Ana Ng

I don’t want the world, I just want your half.

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I don’t even know how to start this yet so this is a very rough first draft (that I ultimately did not change.) I fucking love this album and I fucking love this song. Lincoln wasn’t the first album I purchased from the Johns (that honor goes to Flood¹ on cassette), but it was my first They Might Be Giants CD. Remember the BMG mail order CD club? I responded to an ad in the paper solely based on them having included Lincoln in their available CD options. I remember sitting at my kitchen table and explaining to my dad how lucrative and amazing this opportunity was. 4 compact discs (remember, that’s what CD stands for) for the price of 1 compact disc!)

I might still owe money to the BMG Music Catalog.

In the middle of the 1990’s, if someone living in Spanaway, WA wanted to buy an album by They Might Be Giants, your best bet was the record store inside the South Hill Mall. Filed away near The Talking Heads, you were LUCKY to find something. It was slim pickings to say the least. Since there was not quite internet in the homes of suburban Spanaway (or AOL CD-ROMs flowing out of every mailbox yet) a kid would resort to the newspaper arriving and hoping to one day to find They Might Be Giants listed as an available artist from the BMG Music Catalog.

One fateful Sunday morning, my day had finally come. My dad took the bait and several weeks later, I received a package with The Doors Best Of (the gateway CD to get my Dad on board), Green Day’s Dookie, Beastie Boys’ License to Ill, and They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln.

MELODRAMA.

The first lyric I heard while laying on my bedroom floor reading CD liner notes paints such a melodramatic picture of a person who is desperately in love with a woman whom he has never so much as walked alongside.

“Make a hole with a gun perpendicular to name of this town on a desktop globe. Exit wound in a foreign nation, showing the home of the one this was written for.”

The person that was written for, was Ana Ng.

The singer, in this case it’s John Linnell, has set a lamenting scene of heartache. Shooting a gun into a desktop globe so that the bullet enters the globe where his town is labeled and exits out the side in his love interest’s nation of origin. A foreign nation. That is some serious melodrama.

Perfect melodies, perfect lyrics, perfect song.

A never-skip banger through and through, Ana Ng resides on multiple saved streaming, live versions that I’ve purchased that are not on streaming sites, and YouTube covers.

Honestly, I could write a lyric-for-lyric breakdown of this entire song over the course of several weekly posts. I won’t do that to you, dear subscriber, but just know that I care as deeply about Ana Ng the song as the singer cares about Ana Ng the person.

If the octave alternating slap synth bass and guitar tremolo in the chorus went any harder, I don’t think humanity would have been able to handle this song. Pop in some decent ear buds and really hear this one. Plus, this song comes with a classic TMBG music video that deserves its own dissertation. A dissertation that I will not be writing but will share the video for you to enjoy once this sentence is over.

Oh no, I’m writing too much about a special interest.

Ana Ng reminds me of long lost crushes. The kinds where I became infatuated with a girl who I’d only seen from afar. Maybe I sat in the same class and imagined what “going out” with this person could be like. Ultimately, I didn’t know them at all. We never conversed let alone walked in the glow of each other’s majestic presence.

Writing about each song from this album feels like it will be more of a challenge because I love each song so intensely that I have too much to say about them. Editing my words down feels like I’m not saying enough but saying everything I possibly can is surely a wasted effort. I can do this. I can strike the balance. Probably.

Is there an album (or tv series, book, etc) that is just You Core? Tell me about it in the comments.

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1. More about the Flood album here!