They Might Be Giants - We Want A Rock

[Here’s a post I contributed to tuneage—SYNERGY! The song really just came to me after a stretch of forced insomnia, and in that mental state, the lines about rocks and strings just articulated something ineffable and profound to me, and I became consumed by the song and listened to it a million times. That’s all I really wanted or needed to say in the post, but you can’t do those kinds of pitches these days.]

Earlier this year, They Might Be Giant’s commercial breakthrough Flood was certified platinum, just shy of the album’s 20 year anniversary this coming January. To mark the occasion, the band has recently began doing performances of the album, and I accordingly decided it was time to revisit the album. The big hits—“Birdhouse In Your Soul”, “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”, “Particle Man”—remain charming and satisfying, as do “Whistling In The Dark”, “Twisting” (dB’s namedrop!), and “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair”. The album provides a great snapshot of the offbeat pop that would eventually evolve into something called “alternative” music.

That is all good, but it’s “We Want A Rock” that really floors me. The wonderful melody and accordion performance transform the inscrutable lyrics—“everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads”—into something with a resonating sentiment. It only took a couple plays for me to identify with the song’s people who “want a rock to wind a piece of string around”. Although the lyrics seem silly and nonsensical, the meaning of the song, according to John Linnell, is quite simple:

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.

Okay, I don’t think I would have thought of that metaphor after 20 years, but that’s not going to stop me from joining a rock-and-string sing-along.