Four Of Two: Supposedly, a Song for Kids that Gives Me Existential Dread.
Four Of Two by They Might Be Giants: A Broken NYC Clock, Watching My Kids Grow Up, and slipping nature of time.
Four Of Two is such an odd way to refer to a time of day. It’s very old-timey. No, it’s not mathematically referring to the number eight. The song title is trying to convey that it is almost two o’clock; four minutes until two o’clock, actually.
Honestly, I heard this song for the first time and I kind of assumed that this was an East Coast turn of phrase since I had never heard it before and have lived my entire life in the Pacific Northwest (Tacoma, WA represent, etc.) Knowing that both John Linnell and John Flansburgh were lifelong East Coasters, this must have been something that only exists over there like Water Ice or Mallomars.
According to the They Might Be Giants wiki, saying “blank minutes of whatever hour” is an old fashioned American way of expressing a time of day when you’re almost at an hour. I thought the old fashioned American way to say this was “one muddled demerara sugar cube, two fingers of rye whiskey, over one large rock and 3 dashes of bitters of two.”
After some surface level internet research, I’m still not so sure that this was a nationwide way of referring to the time “back in the day” and not still just an East Coast-ism. The amount of time that I’ve spent trying to un-surface its roots in order to discuss and compare this phrase to ways that I’ve always heard is testament to what a catchy, brain-grabby, lyric this is. Clearly, why Linnell chose it.
The second track on No! from TMBG, Four Of Two is one of the songs from this album that I have revisited long after my kids were of the “children’s music” ages. Stand alone, this song is a banger. An immediate TMBG classic with its guitar and accordion sound coming through most prominently alongside Linnell’s melodic verses. In case you’ve never heard it, have a listen:
It tells the story of someone who agreed to meet a girl he knew and has arrived early. As time passes, our narrator feels nervous that he either missed her or is being stood up. Like a familiar scene from Hollywood where one person from a date sits a table in a fancy restaurant, eating free bread, reassuring himself and the impatient wait staff that the date is still on their way.
As a sort of relief and source of emotional grounding, our narrator looks to a public clock there on “the corner of 5th Avenue and 22nd Street.” The clock says the time is still 1:56PM. The pacing of the song intensifies as the waiting continues but still the clock remains at Four Of Two and our narrator remains steadfast while we, the listeners, recognize that the clock must is broken.
Determined to wait until 2PM, the narrator shuts his eyes for a brief four minute rest, while waiting for his date.
If you’re new here, I’m writing about every TMBG song in the order they came out. This is the second track on No!, from 2001. There are a lot more.
Cut To: The Future
Our music begins to sound disjointed as our narrator wakes up to a “futuristic world” full of “gigantic metal bugs.” He overslept and now finds himself several decades into the future. By this point in the song, the tempo is very quick and words comes racing out as Linnell sings the final phrase:
I'd grown a beard; it was long and white
But I knew that the girl would be coming very soon
For though everything had changed, there was still that clock
And it still said four of two.
Ultimately, the broken clock provided relief even though all evidence around this man was proving that the clock was broken. Almost as if the songwriter was suggesting that whoever was in charge of this public clock, surely must know that it is in need of repair. Perhaps this song was a call to action. A warning to heed lest a city be responsible for a man who wastes his life away on a bench, waiting at a broken clock.
Allow me to introduce you to the real-life broken clock that existed at the time TMBG wrote this song. Below is a picture of The Restoration Hardware clock on the corner of Broadway and 22nd. The clock was apparently broken and stuck for quite some time at precisely 1:56.
Here’s the thing about Four Of Two that gets me every single time: I have listened to this song across an absurd stretch of my own life. I first heard it when I had one kid. As I continued to listen, I had three more (who also listened to this song). The kid who was in a car seat when I first put this album on is as tall as me, graduated college and is married. My youngest is IN college. And the song hasn’t changed at all. Same guitar. Same accordion. Same clock, stuck at 1:56, patiently waiting for a girl who is almost certainly not coming.
That’s the trick of it. The narrator wakes up decades later with a long white beard, surrounded by flying cars and metal bugs, and the only thing that hasn’t changed is the broken clock. Everything else about his life is unrecognizable to him. I feel that so acutely I almost don’t want to write it down. Every time I hit play on this song I am, in some sense, a different guy than the last time I heard it — older kids, more gray hair, more evidence that time did in fact keep moving even when it felt frozen. But the song stays exactly at four minutes of two. It’s one of the most reliable clock I own.
Maybe that’s what a three-minute pop song about a broken public clock is actually for. To be the thing that doesn’t move while you do.
What’s a song that’s marked time for you like that? Maybe one you can measure your own life against because it never changes, even though you clearly have?
You’re reading one of my No! essays. An album full of insubordinate mops, wobbly time, and sleepy heads.
See all No! posts - Start Here
Dive deeper into TMBG lore at TMBW.net (fan-run and fantastic)