Spider
From This Might Be A Wiki
Drawing from Apollo 18 promo representing the song
| song name | Spider |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | Apollo 18, Dial-A-Song: 20 Years Of They Might Be Giants, A User's Guide to They Might Be Giants: Melody, Fidelity, Quantity, TMBG Clock Radio, Flood + Apollo 18 |
| year | 1992 |
| first played | December 30, 1995 (321 known performances) |
| run time | 0:50 |
| sung by | John Linnell, John Flansburgh says the "Must stop!" line |
Trivia/Info
- From a 1995 TMBG Info Club newsletter: "Spider is the product of an idle afternoon messing with the sampler. Linnell did the voices, except for "must...stop!" which Flans added along with the cocktail bongos, horns and sound effects." John Flansburgh elaborated in a 2003 interview:
Our big collaboration is on the arrangement and production. We're too shy to sit in the same room and bash out a song, although it has been done. [...] We've handed off songs in various forms of completion — tracks or sometimes just fragments — or a lyric — or samples. Spider was some vocal samples Linnell put on a disc and I put the track together from that.
- Flansburgh spoke about the song in a 1995 interview:
I'm not quite sure [what inspired the song], but it's sort of got a monster-movie vibe to it, like an overdubbed Japanese horror movie. Six months ago John was talking about — well, I have spiders in my house. There's this hole in my bathtub which is over my basement and spiders crawl up into my house. I'll get spider bites in my sleep. That might have been the genesis. I think I remember him reflecting on that.
- The first "Ladies and gentlemen!" sample is from "The Preliminaries", the opening track on the 1961 Smithsonian Folkways LP Campaign '56: Sounds of an Election Year, a spoken-word album about the 1956 United States presidential election. The second "Ladies and gentlemen!" is from the opening "Introduction" track on James Brown's 1968 album Live at the Apollo, Volume II.
- The repeating "Spider!" line is very reminiscent of the song "Boris the Spider" by The Who.
Song Themes
Album Lead-Ins, Animals, Death, Love, Nonsense Words, Problems With Liner Notes, Songs With Samples, Spoken Word, Traded Tracks, Violence
Videos
- Watch it on
– Recorded live on July 26, 2007 by kayakcup
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