Mr. Me
From This Might Be A Wiki
(Redirected from Mister Me)
| song name | Mr. Me |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | Lincoln, Then: The Earlier Years |
| year | 1988 |
| first played | March 1, 1985 (98 known performances) |
| run time | 1:52 |
| sung by | John Linnell, John Flansburgh harmonizes |
Trivia/Info
- John Flansburgh on the guitar effect used on the album recording of this song:[1]
It's tremolo, which was often the only built-in guitar amp effect. It is a rhythmic effect that can be deep enough to basically cut the sound completely like on "Ana Ng", or it can pulse like in "Mr. Me". I often actually play with a fast pulsing, shallower vibrato through entire songs – which gives it a lively sound that is really an "x" factor in older recordings.
- John Linnell explained the guitar tremolo effect in a 1996 interview:
As soon as we realized what we could do with the [MIDI] sequencer, we thought, here's this thing that is very mechanical and precise, and we can use it to control this noise gate. So we set up the sequencer to drive this synth that made a beeping sound that turned the noise gate on and off at a very exact interval. [...] We just set the gate so it wasn't shutting off all the way, so it sounds like a tremolo. It's doing the same thing a tremolo would do, but the timing is controllable. [...]
I think at the time we were sort of influenced by that Smiths song, "How Soon Is Now?" I think they just recorded the tremolo guitar on the original track and then the band played along with it. That's a cool recording.
- "Piece Of Dirt", the song directly preceding "Mr. Me" on Lincoln, includes a lyric that echoes this song — "I find myself haunted / By a spooky man named Me." John Flansburgh drew a connection between the two songs in a 2023 track-by-track breakdown of Lincoln: "'Mr. Me' is kind of the flip side of 'Piece of Dirt.' It's almost impervious to all critique, like, 'Hey man, I'm just here on my sad sack trip and that's my story and I'm sticking to it.'"
- As reported in the Aug. 3, 1987 issue of New York magazine, the band threatened to sue the electronics chain Crazy Eddie because of a commercial they claimed used parts of "Mr. Me" and "Absolutely Bill's Mood." The band was originally offered by Crazy Eddie to feature their songs in April 1987, but the band declined the offer. More information about the original offer was published in the Daily News:
About two weeks ago, they approached rock-'n'-roll madmen, They Might Be Giants to capture the Crazy Eddie Zeitgeist in lyric and song.
All two of TMBG gave careful consideration to the Crazy Eddie proposition, says their manager Jamie Kitman. "The offer was insanely generous." But the time's just not right for John Flansburgh and John Linnell to be writing catchy jingles that include the words, "His prices are insane," "meet and beat" any price, and a list of locations, says Kitman. Indeed, TMBG is just breaking into the big time. Their album is getting great reviews, their video is in heavy rotation on MTV. Crazy Eddie declined comment.
- Upon being turned down, Crazy Eddie's created their own sound-a-like, which led to the band threatening a lawsuit against the company. After the story was picked up by a few newspapers, the advertisements stopped airing. John Flansburgh recalled in a 2021 Tumblr post: "While we had a very effective lawyer, it seemed like simply making the public aware that it was lifted from a local band without acknowledgment or compensation was all it took to make the campaign disappear instantly. While it was hardly a secret that Crazy Eddie was kind of a cheap organization, it still seems like a remarkably brazen move."
Song Themes
Funny But Sad, People (Imaginary), Oblique Cliches Or Idiom, Puns, Sadness, Sea, Songs With Handclaps, Spanish, Titles And Honorifics
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 July 1, 2006
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. Mr. Me is currently ranked #82 out of 1031. (188 wikians have given it an average rating of 8.98) |
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