She's Actual Size

Trivia/Info

• This song was apparently inspired by the band's 1990 Flood tour, during which they spent a lot of time driving around looking in rearview mirrors and at the phrase 'objects may appear larger than actual size' that appears on it.
• John Flansburgh, in an April 1992 interview with XS Magazine: "There's a country western song that talks about seeing someone going away in a rearview mirror. I thought that was a really succinct way of talking about leaving somebody behind. It turned into kind of a brag song about a woman who leaves everyone behind by the virtue for being super cool, so happening that they're intimidating."
• Flansburgh spoke about writing the song in a 1992 interview: "It's a song about being intimidated by somebody. The original song was actually written like a brag song as 'I'm Actual Size,' but it was getting really harsh and kind of bogus that way. I didn't know how to modify it except turn it into 'She's Actual Size.' That worked much better."
• Introducing the song in 1992, Flansburgh stated: "This song is about scale, and sexuality, and, uh...relationships."
• Flansburgh has expressed dissatisfaction with the studio recording of this song. He explained in a 1994 interview:

When I listen to 'She's Actual Size,' I would be lying if I said that it didn't make me a little disappointed, because the later performance versions of it have so much more spirit than the recorded version. It was very tentative at the (recording) time because it was just finished. [...] It's not so much the arrangement, but the confidence we have when we perform the song. It's frustrating to hear the "definitive" version of the song—I think it's a solid song—to be a timid performance.

• The spoken "We take you to Brooklyn" in the beginning is a sample from Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast.
• John Linnell wrote the horn charts for this song.^[1]
• This song features Jim Thomas of The Ordinaires on drums.
• Early live performances of the song had Flansburgh singing while playing a small drum kit. In performances from the late 1990s until the early 2000s, Flansburgh and Dan Hickey would usually stop in the middle to perform a "Dial-a-Drum-Solo" skit. A live version of the song with the routine appears on Dial-A-Song: 20 Years Of They Might Be Giants.

Song Themes

Cities, Language, Mind Control, Hypnotism, Mirrors And Reflections, Money, New York City, Not In Major Or Minor, Religion, Supernatural, Shapes, Size, Songs With Samples, Spoken Word, Swing Feel, Transportation

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. She's Actual Size is currently ranked #547 out of 1022. (105 wikians have given it an average rating of 8.18)

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