They Might Be Giants always seemed to have it backwards. In their late 40s and early 50s the Johns (Flansburgh and Linell) revitalized a career by writing fun yet informative children’s music while apparently missing all of the middle-aged bitterness you got from the music they were making when they were in their 20s. But as silly as some of the songs on an album like Lincoln are, there’s a lot going on under the surface of cheery hooks.
Take “Where Your Eyes Don’t Go,” a song which imagines a scarecrow that mocks every unconscious thought behind your back, and describes the horrible aspects of ourselves that we’ll never understand or even be aware of. “Ana Ng,” the album’s hit song, laments how we will never meet the perfect person for us due to the overwhelming size of the world. The endlessly repeated “Ana Ng and I are getting old…” chorus deserves its broken record treatment at the end. You look past the catchiness and realize how horrible of a thought it presents.
But what makes Lincoln (named, not for the president, but for the small Massachusetts town the duo grew up in) kind of a magical record is how all this unpleasant shit gets presented with witty humor and gentle sadness. “Ana Ng” takes that horrible idea, one that countless people have expressed before, and softens the edges with over the top drama (shooting his hometown on a globe, leaving Ana’s town in the exit wound) and the band’s signature goofiness (after so many mentions of a broken record, the end works like the punch line to a great joke). It’s a balancing act that deserves more credit than the band’s often given, but nowhere can you hear it more than on “They’ll Need a Crane.”
“They’ll Need a Crane” offers a glimpse into a painfully universal relationship between the cartoonishly named Gal and Lad (har har see what they did there). One of them can’t be happy without the others love, but still says and does things that cause their partner pain. Each contradictory, yet understandable, verse slides effortlessly into the chorus’ conclusion: that it’ll take a crane to break up their relationship, and another one to put it back together. It’s all sung to the best melody on the album. Every piece fits together perfectly to create one of the sweetest and saddest songs the band ever wrote. Above all, it’s representative of a beautifully melancholy whole. Mel Brooks has a quote I’ve always liked, “tragedy is when you cut your finger, comedy is when you fall through an open sewer and die.” Lincoln is a great album that takes a bit from both.
