JOHN HENRY (HYPERCARD VERSION)

That's right, I did say we were getting weird.

So this was released as a companion piece to John Henry on the Usenet forum alt.music.tmbg. It contains all 20 songs from John Henry! Kind of. It's got really low-fidelity garbage versions of each track, inadvertently turning TMBG's turn to the age of the full band back a notch by forcing a 0-person band arrangement.

Boy howdy, are some of these songs nigh unrecognizable. A Self Called Nowhere definitely takes some liberties. All of them do; the ones that are closest are probably Snail Shell, Spy, and Subliminal. Spy ends with a funny little "ssshhpie".

I think to talk about that is kind of to miss the point though. This, however inadvertently, plays an interesting role in TMBG's relation to itself and the dawn of the full-band era. They were about to drop a massive musical left turn by moving away from drum machines and synths, and then they promoted this album on the fledgling internet with nothing but synths. Not even good synths!

That probably has something to say about TMBG's relationship to this new era. I can not hope to interpret that seriously. Simply put, you have got to check this thing out, it is so cool. I almost had to set up a macOS classic emulator before I realized that there's an HTML5 version, linked in the sidebar.