Road Movie To Berlin
Not much time to write today, but time to sing, apparently. On Sunday I saw They Might Be Giants here in St. Louis. The show was supposed to happen in 2020, but it got delayed a few times by COVID. This long-delayed tour has a special twist: they play the entirety of their album Flood from 1990. Not in order, and not even all at once - they play two sets per show, and some of the songs are from other albums. (The encore, predictably but wonderfully, was Doctor Worm.) They always do some wild stuff on tour, and this time, that included playing Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love completely backwards during the first set. The second set started with a video recording of that very performance… played backwards. It sounded surprisingly similar to the actual song! (They have practice with this, though - see On Earth My Nina and Thunderbird.)
I was down on the floor right near the stage for the first set, and fairly early on, they launched into one of my favorite songs from Flood: Road Movie To Berlin. The live version includes an additional verse that, according to John Flansburgh, was left off the album by mistake. (The verse is in the liner notes, so that makes sense.) Anyway, here’s that song, performed not by TMBG, but by me.