I Should Be Allowed To Think
From This Might Be A Wiki
| song name | I Should Be Allowed to Think |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | John Henry, Dial-A-Song: 20 Years Of They Might Be Giants, John Henry + Factory Showroom |
| year | 1994 |
| first played | December 3, 1993 (7 known performances) |
| run time | 3:09 |
| sung by | John Linnell; John Flansburgh sings lead on the bridge |
Trivia/Info
- The opening line of the song, "I saw the best minds of my generation / destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical..." is taken from the opening line of Allen Ginsberg's 1955 poem "Howl". The full poem can be read here. John Flansburgh recalled in 1994: "['Howl'] is a generational touchstone. It was easy to get permission, then we found out later he hadn't heard it. Everybody needs a better lawyer. But he finally heard it and gave it the thumbs up."[1] According the band, Ginsberg "graciously gave permission for the band to quote the poem, and in a gesture that harkens back to a simpler time, asked for nothing in return."[2]
- John Linnell spoke about writing the song in a 1995 interview: "It partly grew out of the melodic aspect of that Allen Ginsberg poem. The poem is called 'Howl'; I could've called this 'Whine'. It's basically a complaining song... people blaming stuff on their parents and others." He elaborated in a 1994 Aquarian Weekly interview:
The guy who's singing the song is blaming everyone around him but himself for his problem of not being able to express something. It's something I could sort of get into, but it's sort of a joke in a way. It's not really the way I feel, and it's a parody of the way anybody else particularly feels, because it's taken to such an extreme in the song where they're saying the government is preventing them from having ideas.
John and I live in Williamsburg where there's a lot of young bohemians moving in right now, so it's partly inspired by that scene. There's a lot of people running around sticking their flyers up. Now that we're grumpy old men it seems like it's sort of irritating, and it's sort of nostalgic and charming to see other people doing their dumb little thing like we did.
- Linnell discussed the song's lyrics in a 1995 interview with The Cornell Daily Sun:
We don't write autobiographical material. ["I Should Be Allowed to Think"] is not really a personal complaint on our part. The song is from the perspective of somebody else. That's one of those things that, for some reason, if you write a book or if you're writing a screenplay or something, you can say "I" and people know you don't mean yourself. For some reason, if you say "I" in a song, people assume that it's as though you're sitting on stage actually speaking plainly, doing something other than creating entertainment for people. You can write from another perspective. In fact, that's pretty much exclusively what we do. When you write a song about an experience somebody had, it's not an unedited slice of your own experience. [...] The thing to bear in mind is, when in a song we say "I killed my parents,” we're not actually confessing to something in the song.
- Guitarist Jay Sherman-Godfrey recalled recording the song in a 2022 interview with the Don't Let's Start fan podcast:
I just made my part up. They were just like, "What do you want to do?" It was definitely sort of thumbs up, thumbs down. I'm playing the little repeating high riff that goes through the chorus. I recorded that part at Skyline, a famous old studio on 37th St. Really fantastic place, kind of a left over from the '70s, beautiful thing. It's totally an overdub, like, "Come on this day, at this time." I was in the big room by myself with an amplifier. I remember Ed Thacker, the engineer. I was like, "What do you want me to do, what do you want me to sound like?" and he was like, "Well, you do it, I'll just record it." [...]
I think they just wanted to have people do something interesting. They were just interested in putting stuff into the mix. I also think they wanted the song to sound like a rock band, and it's easier to sound like a rock band if you don't play both guitar parts. Like, Flans didn't have to do it, he could get me to do it.
- The band informally named their early 1994 tour "I Should Be The Loudest Thing", in reference to this song. Linnell explained in a 1994 interview: "There's a song on the new record called 'I Should Be Allowed To Think' and when we were mixing it we started singing other versions of it. And when you have your musicians assembled in the control room, there's a tendency for everybody to want themselves to be the loudest."
- An excerpt of the song was read by Andy Richter in the 2003 documentary Gigantic (A Tale Of Two Johns). Linnell commented on the scene in a 2003 interview: "It's one of the sort of unreliable narrator lyrics, but he was reading it in such an earnest way with such a furrowed brow. It almost just became its own thing, just listening to him reading like that. It's just a different experience."
Song Themes
Colors, Egoism And Pretentiousness, Fading, Gleeful Irreverence, Intelligence, Espionage, Mind Control, Hypnotism, Music, Oxymorons, Paradoxes, And Contradictory Statements, Paranoia, Poetry, Problems With Liner Notes, Reading, Telecommunication, Writing
Videos
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