Don't I Have The Right?

Tony Millionaire's artwork for the song

Rykodisc artwork

Trivia/Info

• The original demo for this song was recorded for the performance art group Watchface piece "More Songs of Desire and Despair", which was performed by Iris Rose from April to May 1987. It also featured a song written by John Linnell.
• John Flansburgh, from monopuff.org:

I wrote this song a couple of years ago for performance artist Iris Rose's Torch Song show at La Mama. It is a radical departure, even for this record, but Nancy Lynn Howell's beautiful vocal brings the song to life.

• Flansburgh in a 1996 interview: "It fits in the rest of the record in a grab-bag kind of way, whereas if it were on a They Might Be Giants record, people might think, 'Oh, they want people to take them seriously now.'"
• Nancy Lynn Howell, who provides lead vocals on this track, is married to Mark Lerner. In 1989, Mark and Nancy's first date was at a Maudlins show at John Linnell's apartment Quiet Life in Brooklyn, for which he opened, performing early renditions of some of his State Songs.^[1]
• San Francisco-based singer Connie Champagne recorded a cover of this song for her 1991 Heyday Records album La Strada. The liner notes attribute the song to They Might Be Giants with a 1991 copyright, with Connie's description: "John F. tells me this is a torch song."
• Though the versions mentioned above are all downtempo ballads, Flansburgh also once recorded a fast-paced upbeat version for Dial-A-Song.

Song Themes

Coffee, Drinks, Eyes, Forgetting And Remembering, Food, Games, Love Gone Sour, Money, Non-John Vocals, Rhymes, Questions, Time

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. Don't I Have The Right? is currently ranked #726 out of 1020. (34 wikians have given it an average rating of 7.73)

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