Birdhouse In Your Soul (Demo)

Trivia/Info

• This early demo of "Birdhouse In Your Soul" is shorter than the final song (lacking the intro, bridge and repeats of the chorus) and features alternate lyrics. It has not been released outside of Dial-A-Song, and is currently only available as a low quality over-the-phone recording.
• This demo likely dates to 1988. John Linnell wrote the song's melody and chords at some point between 1984 and 1987, when he was living in Manhattan. He didn't start writing the lyrics until after he moved to Brooklyn in 1988. Linnell recalled in a 2021 interview: "I was living in Hell's Kitchen in the early '80s and I'm pretty sure that's when I started coming up with the harmonic melodic bits, because I was doing a lot of that at that time. Then, you know, five years later, we were making our third album and I'd kind of come up with the lyric."
• John Flansburgh mentioned this demo in a 2021 interview with The Guardian: "Before we got noticed we did this thing called Dial-A-Song to get our music heard. You basically rang a phone number and heard a song free of charge. A really embryonic version of "Birdhouse in Your Soul" was on Dial-A-Song as a one-minute demo a good year before we signed to Elektra."
• This is the first of two demos that the band made of this song. The second demo, which has not been released, was created in 1989 and featured a different musical arrangement.^[1] John Linnell spoke about two demos in a 2021 interview:

I almost ruined the song, because I wanted it to sound more normal. When we started working with Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, I played them a new demo that I'd made where I'd completely changed the rhythm section to make it more like a standard pop song. In the finished version, the version that was released, there's a crazy drumbeat where the snare is hitting on every beat, and then the kick is coming in on the off beats, which is completely wrong and crazy, but that was the original version. I played that to these guys and they said, 'Okay that's what we're gonna use that as a spotlight track.' Then I made this new demo and I completely changed the drumbeat and they were like, 'You ruined it. Why did you do that?' So we went back to the original drumbeat. [...] They were definitely excited about that one and then I obviously was kind of nervous and got cold feet and tried to make it sound more normal, and luckily they were there to save me from myself.

• The lines "I don't feel thirty" and "Give me something to write on!" are likely references to the Van Halen song "Hot for Teacher" and its lines "I don't feel tardy" and "Gimme something to write on, man." The band has been known to break into "Hot for Teacher" during performances of "Masshole" as well.
• This demo was partially played, through Dial-A-Song, in a January 1989 interview with the band on NPR's Fresh Air.

Song Themes

Age, Animals, Clothes, Colors, Death, Food, Loneliness, Money, Oblique Cliches, References To Other Songs Or Musicians, Size, Sleep (Theme), Time, Transportation, Writing

Videos