I’ve written before about the fact that the first album I bought for myself was Flood by They Might Be Giants, when I was the kind of 15-year-old who loved “Birdhouse in Your Soul” when I heard it on the radio and thought, they sound weird in a way that made my head buzz. Every 15-year-old thinks they’re weird to some degree, I think — I hope — but I was one of the 15-year-olds who thought that they were weird in that inexplicable sense of not knowing if I fit in, or who I was supposed to be. They Might Be Giants, even just from “Birdhouse in Your Soul” alone, sounded cartoonish and unrealistic and clumsy and angular, and something about all of that made me feel seen, although I didn’t think of things in those terms back then. Instead, I just wanted to hear more. So: I bought Flood.
There was something revelatory about the album, as soon as it started. The first track on the album is “Theme From Flood,” a short little tongue-in-cheek introduction that blew my mind for the most minor reason; the song ends with a literal introduction that goes, “It’s a brand new record/for 1990/They Might Be Giants’ brand new album/Flood,” and when I heard that, I remember being shocked: they were saying the year and it was the actual year I was listenng to it. It felt like magic.
Looking back — and especially from this vantage point of the digital era with its surprise drops of albums and music and a turnaround between creation and release that can be essentially instantaneous — it’s a genuinely silly reason to feel actual surprise or awe, but I really did feel both about the album being actually contemporary. I hadn’t put it together by that point, but I bought the album on vinyl and played it on my parents’ old record player, and up to that point, that had been home to music that was decades old even by that point. Even the idea of a vinyl record felt like a historical artifact in and of itself, a document of record that stood the test of time and most likely predated my very existence. That I could have bought one with my own money, and then have it identify itself as coming from that very year, felt dreamlike.
For some reason, I’ve been listening to They Might Be Giants a lot recently; it reminds me of a time when even the mundane has magic to it. I think that might have been what they were wanting to do all along, in their way.