When Will You Die
From This Might Be A Wiki
| song name | When Will You Die |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | Join Us, Them Ain't Big Eye Ants, 50,000,000 They Might Be Giants Songs Can't Be Wrong |
| year | 2011 |
| first played | July 28, 2011 (327 known performances) |
| run time | 2:32 |
| sung by | John Linnell |
Trivia/Info
- John Linnell spoke about the song's lyrics in an interview with The Word Magazine: "I felt a little bit funny about it, and I was thinking of starting again with new lyrics, but the people around me were saying, 'No, no, you should stick around with this incredibly hateful lyric you've constructed. In fact, make it more hateful.'" In an interview with The A.V. Club he added:
When we were working on it, everybody was looking at me, like, 'Who is this about?' [Laughs.] And no, it was kind of hilarious to keep people...It’s a funny thing to lead people to believe that there is somebody that it's about, because in a way, the energy of the song is derived from that. I would joke and say, 'Well, it's about someone in this room, but I'm not going to say who.'
- In the same A.V. Club interview, Linnell noted that he subconsciously plagiarized himself in this song: "The middle, the bridge bit, is almost identical in melodic, harmonic structure to part of the song "The Statue Got Me High," and it was so late in the process when I realized it, it was like, 'Fuck it. There's nothing I can do about it now. This song is kinda done.'"
- The song's instrumental track was recorded in a lower key and sped up, to mimic the sound of a 33 rpm record playing at 45 rpm.[1] John Linnell explained in a 2011 interview:
There's some possibly misguided ideas that we just pursued to the bitter end. For example, there's one song where the entire band sped up a substantial amount, and the vocal is at regular speed. Some of the people we played it for were like, 'Those drums sound a little thin.' They didn't get the point of it, so I don't know if that requires an explanation that we did this on purpose.
- The stereo field in this song is very narrow with only the vocals and keyboard slightly panned, making the album mix of this track essentially mono.
- The horn arrangement on this song was written by Dan Levine.
- The video for this song was put together by the Office of Paul Sahre and features the construction (and destruction) of a life-size paper model of the Join Us monster truck hearse. It took four months to build and, together with the video, the total cost was $10,000. You can read more about the design and construction process on designboom.com. Videographer Joe Hollier created a short behind the scenes video showing the hearse's construction, and uploaded to YouTube some raw unedited footage from the project. Sahre wrote a chapter about the project in his 2017 book "Two-Dimensional Man," and some of the surviving pieces of the hearse were shown at the book's corresponding exhibition.[2] A behind the scenes photo from the music video was used as the cover of TMBG's 2012 DVD Them Ain't Big Eye Ants.
Song Themes
Children, Counting, Criminal Activities, Death, Everything, Evil, Funny But Sad, Gleeful Irreverence, Lies And Deception, Mental Illness, Money, Questions, School, Self-Reference, The Senses, Time, Yes
Videos
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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. When Will You Die is currently ranked #22 out of 1023. (256 wikians have given it an average rating of 9.19) |
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