"No one understands
No one knows my plan"
No one knows my plan"
As I got hit by a car there was a message for me
As I went through the windshield, I noticed something
Subliminial, in an unnoticeable way
Important, and hard to see
As I went through the windshield, I noticed something
Subliminial, in an unnoticeable way
Important, and hard to see
—Subliminal
John Henry is the fifth studio album by They Might Be Giants, released in 1994 by Elektra Records.
Susan Drew, the label rep who signed them to Elektra, suggested that they hire a full backing band, and the Johns also felt that they'd gone as far as they could with the duo/backing tapes arrangement, so they recruited Tony Maimone of Pere Ubu on bass guitar, Kurt Hoffman of The Ordinaires on keyboard and reeds, and Brian Doherty on drums (replacing Jonathan Feinberg, who had played with them on tour). After recording polished demos of almost all the songs ("Stomp Box" was the only one not demoed), they tracked the whole album at the Bearsville Studios in Upstate New York with producer Paul Fox (who'd previously worked with XTC, 10,000 Maniacs and The Sugarcubes).
After some tracks were bootlegged, then later featured on the They Might Be Giants podcast, the John Henry Demos
were released by the band as a full album in 2018.
Tracklist
- Subliminal (2:45)
- Snail Shell (3:20)
- Sleeping in the Flowers (4:30)
- Unrelated Thing (2:30)
- AKA Driver (3:14)
- I Should Be Allowed to Think (3:09)
- Extra Savoir-Faire (2:48)
- Why Must I Be Sad? (4:08)
- Spy (3:06)
- O, Do Not Forsake Me (2:30)
- No One Knows My Plan (2:37)
- Dirt Bike (3:05)
- Destination Moon (2:27)
- A Self Called Nowhere (3:22)
- Meet James Ensor (1:33)
- Thermostat (3:11)
- Window (1:00)
- Out Of Jail (2:38)
- Stomp Box (1:55)
- The End of the Tour (3:18)
This Was the Vehicle, These Were the Tropes:
- Celebrity Song: "Meet James Ensor" is a tribute to "Belgium's famous painter".
- Department of Redundancy Department: "Meet James Ensor" features the lyrics "He lived with his mother and the torments of Christ", which is followed in the next verse by "He lived with his mother and repeated himself".
- Drives Like Crazy: "AKA Driver" is narrated by a man who's "a full-day's drive away" from his destination and drives fast and recklessly to make it in time.
- Epic Rocking: "Sleeping in the Flowers" was the longest song they'd released up to that point, and is still among the longest they've issued on a studio project. Still, it's only four-and-a-half minutes long.
- Hollywood New England: Linnell sings "A Self Called Nowhere" in an exaggerated Boston accent.
- "I Am Great!" Song: "Extra Savoir-Faire"
- In Name Only: "O, Do Not Forsake Me" is an odd case - no official members of TMBG appear on the studio recording. It's an a cappella performance by the vocal group Hudson Shad. The John Henry Demos version had Flansburgh sing it in a deep voice, but he was dissatisfied with it and decided he'd rather hear it sung by someone with "a really profound, bassy voice"; Linnell had recently seen Hudson Shad perform live and was impressed, so he suggested having them sing it for the album.note
- Lyrical Dissonance:
- "No One Knows My Plan" is a bouncy salsa-inspired number about a violent criminal plotting a prison break.
- The similarly bright "Destination Moon" is about a mental patient who thinks he's an astronaut.
- "Extra Savoir-Faire" is a little more subdued and reflective than you'd expect an "I Am Great!" Song to be.
- Madness Mantra: "Subliminal" ends with the Johns repeating the line "Stare into the subliminal for as long as you can" over and over... and then playing it again backwards for a bit.
- Meaningful Name: As their first album with a live backing band instead of preprogrammed instrumentals, they only thought it fitting to name it for a tale of man outpacing machine.
- New Sound Album: Their first album backed by a full band, which allowed them to augment their usual Genre Roulette with more fully-realized arrangements.
- Overly Long Gag: The outro for "Spy" is a long string of guitar chords and comically-discordant brass notes.
- Really 700 Years Old: "O, Do Not Foresake Me" is sung by a character who claims to be 1,000 years old.
- Rhyming with Itself: "Spy" rhymes "ground" with "ground", and "me" with "me".
- Sanity Slippage Song: "Subliminal" is about a man who starts seeing subliminal messages everywhere he goes after getting hit by a car.
- Shaped Like Itself: In "A Self Called Nowhere"Standing in my yard
Where they tore down the garage
To make room for the torn-down garage - Shout-Out:
- "I Should Be Allowed to Think" opens with a quote from Allen Ginsberg's "Howl": "I saw the best minds of my generation / Destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical"
- "Why Must I Be Sad?" references several songs by Alice Cooper.
- "No One Knows My Plan" references "the allegory of the people in the cave by the Greek guy", referring to the allegory of the cave from Plato's The Republic.
- The title line of "Snail Shell" is a nod to Sly and the Family Stone's "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)".
- "Pour the poison in my ear" from "Stomp Box" alludes to Hamlet.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: From "Destination Moon":Don't bother to call this room
There's nobody here who can pick up
Or has stuff they need to talk about
And who won't be now checking out and flying - Unreliable Narrator: John Linnell described the narrator of "I Should Be Allowed to Think" as such. He thinks he's a persecuted genius, but the truth is no one hears what he has to say because he's just not that interesting and no one is listening.
- Villain Song: "No One Knows My Plan" is about a man in prison for some unspecified crime (but presumably a violent one, given the references to "shouting" and "shrieks of pain") plotting his escape.
- WPUN: "The End of the Tour" mentions a radio station called WLSD. There actually is a WLSD radio in Virginia (oddly, a gospel music station).
- Writing Around Trademarks: Though they say it plenty of times in the song, "NyQuil Driver" is officially known as "AKA Driver" and is the only song on the album without printed lyrics.
