The Darlings Of Lumberland
From This Might Be A Wiki
| song name | The Darlings of Lumberland |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | Nanobots |
| year | 2013 |
| first played | October 25, 2015 (93 known performances) |
| run time | 3:21 |
| sung by | John Flansburgh |
Trivia/Info
- Lumberland is a town in Sullivan County, New York, located approximately 90 miles northwest of New York City. At a show on September 17, 2022, John Flansburgh stated: "This is a song about wandering around graveyards in Sullivan County, something somebody likes to do."
- Flansburgh explained the origins of the title at a show on August 31, 2022:[1]
I spend a lot of my time in Sullivan County in the Catskills now. It's a beautiful part of the world, and it's a really beautiful place if you're looking for extensive graveyards. One of the families up there, that is very well represented in the graveyards of Sullivan County, is called the Darlings. They were a founding family of the area, so there's a million gravestones that just say 'Darlings', 'Darlings'. So that was sort of what struck me. Lumberland was the name of the area before it was incorporated into towns.
- The town of Lumberland was also mentioned in "Trucker's Coffee", a spoken-word piece written by Flansburgh in 1999. He spoke about the history of Lumberland in a 2013 Tumblr post:
My understanding is in the late 19th century, "Lumberland" was actually a bigger, catch-all term for the large tracks of unincorporated land along the Delaware water gap north of NYC. Wood was cheap fuel for New York, and as they cleared the land they would float it down the river on barges. The Darlings were an early family in Sullivan County (there a lot of tombstones up there!) and it was such an unusual name it always stuck in my head.
- Stan Harrison wrote the horn charts for this song.[2] He spoke about working on the song in a 2024 interview:
John Flansburgh wrote the basis of the tune and the lyrics. But he contacted me and said, the first part of it, "I want you to write a melody here and I want it to be the most beautiful melody ever written." Like, talk about pressure. In any event, I wrote the horn stuff and recorded it. I think I might have put down about forty different tracks. There were woodwinds from bass clarinet and bari sax, all the way up—I don't know if I played piccolo on it. Anyway, there were lots of tracks and I was given pretty much full freedom to do what I wanted.
- John Flansburgh described the song's collaborative process in a 2013 Tumblr post:
The composition was in collaboration with Stan Harrison (who wrote the horn chart to Cloisonné) and is in many ways a continuation of that process. We kinda "underwrote" the song/arrangement in each case, knowing Stan would fill in with a thick chart. He demoed his parts and we subtracted some stuff, and cut some rhythm track stuff at various points to highlight the horns (notably the "huffing" bass clarinets about 45 seconds in--which is really the magic of subtractive mixing).
- Flansburgh on the song's arrangement: "The chart has ten reed instruments, along with the electronic accompaniment of guitars, synth bass, mellotrons and drum machines."[3] He further stated: "Except for the mellotron saxophone chord "pads", all the horns are Stan's. There were sections we discussed as being "big band" charts but I would assume Stan is drawing on a wide set of arrangers–Duke Ellington or Oliver Nelson."[4]
Song Themes
Altered Voice, Accents, Body Parts, Death, Hands, Love, Mind Control, Hypnotism, Museums, Music, No, Not In Major Or Minor, People (Real), School, Temperature, Yes, Zombies Or The Undead
Videos
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