Mrs. Bluebeard

From This Might Be A Wiki
Video screenshot

song name Mrs. Bluebeard
artist They Might Be Giants
releases I Like Fun, Dial-A-Song (2018), Modern
year 2018
first played February 1, 2018 (73 known performances)
run time 2:43
sung by John Linnell


Trivia/Info

There is a fictitious Mrs Bluebeard — seven or eight of them, right? And for some reason he murdered his wives and kept them in a closet. There’s a lot of versions of this folk tale, and it’s referred to in operas, and short stories. So this is just another in the litany of those stories, told from the perspective of one of the wives. That’s pretty much it. The piano part is something I made up [laughing], just a silly Latin-tinged piano part that became the rhythmic foundation for this song.
  • A clip of John Flansburgh tracking this song's guitar part in the studio was posted to Instagram on April 12, 2017.
  • The 17th-Century legend of Bluebeard tells of a wicked man who kills all of his wives, until he himself is done in. The story was included in Grimms' Fairy Tales.
  • The line "I want to say I learned something valuable today / Alas my murdered remains are incapable of learning anything" provided the title for the 2018 release My Murdered Remains. That was originally the working title for I Like Fun.
  • The music video was co-directed by Kassandra Heller, Jeremy Galante, and David Cowles. Art direction and storyboards were created by Kassandra Heller, with animation by Jeremy Galante.
  • This was the final song featured on the 2018 iteration of Dial-A-Song, released on December 24, 2018. As such, it stayed on the phone line well into 2019.

Song Themes

Colors, Death, Evil, Love Gone Sour, Music, Mythology, People (Imaginary), Questions, Title Not In Lyrics, Titles And Honorifics, Zombies Or The Undead

Videos

  • Watch it on Youtube.png

Current Rating

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Mrs. Bluebeard is currently ranked #34 out of 1018. (123 wikians have given it an average rating of 9.15)