I was in San Francisco for a week. Sorry for the lack of postings. But frankly, I’m not sure why I’m apologizing to myself. Perhaps guilt is blind to reason.
Although I usually find myself starting off posts with a rhetorical question, why not give it yet another go: Have you ever found yourself so genuinely amused by something, that even your own earnest chuckle is embarassing?
As I settled down for dinner last night, eager to relax after a week out west, I popped in a DVD that I just bought. Thanks to the kind funding of a friend, I was able to buy the documentary on They Might Be Giants, chronicaling their lives in the music industry. Little did I know that I would be instantly transported back to my own childhood, instantly recalling all the lyrics to the 7 or 8 albums that I owned as a teenager. What a feeling.
I’m not sure how aquainted anyone else is with TMBG, but for me they were the building block of my current musical tastes and even understanding of pop composition. I stole my sister’s copy of Flood right before a road trip to Michigan. Hunkered down on the back floor of the parent’s conversion van, I watched the greenery whiz by as my ears were filled with some of the most peculiar and entertaining music I had ever heard. By the age of 8, I was already a music junky, but more versed in the likes of Michael Jackson, Genesis, The Doors, Depeche Mode and Erasure (and the Top Gun soundtrack, seeing as my dad was obsessed and he controlled the ever-important car stereo on trips). TMBG created these intimately personal, desolate yet still happy-as-hell songs that were cleverly wordy and humorous. Part of me was embarrassed to be listening to them, for it was like listening to a reel of commercial jingles they were so poppy. But I was drawn to the wordplay. They used words and metaphors in their lyrics like no other artist I had ever met. They were expressing themselves, but in the most intelligent and perhaps cryptic way that my naive ears had ever heard.
Needless to say, I became hooked. I eventually went on to buy 7 or 8 of their albums, loving every one of them. They were the soundtrack to my late childhood. I cut the grass every week to them. I sat in my room drawing to them. And unlike the slick, glossy words of Phil Collins or MC Hammer at the time, John and John felt like family…tangible and real, not in a far-off distant land of recording studios. I loved this intimacy.
As time moved on, and high school rolled around, my musical tastes exploded even more. I graduated from cassettes to cds, and thus my TMBG collection sat useless and dusty in the corner of my room. Sure, I listend to Flood a few times in high school (friend’s cds) but I left behind the comfortable ditty’s of youth for “cooler” and just plain different music. It was time.
But sitting on my couch in the end of February, 13 years after I first was introduced to them, my childhood came rushing back to me: The smell of freshly cut grass, the warm, secretive feeling of being back in the van, the inner smile after hearing genuis lyrics set to beautifully crafted pop songs. I forgot how much TMBG played a role in developing my love of music. I guess they were the proverbial uncle that I never really had that inspired me during my childhood. And since then, I’d forgotten all about them.
As I turned the DVD player off for the evening, I couldn’t help but chuckle. Not intentional, not even provoked, it was a chuckle that one gets when realizing their own stupidity after all these years. It was the chuckle of finding out that someone you left behind was right all along: that you’d grow too cool for them for awhile, but come back eventually, just to love them even more.
And I have.
[new pics are up on the right from SF]
