Cowtown

Trivia/Info

• This is one of the earliest original They Might Be Giants songs. It was the first song that John Flansburgh and John Linnell learned to play together,^[1][2] and they performed it at their first live show in July 1982.^[3]
• The song predates They Might Be Giants as a band.^[4] John Linnell began writing it when he was living in Boston, in or around 1977.^[5] He recalled in a 2000 interview: "I was about 18 when I started writing songs that I thought other people should listen to. I wrote Cowtown when I was 18 or something like that." The song was further developed in 1981 or 1982, when Flansburgh and Linnell were in a short-lived trio with a mutual friend. Flansburgh explained in a 1996 Pitchfork interview:

Linnell wrote the song "Cowtown" when I was in a sort of pre-They Might Be Giants project with him and this other guy, who's a writer in New York. His name is Dave Lindsay. [...] Dave Lindsay played bass and I played guitar and Linnell played keyboards. We had this project that we rehearsed for like a month and had a bunch of songs including "Cowtown" and then it just didn't come together for whatever reason, I'm not really sure.

• John Flansburgh elaborated in a 2015 interview:

"Cowtown" is probably the very earliest song that we worked on as They Might Be Giants. In fact, we played as a trio with this fellow Dave Lindsay, who's actually Arto Lindsay's cousin. [...] David was a standup bass player and we jammed with him a few times, rehearsed with him a few times. And one of the songs that we put together — that John and I put together — was that song "Cowtown". It's really Linnell's song, but I contributed some lyrics. But "Cowtown" is really like the original They Might Be Giants song. It's a pretty light-hearted song. I think the lyric that I contributed was sort of vaguely inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey... it's pretty hard to explain.

• After that trio dissolved, Flansburgh and Linnell continued to work together as a duo. One of their first plans as a duo was to release "Cowtown" on a flexi-disc record, paired with an unreleased track titled "My Father's Son". Linnell recalled in a 1988 interview: "We lived up and down stairs from each other, and we started working together. We made little tapes, and we talked about making a flexi-disc. That was our big dream. [...] And we had this big plan. We were going to release "Cowtown" and "My Father's Son." And that was like 1981." While that flexi-disc did not materialize, the band did eventually release the Wiggle Diskette in 1985, a flexi-disc featuring the songs "Everything Right Is Wrong" and "You'll Miss Me".
• The band wrote about recording "Cowtown" in Everything Sticks Like A Broken Record, a 2023 track-by-track breakdown of the Lincoln album:

Flansburgh: "Cowtown" probably has the longest gestation period of any song that we have ever recorded. We were playing it in 1982 and recorded it in '88. It was the very first song that John and I had in our repertoire as They Might Be Giants. I think we played "Cowtown" even before we started They Might Be Giants.
The snare rolls at the beginning of "Cowtown" that sound like fife and drum corps snares... that was the kind of sound you couldn't get out of a drum machine before the Alesis HR-16 we used on Lincoln. There was just too much clang coming from the sounds of the other machine. That was an example of the big step up in sound.

Linnell: The technical feat on "Cowtown" is that, in the very beginning of the song, there are two clarinets and each is playing every other note. That was another sort of stunt, like the noise gate in "Ana Ng." The two clarinets are hocketing one note. That part is probably unplayable by one clarinet, but I could write it out for two clarinets and it's actually not that complicated.

• The scream in the instrumental breaks is the Fairlight CMI stock sample "SCREAM2". Flansburgh wrote about the sample in a 2022 Tumblr post: "I think they are from a stock library that came with either the Akai sampler or the Fairlight… might even be a combo plater of a horror movie scream and something else…" In live performances, the screaming sound is either performed by clarinets, or by Marty Beller triggering a sample. Usually The Audience accompanies this with actual screaming.
• The lyric "The yellow Roosevelt Avenue leaf overturned" is a combination of various phrases ("The Yellow Rose of Texas", "Roosevelt Avenue", "a new leaf overturned").
• At live shows in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the band often instructed the audience to square dance along to this song.

Song Themes

Animals, Cities, Colors, Friendship, Not In Major Or Minor, Oblique Cliches Or Idiom, Puns, The Senses, Sleep, Sea, Songs With Samples, Streets

Videos

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. Cowtown is currently ranked #149 out of 1035. (237 wikians have given it an average rating of 8.83)

Other Links for “Cowtown” [edit] Site Format Price Link iTunes AAC 1.29