PHONE POWER

Phone Power is the last of three albums released in 2015-2016 that collect the songs from TMBG's 2015 revival of Dial-A-Song.

For those uninitiated, Dial-A-Song is a telephone service that can be reached at +1 (844) 387 6962 right now, upon which you will hear a song from They Might Be Giants. It ran from 1983 (pre-Pink Album!) to 2006, and came back in 2014 for this project. It quite literally ran out of the basement of John Flansburgh's apartment for a time.

We'll cover bootlegs of the original run of Dial-A-Song later on in this project. For now, it's notable that the 2015 Dial-A-Song iteration has an interesting relation to the contents of albums; Glean, Why?, and Phone Power are almost entirely Dial-A-Song albums.

This was not what TMBG did in the prior iterations of Dial-A-Song! The point of Dial-A-Song is largely to write a lot, to write fast. If you listen to those old bootlegs, you'll note that a lot of the iterations of songs were very different from their finished, mastered versions. A lot of these songs never even appeared on later albums, and if they did, they were massively different versions, or used for other purposes (i.e. the Malcolm in the Middle soundtrack).

We are now in an era of Dial-A-Song that is producing fully featured studio output. The quantity dial has been dialed up to 11. The notion of creating an album from this sporadic, rapid output is both laughable and laudable; it's akin to the concept of Apophenia, seeing patterns in random data, or gleaning, so to speak. In fact, the music video for Apophenia directly references the "power spheres" that we used to express our argument about the "quantity era" in the Join Us write-up.

I think that this is ultimately the final pin in the argument from post-Join Us TMBG being a fundamentally different character. They have now fully escaped the "lifecycle" of a band as we detailed in the Long Tall Weekend write-up, fully escaped the era of Mink Car and Disney Sound. They are here now, in uncharted territory.

Anyway, about the album. A lot of these songs are obvious Glean outtakes (Apophenia, To A Forest, I Am Alone); but to even call them a Glean outtake perhaps gives Glean more credence than it deserves, if we take Apophenia to mean that we are gleaning patterns out of the chaos of Dial-A-Song. To a degree, all of Dial-A-Song as a project is about Gleaning patterns in randomness, about Why you would even bother.

For this reason, I do not have a lot to say about the contents of Phone Power, because I believe that to do so is antithetical to Dial-A-Song as a project, and because song-level analysis is not something that we tend to do on this project except when it contributes to the themes of the album. It is a very good album, however, and you need to listen to it.