The Statue Got Me High: a kid with a guitar who became a nerd dad.

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Is this one of the greatest most perfect songs in existence?

Yeah, easily.

A few weeks ago, my oldest kid shared this song on his Instagram story and I can’t express enough how amazing that felt. I also realize that I am a cliche. The nerd dad who got all his kids to love They Might Be Giants. I will not apologize.

Learning Guitar, Learning TMBG (just like all the cool kids)

During my early guitar learning years in high school, my instructor (hello, Cousin Greg!) taught me how to figure out a song on the guitar. One of the things that made him such a great teacher was that he always encouraged me to bring along some songs I like that he could learn and write down the music for me to practice.

Eventually this led to teaching me how to do some of this on my own, at least for the chords, if not for the lead guitar yet. That would have require practicing my scales and I was lazy about that. I remain lazy about that.

The first song that I attempted to teach myself how to play was The Statue Got Me High from They Might Be Giants’ fourth album, Apollo 18. I know every sound of this song by heart. Bass, accordion, guitar (obviously), the little sustained feedback before the John Linnell sings, “And now it is your turn.” It’s a song that I often start playing as soon as I pick up bass or guitar.

A Teenage Band (almost)

For a very brief period, my best friend David and I pretended to be a band. I’ve shared about this briefly when I wrote about ‘Twisting’ from the Flood album. We spent a lot of time learning some TMBG tunes.

I remember us being upstairs in his bedroom, probably wearing some combination of t-shirt, relaxed jeans and Converse All-Stars. A couple of half empty cans of warm Pepsi on the floor that we’d left out from the night before (it tasted better flat) and a pile of potato wedges and fry dip from the grocery store deli. This was the fuel of teenage Chase and his best friend David.

He’d strap on his accordion and I would spend in inordinate amount of time finding just the right tone and gain levels and then we’d launch into The Statue Got Me High. I don’t think he can still play this on the accordion but I can certainly throw down on some Statue at any given moment.

Oh man, I just remembered that one of our band name ideas was The Amplitude Modulation Band. Yikes.

Giving a Song the ‘Wrong’ Meaning

From all the way back in the 90’s until just a few days ago, I had always assumed that the titular statue being referenced in this song was referring to the giant black monolith seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe its because the lyrics appear to tell a story about a man who encounters a giant slab of granite that reveals truths to him and ultimately destroys him. Or maybe its because they use the word “monolith.” Either way, it always seemed to fit for me.

Occasionally, I’ll hop into the TMBG Wiki and read any interview comments from the Johns for a song that I’m writing about. I try to stay away from that because I like letting my experience with a song create its own significance and meaning. I think a lot of music is meant to be that way - like most art forms.

As is usually the case, I ended up learning that the true inspiration or meaning behind this song is quite literally about a person who sees a statue in a public square and he’s so impressed by this plain old statue that his head explodes. It just happens to be expressed in a just-vague-enough yet very poetic way that I attached a lot more weight to it than was necessary.

Theme of my existence.

A Mozart Connection?

Even more intriguing? In a 1994 interview, Linnell mentioned how this song unintentionally parallels Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. In the opera, Don Giovanni is a womanizer and all-around piece of crap guy who kills a nobleman whose daughter he was trying to seduce. Later, a statue of the murdered nobleman kills Don Giovanni and drags him to hell.

The Statue Got me High may be a bit more metaphorical than that but it really is nuts that this happened.

After all the years that I’ve listened to or play this song, it is still revealing new secrets and layers before me.

It’s been a minute since I’ve had an official music video to share. This is some classic TMBG video experience but I also highly encourage you to hear this song in some form of higher definition media. The nuances are spectacular.

The Statue Got Me High puts me in a good mood. It feels comforting and worn. It’s more than a song, it’s old friend.

I can’t imagine I’ll ever stop listening to it or sharing it with others. Of all the songs I’ve shared on this newsletter, I really hope you all like this one.

If you’ve ever learned a TMBG song on an instrument, I want to hear about it. What was the first one you learned?

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