Dirt Bike: Trumpets, Cults, and Broken Vows
“All hail the dirt bike.” A They Might Be Giants song about cults and devotion reframed my own story of marriage and personal identity.
Dirt Bike is a song that I forget how great it is until I’m listening to it again. I don’t know why it’s like that because it’s SUCH a good song. For some reason, it escapes my schema as if it were never there.
The Congregation Assembles
The song comes in with horns playing the chorus. Really, the trumpet in this song is almost a second lead vocalist. They really deliver the goods. Dirt Bike is the epitome of the groove that They Might Be Giants are capable of. We’re twelve songs into John Henry, and this song is loaded with a full band. Despite the fact that it brings with it, a guitar, baritone sax, bass, drums, tenor sax, and trumpet, Dirt Bike doesn’t feel like this many instruments are even happening.
It is a testament to how well TMBG know how to show reserve in their song writing. Last week, I wrote about No One Knows My Plan which has as many different instruments and definitely sounds like you’d expect. A full band with horns coming to PLAY. But Dirt Bike is expressing control and restraint, which allows this song to breathe and gives it room for every sound we hear to shine.
If you’re into weird cults of love and dirt bikes that may or may not be real, click here to subscribe. New posts drop weekly, and it’s always a strange ride.
Flansburgh the Evangelist
John Flansburgh sings in the silky tone that only he can bring, and honestly, I don’t think enough people commend him on his vocals. They’re iconic. His guitar solo in this song sounds fairly simple, or at least not show-off-y, but the balance of overdrive and wah-wah is just perfect.
I apologize, Dirt Bike, the only reason you don’t have a permanent home in my playlists is that you are on an album that has too many emotional triggers for me to want to deal with frequently.
Skeptic Turned Believer
A song about a dirt bike wasn’t immediately interesting to me when I first got this album. I also hadn’t fully refined my musical taste to make room for the slower tempo, groovy songs, as I would come to appreciate later. For a long time, I made an assumption about the song being about dirt bikes, which was a topic I was generally not interested in at all. Eventually, I read the lyrics again while listening, and I realized what I’d been missing.
Here comes the dirt bike.
Beware of the dirt bike.
Dirt Bike could be about a few things. The lyrics read like a harbinger of something sinister on its way to your town; the dirt bike. Whether this dirt bike is to be taken literal or as a stand-in for a band or charismatic leader, the intensity of its influence is laid out clearly.
All Hail the Dirt Bike
It’s hard not to be attracted to the lure of the dirt bike. Eventually, the indoctrinated will be swept away. They aren’t in control anymore. All of their opinions, their likes and wants - everything is for the dirt bike.
Now it's brain-washing dirt bike
Ground-shaking dirt bike
Mind-bending dirt bike
In control
Conversion Experience
Of course, a lot of my thought energy these days has been consumed by my marriage recently ending. I’ve written about it plenty in other posts, but with a month of distance, I can finally see just how much of my headspace had been devoted to this person.
The realization hit me one night while sitting in a living room with friends. We were just having an ordinary conversation, but I noticed that almost every story or memory I reached for was tied to my ex—not just things we’d done together as a couple, which would make sense after so many years, but even stories that were really theirs. Their memories surfaced faster than my own. Mine weren’t rising to the top at all. Why was that?
A couple of weeks later, while out with a friend, we ran into another friend who happened to be with my ex. We all ended up at the same table, and for the next forty minutes, anytime I started to share something, my ex would jump in, hijacking my sentences and telling my stories for me. They weren’t being malicious, just excited, but what I saw in real time was something I’d only half-admitted to myself after the breakup: how often my voice had been crowded out so that theirs could take center stage.
Leaving the Cult
Listening to Dirt Bike with that fresh in my mind reframed the song completely. In a way, I’d had a dirt bike roll into my life eight years ago. Slowly, my thoughts and emotions began to orbit around theirs instead of my own. That can feel like devotion when it’s mutual, but when it isn’t, you don’t realize how unhealthy it is until you finally step off the ride.
TMBG songs thrive on ambiguity, and Dirt Bike is no exception. It’s funny, ominous, and suddenly strangely relatable all at once. That’s what makes They Might Be Giants so good at what they do: they turn something absurd into a mirror. For me, it’s a reminder that devotion (whether to a band, an idea, or a person) can be exhilarating, but also dangerous if you forget who you are along the way.