BOOK

This is what it's all been leading to. BOOK, the most recent studio album by They Might Be Giants at the time of writing, really vindicates our read of They Might Be Giants as being a band about being a band, and a band about being They Might Be Giants. It is, in a lot of ways, TMBG's most personal album.

The album cover of BOOK is a broken record; not one that loops, but one that is shattered. It is part of a whole, and the whole isn't known. BOOK is about breaking and discarding things, about selection, about how any artistic process will inherently leave scraps. Pamphlets, even, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Synopsis For Latecomers, on the surface, is a song about covering up a narrative, about people asking questions that you are unable to answer. It's about chaos happening, and being unable to explain it. What chaos is this, then? Well, it's flooding. Volcanoes are opening up, babies are being eaten. The chaos is manic expression, the kind of expression that TMBG did on Flood and the Dial-A-Song projects (all of them, including 2015 and 2018). It's notable that this album was released after about a 4-year wait since The Escape Team and My Murdered Remains; as a result, they've calmed down from this mania. They're trying to recuperate.

From here, we get more Flood-ian non-resolution, as The Pamphlet primed us for. From Moonbeam Rays on, every song has a theme of something happening but being unsatisfied with it. There is something missing about BOOK; there is something missing about They Might Be Giants. In the BOOK book, the word "BOOK" is typeset with another O under the second O. It's something falling off. It's gone.

There is a theme of obsession throughout all of BOOK, trying to find the missing thing. I Broke My Own Rule is about holding yourself to preconceived notions, and then throwing everything away because you messed it up. I Can't Remember The Dream brings us to a kind of state where you're looking for something, and if only you had remembered the dream you had, your entire life would be different.

Another recurring theme on BOOK is that of death, but less about death in the abstract, and more directly the death of They Might Be Giants. Far more explicitly than anything on Join Us, even Three Might Be Duende, the song Brontosaurus brings us directly to the question of do you think this tale has gone on for too long?, about entering the world as someone who is already gone. We also gain one of the most important lyrics of the album from this song: Life was devoid of purpose / and so I joined the circus / somehow they found it easy to ignore us.

The motif of circuses appears two more times on the album. Drown the Clown is both political commentary and simultaneously about destroying the circus that TMBG joined/is. Quit The Circus, on the other hand... is a track I cannot reasonably hope to provide commentary on. Quit The Circus is about what it is about, and I need you to understand that. I really need you to know that.

Expressions of parts appear throughout all of BOOK, specifically on Wait Actually Yeah No and Less Than One; both are songs about half-finished ideas, about scraps of records that could have been. By this point in TMBG's discography, the outtakes could have formed a band of their own. There is nothing left to do but mourn what could have been; the other parts of the record.

Once again, Three Might Be Duende echoes throughout the quantity era of TMBG. Once again, we are faced with the inevitability of TMBG's death as confrontingly as it was put on John Henry. Less than point five of the million times I closed my eyes / I couldn't open them again. But TMBG will keep going until the road disappears; they are unable to stop gleaning, to stop seeing patterns in noise, to quit the circus, to make the car crash. The pink monster truck hearse is still careening down the interstate. The fuel's ran out.

All it has is momentum now.