03/01/2026, 6:50 AM
could this words entry just as easily fit in with a singles recommendation on the music page? maybe. but i dunno, this is less something i want to talk about because its a song that i like, and moreso a phenomenon i've noticed with music recently for me. so, to begin, They Might Be Giants is one of, if not my absolute favorite band of all time. they've got such a long, storied history with a song of basically every genre under their belt, and they're so infinitely fascinating to me because of this. they also have so many interesting and innovative ideas, and were on the cutting edge of music for a while. Dial-A-Song is a classic example, they set up an answering machine to play new, yet-unreleased songs they were working on so people could call in and listen to them for free, as a little sample. additionally, they were the first major band to release a fully digital album exclusively on the internet for download, with no physical release at all, that being Long Tall Weekend from 1999. it's an excellent album and one of my favorites, but there's one track that always stuck out to me, and that's On Earth My Nina. it's a weird ass song, it's purely vocals by John Linnell, no backing instrumental or anything, the lyrics are even more nonsensical than the already pretty abstract lyrics they usually write, and it's oddly somber and emotional. what the hell is this song's deal? well after doing a bit of research, i found that On Earth My Nina's lyrics are what John Linnell heard when playing one of their other songs, Thunderbird, from 2004's The Spine, in reverse. (TMBG likes doing stuff in reverse a lot i've noticed, Dinnerbell from Apollo 18, Subliminal from John Henry, and their concert trick where they play Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love LIVE in reverse, then play the video back in reverse later on so it sounds like it's being played forwards come to mind...) You can even hear Linnell sort of imitating that warbly, reversed sound in his voice in certain parts, like with "say the sparrow wants a morbid arrow," it's pretty cool. all that is to say, however, the lyrics are complete nonsense, they literally don't mean anything. so then tell me, why did this song make me cry when i first heard it? yeah, something about it really tugged at my heart, i think it definitely had to do with the rawness of it, having it ONLY be Linnell singing in a very soulful way. the way he sings "maybe i'll buy the whirlwind" really got to me, it's so powerfully done. this made me come to a realization; i think most of my emotional impact i get from music does come from the way it sounds, as opposed to lyrical content. of course, lyrics can still add emotional impact, Kiss Me Son Of God is a testament to that fact, but for the most part it does come from the way the music sounds. i was kind of embarrassed about this fact for a long time, i felt like i didn't really get music or i was being too naive about artistic intent, but one day i was talking to a friend about it and she said something that really stuck with me.
"you don't need a song to tell you how to feel with it's lyrics, you feel emotions based on how the song itself makes you feel."
hearing that made me feel a lot better about this fact about myself, and it's what got me wanting to talk about it. this friend of mine primarily listens to instrumental music, and so i feel like she gets it better than anyone else i know. that being said, i even get self conscious about how i interpret lyrics, i feel dumb whenever i have an interpretation that's different from the original intent. an example of this is Lazybones by Soul Coughing, i had just recently lost a very special pet of mine, and i was still mourning her when i heard the song for the first time, so i interpreted the song's lyrics being about mourning a lost loved one. i then looked up what the original idea was behind the song, and it was about a drunk and a drug addict trying to make a relationship work, and not being able to do so because of their respective addictions conflicting. this made me feel really stupid, but thinking about it now, is that not the beauty of music and art as a whole? different people can get different meanings from the same piece of art, and that's what makes it so cool. since then i've become a lot less self conscious about this part of myself, and i sort of take pride in it in a way.