SELF-TITLED/THE PINK ALBUM

Welcome to Eastern Mass. I hope you enjoy your stay.

First, some context. About a year ago we went to the August 3rd, 2024 show of the Mountain Goats, at Union Transfer in Philadelphia. Despite the Mountain Goats being our favorite band, we were unable to identify a lot of the tracks that were playing. Our experience with the Mountain Goats up until that point was a strange one, since we largely ignored a lot of their most important albums (All Hail West Texas, The Sunset Tree) and instead listened to a very stilted collection of their work (The Coroner's Gambit and Heretic Pride were favorites at the time, and still are). We were so frustrated with this that we decided to exercise the nuclear option: listen to the entire TMG discography in 30 days, which culminated in this Mastodon thread.

We had a really good time with it, and it was a large reason that we ended up starting our own band and getting into music-making in general, even if we aren't very good at it. We got to listen to a lot of strange tracks that were deeper in the trenches of their discography. We then wrote up a really small summary of each album, and posted them.

Come 2025, we despise posting as much as we did in 2024, which is why we're putting our thoughts on They Might Be Giants here. We've been planning this for months with our friend Alice, who is able to identify TMBG tracks from the first second consistently. We will be listening to every studio album, as well as select EPs and compilations that Alice considered "canonical", by the end of May 17th, 2025. Afterwards, you'll just have to wait and see. We aim to write "about 500" words about each studio album and our vague, unedited analyses about them. We'll also note our favorite song sung by Linnell and by Flans separately (though the distinction is vague). (I will now switch to more normal first-person pronouns, since I'm the only one here at time of writing.)

...Can we talk a bit about the colloquial album title? Seriously, I can't think about "the [color] album" without thinking about Weezer, even though this is before any of that stuff. Someone's definitely made an edit of this album that's the two Johns standing next to each other, Blue Album-style, with "they might be giants" in the Weezer font and a pink background. Someone's gotta do that.

This album makes the fact that the first TMBG show happened at a Sandinista rally make sense.

Above all else, The Pink Album is spiteful and angry. The main thematic through-lines here are oppressive systems, self-destruction, paranoia, and the inability of music to do anything.

The opening track, Everything Right Is Wrong Again, starts off with the theme of car crashes that would occur often throughout TMBG's discography (John Henry). I view this song as being about derealization, about values and systems changing around the narrator and their inability to keep up, about the "silent voice" that seems to influence things behind the scenes; the so-called invisible hand of free-market capitalism. This inability to keep up with the world shows up in a lot of other tracks throughout the album; Youth Culture Killed My Dog is very distinctly about the inability to know what's "in" in the context of punk scenes, and Absolutely Bill's Mood is about the producer for this album, Bill Krauss, going insane while making this album, unable to keep up with the frantic pace it demonstrates.

And boy, is this album frantic, with songs that often don't last two minutes. It gets incredibly meta too; I was taken aback at how immediately TMBG's music was about TMBG, even from the first track of this album; I'd known that TMBG got meta (see my read of Nanobots later on), but I didn't know they started meta. Number Three is about being the third track on the album, for one. In that meta vein, many songs on this album are about the feeling that the release of The Pink Album wouldn't do anything, despite its anti-capitalist undertones; The Day is a song about Marvin Gaye and Phil Ochs' anti-war music not having the desired impact (And happiness bled from every street corner, And biplanes bombed with fluffy pillows). The closer, Rhythm Section Want Ad, develops on this theme of punk being kind of self-serving (Hats off to the new age hairstyle made of bones), adding to The Pink Album's feeling of self-consciousness, of knowing about its own irrelevance.

Despite that fact, however, this doesn't stop this album from being staunchly anti-capitalist. Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head is largely about the idea of your boss oppressing you, and wishing for something better (for someone to "put their hand inside the puppet head", thereby ripping it apart), but resigning anyway (Memo to myself: Do the dumb things I gotta do). Expanding on that, I think She's An Angel is about McCarthyism, with "angels" in the text of the song being a hunted group, and about guilt by association (Calling you an angel, calling you the nicest thing). Going even further than that, I don't think I have to explain Alienation's For The Rich, but it sure does back up that theme, huh?

But regardless of how much you know that things are wrong, how much you know your work is self-serving, it doesn't actually help you. The detachment continues, and it drives you mad. To me, 32 Footsteps is about seeing patterns where there are none, about seeing the same numbers and calling cards appearing everywhere, and going mad about it. (There is also a good read of it as being about capital punishment, the footsteps being those to a guillotine.) I Hope I Get Old Before I Die is fairly easy to read as being about suicide when you consider the idea of not getting old before you die. Finally, Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes seems to be about the inability to self-actualize; to know that there's something in you that feels immutable, that cannot change. (God damnit, it's gender. John Flansburgh he/they arc.)

All that is to say, The Pink Album knows what it is, and it kind of hates itself for what it is. At the same time, it's there anyway, as an act of profound spite; and that's what makes it worth it.