 1960s all bought Mellotrons and if you were ambitious about it, you could create your own library of sound samples. So on "I Like Fun," there's a vocal Mellotron that's a homemade vocal sample created by Jack Bruce of Cream...Bruce made a simple set of sounds of him singing. So when you play a chord you have a choir of yourself playing these notes. The sampler is reanimating Jack Bruce. These sound libraries are all available online. It's super weird. I was going through these sound libraries and I was like, "Is this what I think it is? IT IS." I realize I'm getting lost in the weeds here. But...you actually hear that he uses a glockenspiel as a pitch reference. He hits the tone and sings, "ahhhhhhhhh." I like the idea of Jack Bruce at home with a tape recorder and a glockenspiel, singing a scale, cutting up tape and feeding this contraption in his own personal bedroom. That's dedication.
- John Linnell in The Newtown Bee,[4] April 2018:
[Flansburgh and I] have been collaborating in lots of different ways recently just sending material and ideas back and forth. He wrote the title track "I Like Fun", but he asked me to work up a bass clarinet part — it's actually the even deeper contra-alto clarinet.
- In 2019, Linnell humorously described the clarinet used here as a "metal paperclip-shaped LeBlanc contra alto which likewise is tougher than its wooden counterpart and looks kind of like the Terminator skeleton after his flesh has been burned off, if he had been a clarinet."[5]
- In a Periscope stream on February 8, 2018, Flansburgh said that the "age of 58" lyric referred to himself, despite him being 57 at the time of the song's release. It was chosen because "58" was "easier to sing", and he'd be that age "soon enough."
- The lyrics to this song were included on the October 26, 2017 TMBG Newsletter, nearly three months before the album's release.
- Music video directed by Joren Cull.
Song Themes
Age, Counting, Drugs, Falling, Flying, Non-John Vocals, Songs With Samples, Sports, Time
Videos
- Watch it on
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