they might be stuck in my head
Back in October we accidentally introduced the boys to "Particle Man", by the band They Might Be Giants. Then Leah accidentally revealed to them that we own Flood, the album on which it originally appeared back in 1990. Then we allowed them to listen to said album in the car. Again and again. At first I just hated it—I complained to other people old enough to have experienced it originally that it must have been recorded and mixed by people who hated music and other people. I take that back now. It may be the stockholm syndrome from listening to it 149 times talking, but it's actually kind of good. And I certainly know those songs well now!
I'm especially enjoying trying to play them on the guitar. I'm not a very good guitarist—I can only learn things I have to play, so I haven't progressed beyond the level of strumming preschool songs and worship music for Elementary Kids Church. You know, the ones with two-to-five chords per song (some of the preschool songs are even mono-chordal!). I've tried to play some more sophisticated jazz tunes, but then I run into chords that I don't know how to play at all, and when I do manage to figure them out I can't manage stringing them together. That sort of complexity maybe demands a teacher.
The songs on Flood are a lovely middle ground. The chord progressions are wonderfully varied, but the chords themselves are all simple major or minor. That means I get to practice bar chords all over the neck and strange transitions from one chord to another. The first song from the album to catch my guitar-playing attention was "We Want a Rock", which after a straightforward verse of G, C, and D dives into the chorus with the rare A-B-C-D progression. Also all the chords fly by one after another, one per beat—there's no lingering on a chord like in those worship songs (clearly the band composed more on auto-chording synth than guitar). Next I moved on to "Make a Little Birdhouse In Your Soul", which forced me to learn the bar-chorded progression of Eb-Ab-Eb-Cm-G-C.
The band's lyrics are also clever, at least in the sense of how they fit in to the songs. I still haven't figured out how the timing of the chorus of "Letterbox", for example. In that case I got so frustrated I've given up for now, but now I've set myself a new goal: "Meet The Elements", from the band's science-themed album for kids (which we were exposed to via youtube; there is still some screen time in our house). It's pretty tame, chord-wise, but the way the lyrics lay over the beat is very fun to try and get right. My family and everyone who has been in my house has been very indulgent of my repeated attempts to figure out. Check it out here, and join me in thinking of nothing else for 36 straight hours! Or maybe you have more discrimination. I don't, clearly!