We Want A Rock
From This Might Be A Wiki
| song name | We Want a Rock |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | Flood, Flood + Apollo 18 |
| year | 1990 |
| first played | December 5, 1989 (182 known performances) |
| run time | 2:47 |
| sung by | John Linnell |
Trivia/Info
- This is one of four songs on Flood produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. It features John Linnell on banjo and guest musician Mark Feldman on violin. Linnell discussed the song in a 2009 Rolling Stone track-by-track retrospective on Flood:
Mark Feldman was and is a joy to work with, partly due to his deadpan wit, but also because he can play any kind of music. I guess the song is a metaphor. We who have nothing to 'wind string around' are lost in the wilderness. But those who deny this need are 'burning our playhouse down.' If you put quotes around certain words it sounds more like a metaphor.
- At a 2023 live show, Linnell revealed that this song was inspired by Homer Price, a 1943 children's book by Robert McCloskey. He stated: "There's a discussion in the book, how do you begin wrapping string in a ball if you have nothing to wrap it around? That's what this song is about."[1] While the passage Linnell described does not appear in the text, he is likely referring to the chapter titled "Mystery Yarn". In that story, the characters hold a competition to prove who has wound the largest ball of string, and one contestant is disqualified for having started their ball around a walnut.
- Linnell spoke about writing the song in a 2008 Houston Chronicle interview:
There's a little bit of stream of consciousness to writing that one. This sounds really abstract, but in order to begin wrapping a piece of string around itself, you need something to start with. Like a rock. I guess you can make a ball of string starting from nothing if you just make a tiny loop at the end of the string. But it seems theoretically impossible. It's a metaphor for getting started. [...]
It was just a general set of loose metaphors. You know, where do you begin? It's a funny conceit, saying everyone has this problem when it's really about the problem of the person singing about wanting a prosthetic forehead. It's hard to make the argument that everybody wants one. You're enlisting everyone else.
- Producer Clive Langer was reluctant to keep the banjo part in the song and advocated for its removal. John Flansburgh recalled at 2023 live show:
John bought a banjo, taught himself to play the banjo, and wanted to find an outlet for his banjo-mania. So basically Alan [Winstanley], who was more of a get-along kinda guy, was like, "yeah, let's try it." [...] Clive insisted that the banjo be banished and muted from the mixing. And then Alan sort of turned to us conspiratorially and said, "watch this." He bypassed the board, the console where you can mute things, and just fed the banjo directly into the final mix. It's not very loud.
- The lyrics reference the titles of a few songs by other artists:
- "If I Were a Carpenter", a 1967 song by Tim Hardin, famously covered by many artists including Johnny Cash.
- "I'm Gonna Burn Your Playhouse Down", a 1959 song originally performed by George Jones and written by Lester Blackwell, later covered by The Proclaimers.
- The title echoes the 1984 Twisted Sister song "I Wanna Rock".
- Played over the closing credits of Jake Johannsen: This'll Take About an Hour. It was also used during the closing credits of Wild Chicago, a show on Chicago's PBS station WTTW.
Song Themes
Animals, Artificial Body Parts, Body Parts, Doors, Fire, Forgetting And Remembering, Heads, Money, Music, Oblique Cliches Or Idiom, Puns, Questions, References To Other Songs Or Musicians, Science, Size, This Town, Title Not In Lyrics, TV And Movie Themes, Violence
Videos
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