Cowtown

Trivia/Info

• This was one of the band's earliest original songs, written in 1981 or 1982. It was the first song that John Flansburgh and John Linnell learned to play together,^[1][2] and they performed it at their first live show.
• The song predates They Might Be Giants as a band.^[3] It was written for a short-lived trio that Flansburgh and Linnell started with a mutual friend. Flansburgh explained in a 1996 interview with Pitchfork:

Linnell wrote the song "Cowtown" when I was in a sort of pre-They Might Be Giants project with him and this other guy, who's a writer in New York. His name is Dave Lindsay. [...] Dave Lindsay played bass and I played guitar and Linnell played keyboards. We had this project that we rehearsed for like a month and had a bunch of songs including "Cowtown" and then it just didn't come together for whatever reason, I'm not really sure.

• Flansburgh explained further in a 2015 interview:

"Cowtown" is probably the very earliest song that we worked on as They Might Be Giants. In fact, we played as a trio with this fellow Dave Lindsay, who's actually Arto Lindsay's cousin. [...] David was a standup bass player and we jammed with him a few times, rehearsed with him a few times. And one of the songs that we put together - that John and I put together - was that song "Cowtown." It's really Linnell's song, but I contributed some lyrics. But "Cowtown" is really like the original They Might Be Giants song. It's a pretty light-hearted song. I think the lyric that I contributed was sort of vaguely inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey... it's pretty hard to explain.

• When the trio dissolved and Flansburgh and Linnell started working as a duo, they had a plan for "Cowtown" to be their first release. Linnell recalled in 1988: "We lived up and down stairs from each other, and we started working together. We made little tapes, and we talked about making a flexi-disc. That was our big dream. [...] And we had this big plan. We were going to release "Cowtown" and "My Father's Son." And that was like 1981."^[4]
• Linnell introduced the song at a 1992 Boston show: "This song was written right here in the fair city of Boston, something like 15 years ago." This suggests that Linnell had started writing the song in the late 1970s or early 1980s, before he moved to New York City in 1981.
• The lyric "The yellow Roosevelt Avenue leaf overturned" is a combination of various phrases ("The Yellow Rose of Texas", "Roosevelt Avenue", "a new leaf overturned").
• The scream in the instrumental breaks is the Fairlight CMI stock sample "SCREAM2". Flansburgh talked about the samples used in the song in a 2022 Tumblr post: "I think they are from a stock library that came with either the Akai sampler or the Fairlight… might even be a combo plater of a horror movie scream and something else…"
• In live performances, the screaming sound is either performed by clarinets, or by Marty Beller triggering a sample. Usually The Audience accompanies this with actual screaming.

Song Themes

Animals, Cities, Colors, Friendship, Not In Major Or Minor, Oblique Cliches Or Idiom, Puns, The Senses, Sleep, Sea, Songs With Samples, Streets

Videos

Current Rating You must be logged in to rate this. You can either login (if you have a userid) or create an account with us today. Cowtown is currently ranked #189 out of 1015. (217 wikians have given it an average rating of 8.80)

Other Links for “Cowtown” [edit] Site Format Price Link iTunes AAC 1.29