Pencil Rain

Trivia/Info

• This song's title is a parody of the title of Prince's "Purple Rain". John Linnell would recall the songwriting process of "Pencil Rain" in 2023 for Everything Sticks Like A Broken Record, a track-by-track breakdown of the Lincoln album featured in Bandbox Issue #103:

You'll notice "Purple Rain" as "Purple Toupee," so clearly I was going back to the same well and trying a different version of the same thing. But "Pencil Rain" was a very different vibe. I suppose it's an example of one of these songs where the title generates the somewhat nonsensical lyric that it's about — maybe a way of making it surrealist in the simplest way. For some reason, there's an army of people who are being killed by the pencils underneath. Actual military soldiers being killed by pencils. I don't know what that's about. I think I was just free-associating.

• The earliest known performance of "Pencil Rain" occurred in 1986, two years before its official release on Lincoln. Flansburgh would recall audience reactions to the song in 2023 for Everything Sticks Like A Broken Record:

There was something singular about "Pencil Rain" when we performed it live; it would unwind over the course of the song and you could see people getting drawn in. It's such a slow song that it really makes this declaration like, "You're going to have to hang with this." And then it builds up and builds up. It's a very effective arrangement.

• In the instrumental bridge, the Morse code in the background translates to "Ay, ay, ay, ay, canta y no llores," which is a line from the traditional Spanish song "Cielito Lindo." In English, that would be "Ay, ay, ay, ay, sing and don't cry." Interestingly, an instrumental that would appear on a leaked 1999 studio tape was titled "Canta Y No Llores".
• The phrase "finale of seem" is from the poem "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" by twentieth-century American poet Wallace Stevens. The full line is "Let be be finale of seem," and is generally interpreted to mean, let true existence (being) put an end to mere appearance (seeming).
• The continuous drumbeat and opening line might be a reference to "The Impossible Dream" from Man of La Mancha which opens with "to dream the impossible dream" versus TMBG's "The possible dream, finale of seem". Interestingly, Man of La Mancha is the musical version of Don Quixote, the book which famously gave us the phrase "They Might Be Giants". Compare the opening beat/rhythm here.
• This song was played over a slow-mo fight scene in the first episode of Malcolm in the Middle.

Song Themes

Accents, Colors, Death, Heads, Not In Common Time, Numbers, Onomatopoeia, Poetry, Puns, Spanish, Telecommunication, War, Military, Weather, Writing

Videos

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