Authenticity Trip

Trivia/Info

• John Flansburgh wrote about his inspiration for the song in a 2023 Tumblr post:

I had a plan with some NJ folks for dinner, but because of a previous midday meeting, I somehow found myself [in Teaneck] hours early in the late afternoon, so I simply waited and walking around killing time (a predicament I am actually quite familiar with) I just took in the whole area, which, while filled with small businesses was essentially free of street traffic. It was VERY quiet and seemed... haunted... which became the frame of the song, then drawing on the area’s ghostly past...

• The phrase "baby tooth" also appears in the song "Canajoharie." Flansburgh has stated that this repetition was unintentional:^[1]

Truth be told, once you've written a bunch of songs, you're also in this strange dialogue with yourself, and since John [Linnell] and I work together, I feel we're always cross-referencing each other's thing. So often, things we talk about end up in the songs in a weird way. I just realized that I've been working on this new song that has the word "babytooth" in it. There's a song on [Join Us] with the word babytooth in it. And they're really unrelated, they have nothing to do with each other, but I don't want to be in the penalty box with Linnell, that I used the word babytooth again.

• Bubble's of Teaneck is a laundromat located in Teaneck, New Jersey.^[2]
• The "waggle up stance" lyric might be a reference to a poster created by artist Cliff Baldwin in 1984. Baldwin was the founder of AQUI, a Brooklyn-based art magazine that produced large-scale typographic posters. Their works were distributed around New York City in the mid-1980s,^[3] and Flansburgh might have been familiar with them. Baldwin's poster, titled "WAGGLE UP.", featured that phrase beside an illustration of a man striking a pose.
• 200-proof alcohol would be 100% alcohol by volume (according to the American definition of "proof" as twice the ABV). Such "absolute alcohol" is impossible to distill using traditional means, but can be done in a laboratory.

Song Themes

Accents, Animals, Body Parts, Clothes, Dancing, People (Imaginary), Reading, Relatives, School, Transportation, Writing, Yes

Videos

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