I bought this CD right as my TMBG obsession started getting into full swing. It must've been 1996 right after I got a CD player that I got Lincoln soon after the Big Blue Dog. Having much in common with the first song, it's another huge pile of inspired lunacy. What makes Lincoln so much better than the debut album is that the song are more polished and it basically sounds like more time was spent on the production. For trivia's sake, the first album was produced in a studio largely after midnight after it closed because the two Johns of TMBG knew a guy who worked there. It saved them a lot of money, but they had to work while on a lot of coffee, and at any given time one of the Johns or the producer Bill Krauss would usually be sleeping on the couch.
On Lincoln, Linnell and Flansburgh seem to have a lot more time on their hands to perfect things. This album actually made them the best-selling independent band ever since they resided on the Bar-None label. The album starts with its high-point, "Ana Ng." The premise is way out there: A man laments because he thinks that his true love resides on the exact opposite side of the earth from him and that she just missed her one day at the 1964 World's Fair. The point is made clear though. Everyone has their match, but some never find theirs. Everything that makes John Linnell my favorite songwriter comes together in the verse "They don't need me here and I know you're there / Where the world goes by like the humid air / And it sticks like a broken record / Everything sticks like a broken record." This is definitely one of my favorite songs ever.
"Ana Ng" is actually so great that it casts a shadow over the rest of the album even though the rest of the album is great. "Cowtown" follows as a sort of slap-happy pointless excursion with clarinets, a glockenspiel and a steam whistle. I could get into all of instruments on this album, almost all played just by the two Johns, but let's just say everything but the kitchen sink is on here. And here's another piece of dork trivia for you: In "Cowtown," the line "The yellow Roosevelt Avenue leaf overturned" makes no sense unless you split it up and hear that phonetically Flansburgh is saying "The yellow rose," "Roosevelt avenue," and "A new leaf overturned." This is just the beginning of hoops you have to jump through sometimes to make sense of the lyrics. Almost the entire song "Purple Toupee" seems to make no sense on the surface until you get into and realize that nearly every line is a reference to something that happened in the 60's. "I remember the book depository where they crowned the king of Cuba" = Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy from the bok depository, and all of the biggest events of JFK's political life involved Cuba, hence he's the king of it. This is the 60's as remembered by a child, mixing up names and events. I did a report on this song in high school and there's more to it than you'd want to read in a record review.
For the most part, the rest of the CD follows this kind of suits. There's lots of playful dorky lyrics and off-kilter, weird, catchy music. Of course there's the occasional witty love song ("I've Got A Match," "They'll Need A Crane," "Santa's Beard"). And then there's a weird trilogy of short interestingly arranged songs with weird imagery that begin with S - "Shoehorn With Teeth," "Stand On Your Own Head," and "Snowball In Hell." The disc finishes with "Kiss Me, Son of God," a delicate derailment of monarchies which features a nice strings arrangement with The Ordinaires. With Lincoln, They Might Be Giants set the bar by which all geek rock from then on should be measured.
