(Credits: Far Out / They Might Be Giants)
Mon 8 December 2025 10:00, UK
“We don’t like to think of what we do as wacky,” John Linnell said in 1994. As one half of the Brooklyn alterno-absurdo band They Might Be Giants, Linnell – like Pee-Wee Herman, Devo, or Douglas Adams before him – has always taken the goofiness of his art very seriously.
“It’s work,” Linnell told the Salt Lake Tribune. “If we knew exactly what inspires us to write, we could go out to the well each time we needed a new song. As it is, we have to wait and see what happens.”
On the surface, the songs Linnell and bandmate John Flansburgh created for their best-selling album, 1990’s Flood, do have a whiff of wackiness to them – maybe not to the level of a Weird Al, but certainly in a way that seemed to appeal to the tastes of ‘90s alternative nerds who’d grown up on Monty Python and Dr Seuss. The compositions were often childlike and circusy, utilising accordions, melodicas, mandolins, and trumpets, and the lyrics were whimsical and bizarre, with an intellect behind them that suggested a complex riddle with a heavy meaning potentially lurking underneath.
In some cases, such as the breakout Flood hit ‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’, the mysterious “blue canary in the outlet by the light switch who watches over you” turned out to be a literal description of a canary-shaped wall light. In other instances, though, the weird simplicity of a TMBG lyric produces decades of debate and analysis from the band’s devoted fanbase, with no firm solution ever offered up by Linnell or Flansburgh.
“Ideas tend to take flight on their own,” Linnell said in 2007. “Then you stop worrying about the origin of the idea. Often you have a phrase, and you’re not sure what you’re saying at first.” Take, for example, another fan favourite from Flood and arguably the song that laid the groundwork for They Might Be Giants’ eventual move into recording children’s albums: ‘Particle Man.’
While it wasn’t even selected as a single, ‘Particle Man’ was instantly a standout track on Flood, and when it was featured in a 1991 episode of the Warner Bros kids cartoon Tiny Toon Adventures, with Plucky Duck in the title role, it took on a whole new life for Millennials who were still too young to be reading Spin magazine.
There’s a reason the writers at Tiny Toons felt ‘Particle Man’ was fit for cartoonisation – well, two reasons really. For one thing, They Might Be Giants were on Elektra Records, a subsidiary of Warner. The second, less cynical reason is that the song sounds like a cartoon, complete with an oompa bassline and accordion solos. Lyrically, it seems like a nonsensical re-imagining of the old ‘Spiderman’ theme: ”Particle Man, Particle Man / Doing the things a particle can / What’s he like? It’s not important / Particle Man.”
But even the kids watching a cartoon of Plucky Duck’s Particle Man fighting his enemy Triangle Man in a boxing ring were confused to the point of curiosity, especially when Particle Man loses his outfit and becomes merely ‘Person Man‘: “Is he depressed or is he a mess? / Does he feel totally worthless? / Who came up with Person Man? / Degraded man, Person Man.”
Theories are aplenty in terms of what the characters and conflicts of ‘Particle Man’ might represent, but as They Might Be Giants began playing more concerts for child audiences in the 2000s, they kept the song in their setlist – despite having written it with more of an adult listener in mind.
“As childlike as it seems,” Linnell told The Times of Trenton, New Jersey, in 2009, “there are dark elements to the lyrics [of ‘Particle Man’] that the kids don’t seem to have any problem with. Either they are amused or not worried about the subject of depression.”
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