Imaginary Friend
From This Might Be A Wiki
| song name | Imaginary Friend |
| artist | Mono Puff |
| releases | The Hal Cragin Years, It's Fun To Steal, TMBG Clock Radio |
| year | 1997 |
| first played | June 25, 1996 (19 known performances) |
| run time | 3:06 |
| sung by | John Flansburgh |
Trivia/Info
- This song was written on June 24, 1996, just before the start of Mono Puff's 1996 East Coast tour. The band did not have enough material to fill a full hour-long live set, so they worked up the song during a rehearsal. It was initially titled "Felt-Tip Pen". Compared to the final studio recording, the 1996 live performances of "Felt-Tip Pen" featured a faster tempo, slightly different lyrics, and an alternate musical arrangement with Michael Kahn on bass and Dan Levine on trombone.
- The song was inspired by a story Michael Kahn shared with John Flansburgh about a mutual friend who favored felt-tip pens as their preferred tool for illustration. It is rumored that the subject of the song is either Brian Dewan or Tony Millionaire — Flansburgh dedicated the song to Dewan at one 1998 live show, and Millionaire contributed illustrations to Mono Puff's Unsupervised Libretto.
- John Flansburgh spoke about the song in a 1996 interview with NPR's All Things Considered:
It was written two days ago. We're on tour down the East Coast right now. Our show is sixty minutes long, and it was fifty seven minutes long until we wrote this song. [...] That song is actually based on a friend of mine who is a visual artist. But he feels strongly that a felt-tip pen is a very very pure and real form of personal expression that is underrated. It's just such a singular, kind of obsessive point of view. I mean, since no one agrees with that idea, basically categorically. Neil Young tried it with the cover of Zuma and that was pretty much the end of it. The felt-tip pen has not succeeded.
- Flansburgh wrote of the song in a 1998 press release: "['Imaginary Friend'] is about the comfort found in an insular existence..."
- Store 24 was a chain of convenience stores based out of Massachusetts.
- The liner notes of It's Fun To Steal credit George Sanders, Jo Anne Worley, Trini Lopez and The Blow Monkeys on handclaps. John Flansburgh commented in 2011: "You have heard of sampling, but I say nothing more."[1]
- "Imaginary Friend" was an early working title for the It's Fun To Steal album.[2] Another early title for the album was "The Great Indoors".[3]
- The phrase "Felt-Tip Pen" appears on the back cover of Mono Puff's The Devil Went Down To Newport 7" single.
Song Themes
Friendship, Numbers, Size, Songs With Handclaps, Songs With Samples, Time, Title Not In Lyrics, Trade Names, US States, Writing
Videos
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. Imaginary Friend is currently ranked #500 out of 1038. (27 wikians have given it an average rating of 8.30) |
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