The Stories of Scott D. Southard

I’m a proud card carrying member of the lifetime fans of They Might Be Giants.

I own all of the albums, each collection, a box filled with B-sides, concert albums, and too many shirts to count spanning the last two-and-a-half decades. I even once bought a shirt of theirs to save! See, my dream was that one of the characters in a screenplay I had written would wear that shirt in one scene. So even though I didn’t have a producer, studio, director or even an actor for it, I wanted to have the shirt just in case.

I’ve seen They Might Be Giants five times in concert, and the best way I have found to describe the experience is to compare it to what (I assume) it is like to attend a meeting of the masons. You are with others that believe the same as you, know the same rites, know the same words, and instead of wearing creepy pinky rings we wear shirts with obscure references that no one but us really know…. And whenever I have met someone who already knows their albums, we immediately bond, our humor and artistic likes immediately snapping into alignment.

I was indoctrinated into the club of John Flansburgh and John Linnell (The geniuses behind They Might Be Giants) via a B-side of a single for Flood. I was in high school, and had to rely on one of my friends to get back and forth to school. And as we would drive each day, with our saxophones bumping against each other in the backseat, my esteemed driver would keep throwing in the same tape that had nothing more than four songs on it. (more…)