Whistling In The Dark
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| song name | Whistling in the Dark |
| artist | They Might Be Giants |
| releases | Flood, Flood + Apollo 18 |
| year | 1990 |
| first played | November 15, 1989 (465 known performances) |
| run time | 3:25 |
| sung by | John Linnell, John Flansburgh harmonizes |
Trivia/Info
- During some live performances, John Flansburgh discards his guitar (often during the accordion solo of the previous song, "Hearing Aid") and picks up a large chest-mounted bass drum, which he strikes zealously through the song.
- "The bass drum sound was something we actually worked on for quite a while in the studio and we weren't so happy with it even in the end — but I think in our imaginations even an atomic blast would have been too small. We actually recorded it and possibly sampled it so we could retrigger the biggest sound." - John Flansburgh in a 2009 Rolling Stone interview
- Linnell commented in a 2009 Rolling Stone interview, "I thought it would be funny if there were two guys who have a seemingly brief, hostile interaction and the camera pulls back and they're in jail together. Bear in mind, if you insist on interpreting the words to this peculiar song, that the narrator is comfortable and capable in the role of being what he's like. However, as the wise men say, an 'is' is not an 'ought.'"
- In a 1996 interview with LAUNCHonline, Flansburgh would talk about the difference between the album recording of "Whistling In The Dark" and its live performances:
After we start doing [songs] live we feel pretty free to change [them] around to make [them] more effective performance[s]. Like "Whistling In The Dark": it has a huge bass drum part in it that comes in on the word "whistling" on the record − even though immediately after recording it we realized it made really obvious sense to make it "Whistling in the dark, boom!" But the record's done, so what do you do? Do you just do another thousand shows with the drum in the wrong place or do you just kind of 'fess up? We just changed it; it's not a problem.
Song Themes
Accents, Criminal Activities, Different When Played Live, Fade Out, Heads, Jail And Imprisonment, Mind Control, Hypnotism, Not In Common Time, Oblique Cliches Or Idiom, Oxymorons, Paradoxes, And Contradictory Statements, Poison, Problems With Liner Notes, Recursion, Violence, Writing
Videos
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