Doing the things a particle can!

Join us for the little, but classic number, Particle Man, by They Might Be Giants, and answer life’s most pressing particle questions. 🙂

Yes, the frying-pan-to-the-head sound is real. :-O

Mi mi mi mi!

Once again, identical twins The Disclaimers return to our site with their cover of The Proclaimers’ first major hit single, “Letter From America”.  The song makes parallels between the period of the Highland Clearances when many Scots were ‘emigrated’, and the later impact of the loss of Scottish engineering, and pondered whether the blood of those who had departed might return to ‘kick the life back’ to their homeland.  Perhaps in 2026 there could be an additional twist to such ponderings.  I wonder how it got on when it reached the promised land…

… so before too much of it has elapsed, here’s one recorded earlier this year, before the onset of every type of illness. This is a They Might Be Giants classic, and is possibly the truest song you will ever hear.

Hello fellow Wanderers – it’s been a while!

All sorts of things have gummed up the works since January, not least of which has been one of us coming down with a respiratory ailment that still hasn’t shifted after five weeks. We had grand plans to record a half-dozen new “Roadside Sessions” during Andrea’s recent UK visit, but for the above reasons, we only managed one – barely – and not by a road. 😉

Nevertheless, today is the 61st anniversary of the original acoustic release of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence”, so what better than to subject you to the strained vocals of one of us coming out of a heavy cold, and the other coming down with even worse! Are we overselling this?

Filmed in the 540-odd year old chapel at Calverley Old Hall, Yorkshire, we managed two live vocal takes – this is the second one, joined by the first towards the end.

Here’s a song for today: our take on Fountains of Wayne’s 1996 lullaby about how easy it is to utterly mess up everything for everyone forever.

As we say goodbye to 2024, let’s take a break from the mid-winter greys and time-travel back a few months to peak fall foliage for this little rendition of Billy Bragg’s classic, made even more famous by the late, great Kirsty MacColl.

Back in October, the two of us were both, unusually, in the same place at the same time – namely New England, and the autumnal shades had us trying to choose songs we could do with a New Englandy theme.

Well, there’s one that literally has those words in its title, even if it’s not actually referring to north eastern USA, so how could we not? Look out for an errant leaf getting in on the act. 😉 Shot on location around New England.

So last month we were about to post this little fun They Might Be Giants song when world events cast a bit of a pall on stuff. So we did a different TMBG song instead. Anyway, one month and a bit on, perhaps there’s enough headspace for us to indulge in this little bit of nonsense for a couple of minutes. So join us as we go on down to Cowtown – a song that dates back to something like 1977, according to writers John Linnell and John Flansburgh, and predates They Might Be Giants as a band! It was released in 1988 on the album “Lincoln”, where we did not go to film the video (boooo!). However, the video was filmed in quite a few places – see if you can figure out all the wheres!

For the technically curious, the scream sound in the original is apparently “SCREAM2” from the Fairlight CMI library – we only had “SCREAM5” to hand, so that’s why it’s different. 😉

Also, see if you can spot all the things that are not cows.

For your delectation, we had a super-cheerful They Might Be Giants cover ready to go this month (Nov 2024), but then suddenly the atmosphere in the room changed, and it didn’t seem to fit the mood any more. Unfortunate, but maybe another time. Coincidentally, one of us went to see TMBG live in Glasgow on 5th November and they closed their show with a song from their 2011 album, “Join Us”. Knocked it out of the park.

This song was just the thing to fill our TMBG-shaped hole. Recorded a couple of days ago, and filmed last night and this morning, it’s a bit of a rapid-fire offering. Under those circumstances we’re sure you’ll forgive us. Musical arrangement by O; vocals by A & O. Putting it off no longer, please join us as we ask the important question first posed by Messrs Linnell and Flansburgh over thirteen years ago.