JOHN HENRY

Instead of being two people called John, They Might Be Giants are now six people with five names. Throwing a cursory farewell to computer backing tracks, they tour and record as a rocking six piece, adding a fresh new dimension to their unique view on the world. Their new album is still called John, though. John Henry. Pleased to meet you.

­— UK magazine ad, promoting the album

In 2024, I caught TMBG on tour at Union Transfer, and they played a lot of tracks from John Henry. It was an excellent night, because this is one of the albums that I'm personally most familiar with.

Let's talk about the title first. The story of John Henry, the black American folk hero from about 1850, is one of man versus machine: his prowess as a railroad engineer and steel driver was measured in a race against a steam-powered rock drill, which he won only to die with his hammer and chisel in hand. The title, then, is about this nature of man versus machine as the possible Giants move from their traditional drum machine and synthesizer setup to a full band arrangement. They are hoping that their gamble on men will win, but they are uncertain about their future; they might die in the process and experience The End Of The Tour.

John Henry is, largely, about altered mental states. When I mention altered mental states, you're probably thinking about drugs, and this album certainly doesn't lack that. Flansburgh has stated that Sleeping In The Flowers is about "getting stoned in Central Park". He's also stated that Extra Savoir-Faire, with all its toxic masculinity and macho posturing, is about a man on steroids. I don't even have to explain how AKA Driver, its former title being Nyquil Driver before being changed for copyright reasons, is related — hey, Nyquil driver, it's Nyquil drivin' time.

But to simply call John Henry an album about doing drugs at bad times is both reductive and misses the greater point. When I mention an altered mental state here, I mean it in the broadest sense: one in which there is a "true self", and one where there is a mask. This mask can cause one to act different, even think sideways, but the reality of the matter is buried somewhere underneath. The woman on the cover is holding a pickaxe, much like the title character would: it's time to get digging.

We begin with Subliminal introducing us to the themes of dreaming and hyper/hyporeality that thread throughout the album. Alongside the common TMBG theme of car crashes and backwards text reinforcing the message of staring into the subliminal messages (ymra eht nioj), the significantly more guitar and rock-focused instrumentation that the full band gives us harkens towards larger rock and roll outfits, ones that typically do a lot of drugs and put on bombastic shows. The sound of the album raises the new and troubling question of whether those guys were actually like that, or whether they were just pretending. (They were.)

The kind of dream-like thinking in Subliminal is reinforced by Unrelated Thing, a song about thinking so incredibly sideways that your partner can no longer understand you. I personally think that this song has the same narrator as I Should Be Allowed To Think, where the narrator talks about how they should be allowed to blurt out whatever intrusive thoughts they have, reaction be damned. Later on in the album, Stomp Box shows us the logical conclusion of actually doing what I Should Be Allowed To Think asks; ceaseless screaming, voices from the dark, shout, shout, shout.

When your life is stuck in a dream, then, where do you go? Snail Shell, under this interpretation, is about returning to the dream-state, one of gratefulness for not having to engage with reality in its full power. In that comfort, though, there is darkness and introspection. The narrator of Spy, being, well, a spy, discusses how they can no longer trust anyone, how the facade has consumed their life. Espionage, to this narrator, is an altered state, and they've lost track of how to not do it. It's at this point where you begin to reach a point where you lose yourself, and become A Self Called Nowhere, a bottomless pit with a thing named "it". If you lose track of that introspection, you get to Destination Moon, a song which Linnell has stated is about "being really sick but not knowing that you are". You're still in the altered state, but you can't run anymore. You're here forever.

It's at this point that I return to the guitar-heavy, rock and roll-inspired instrumentation, and the notion of a band's image altogether. The success of Flood made They Might Be Giants almost synonymous with the new genre of "geek rock", putting them alongside acts like Weird Al Yankovic and Ween. However, I'd argue that TMBG never really wanted to have this image, and geek rock is more of a thing that kind of incidentally happened to them. Mainstream consensus about TMBG largely focuses on their being a "joke band", "funny guys", despite all their albums being unendingly sincere.

This, then, brings us to John Henry's obsession with fame and the relationship between artist and audience. Why Must I Be Sad? is about a kid who listens to a lot of Alice Cooper, feels really bad, and believes that Cooper's lyrics are speaking to him in a way. While music has this power, I'd argue that the inverse thing could also be happening: it's possible that listening to too much Alice Cooper is bad for the kid, because the music is putting him in an altered state where he's more likely to associate himself with these things. (We've, personally, been told that listening to the Mountain Goats early in the day is a bad idea, because we didn't even try to have a good day.)

From then on, Dirt Bike, being about a fictitious, culty band of the type that gives John Henry its sonic influence, talks about the way that music can put people in this type of emotional control. It's soul-crushing, it's self-propelled, and it's largely out of their hands. To harp on this theme, I view Meet James Ensor and Window as being the same situation from two perspectives: Meet James Ensor talking about the clamoring masses wanting to meet Ensor, and Window from Ensor's perspective, staring out at how many people he has to talk to and becoming highly paranoid. Ensor's perception becomes one that is out of his hands.

The out-of-their-hands geek rock reputation of They Might Be Giants is one that people associate so strongly with the band that this album is often considered to be where TMBG became uninteresting. This is an image that TMBG itself makes exceedingly clear in No One Knows My Plan. TMBG largely gained its reputation from being highly wordy, with lines such as After killing Jason off, and countless screaming Argonauts. No One Knows My Plan, however, establishes its narrator voice by subverting this expectation of wordiness: instead, it's the allegory of the people in the cave by the Greek guy.

The End Of The Tour, then, is about the uncertainty of the band's future in an era where they wish to defy expectations. TMBG makes a statement with this album that they will not be tied down to the image of them fabricated by their prior albums: they will do what they will do, and that is that. I find it admirable, which is why John Henry is absolutely one of my favorite albums of theirs.