They Might Be Giants are a band that’s so much an acquired taste that it feels as if they’re almost deliberately off-putting. That nasal voice! The purposefully-restricted arrangements (the cheap-sounding drum machines!)! And yet, under all that, there is a real pop sensibility; listen to the chorus of “Ana Ng” – not the vocals, as such, but the whole package – and there’s something very perfect pop about it, at least to my ears. At heart, this is a bouncy pop song about unrequited love (“And we still haven’t walked in the glow/Of each other’s majestic presence”), and what could be more mainstream pop than that? Admittedly, you have to pick your way through chainsaw guitars and tinny drums and nasal vocals to find it, but once you do, it’s like seeing the arrow in the Fed Ex logo; you’ll never be able to go back to the old ways ever again.
Something strange and wonderful about this song: The number of people performing their own covers on YouTube. Gaze upon these wonders for yourself.
I kind of love that. Clearly, TMBG fans are the performing kind (And, yes; I really think that each of these covers demonstrates the greatness of the song under the original’s production. Your Mileage May Vary, as they say).