Turn Around: A Jaunty Tune for the Recently Deceased
An exploration of a morbid TMBG song that gave words to how I experienced life and also taught me the word 'Obsequious.'
From Center Stage to Existential Spiral
I was a theater kid. From fourth through twelfth grade, I performed in plays, musicals, and the occasional band concerts. Later, I spent a full decade doing stand-up comedy. So by most definitions, I looked like an optimistic, outgoing person. At least, that’s how it seemed from the outside.
Catch me alone—or worse, peek into my inner dialogue—and you’ll find out just how often a person can think about their own impending demise in a single day. I tend to filter everything through the lens of mortality, constantly measuring my existence against the permanence of the world around me. I see a tall building downtown and imagine what it’ll look like 100 years from now, long after I’m gone. Somehow, everything becomes a nonchalant reminder that death is always just behind me.
The fifteenth track on Apollo 18 tells three stories featuring a man who is either delivering a musical message about death—or receiving one. Each stanza finds him intertwined with the melody of the macabre. Maybe he’s the same man from the previous track, now discovering what happens when he does the things his shyness once held him back from.
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Swing Time for the Dead
Turn Around features John Linnell on vocals, accordion, saxophone, and keyboard, with John Flansburgh on guitar. The song’s playful, swing-era-style backing chorus was created by having Linnell record short melodic phrases into a sampler, with each key triggering a different two- or three-note vocal burst.
“That was supposed to sound like the Modernaires, the vocal group that sang with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, like in Chattanooga Choo Choo. Not like the Chipmunks. It's all me singing; we sped up the tape for half of them, for the notes I couldn't reach.”
—John Linnell, Music & Computers, 1996
Give it a listen below before we get into it. See if you can spot that signature TMBG trick: something that sounds like joy and is anything but.
This song gives me Nothing’s Gonna Change My Clothes vibes. I can’t explain it better than to say I feel drenched in waves of upbeat, happy melodies and harmonies. That super-cheerful sound is just a smokescreen for the existential, morbid reality underneath. The classic TMBG one-two punch.
It’s something I’ve always loved about Turn Around—and TMBG in general—that I couldn’t quite articulate as a kid. Now, I think I’m just a sucker for ironic juxtaposition.
Each stanza in this song is essentially the same story: someone dies, and the person responsible sings them a jaunty, upbeat tune. Pretty psychopathic if you really think about it. “Turn around,” they sing. “There’s a human skull on the ground.” It’s their way of saying: Death is right behind you. It always has been.
It’s such an absurd tonal cocktail—swing harmonies, crisp accordion, and playful vocal layering paired with imagery of murder, graveyards, and “paper-white masks of evil.” And yet, it gives me such a positive feeling. I didn’t find it scary or morbid. I found it comforting. Or at least, familiar.
It’s Behind Me, Isn’t It?
I relate to this song in a very literal way. I’ve struggled with intrusive thoughts about the end of my existence for most of my life. It wasn’t until adulthood that I began using therapy and medication to deal with it. As a kid, it often manifested as the overwhelming sense that something—something—was behind me. A persistent, invisible dread following me through rooms, down hallways, into dreams.
I didn’t understand that anxiety could be more than just “feeling worried.” Sometimes it looked like running up the basement stairs because I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was reaching for my ankles.
These days, that feeling shows up more often in my dreams. I’ll be overcome with impossible dread, convinced something awful is lurking behind me or just around a corner. I’ll realize I’m dreaming and try to wake up—but I can’t. I’ll try to yell, but in classic nightmare fashion, nothing comes out. Not in the dream, anyway. In the waking world, my sleeping body starts making strange, panicked noises. Then I yell. My wife wakes up, terrified, and shakes me out of it.
My Favorite Human Skull on the Ground
I think that’s why I love Turn Around so much. It sings about death the way my brain has always felt about it. It’s a spooky little friend I’ve carried since childhood—humming along to a song only I seem to hear.
Turn Around also sounds like a continuation of If I Wasn’t Shy—the track that comes right before it on the album. From my very first listen, those two songs felt like a single arrangement split in half. I could never figure out how they were thematically connected. It just made sense musically.
Flansy once mentioned that while they usually “put slower songs after the faster ones,” If I Wasn’t Shy and Turn Around share the same tempo and rhythm. Putting them back to back had the unintended consequence of making them sound like the same song.
I relate to this more than I’d like to admit. Sometimes, as I write these essays, I worry they all sound like the same song in a different key. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s okay if every week is just me, turning around.
And if that’s what these essays are (variations on the same melody, the same skull glinting in a slightly different light each week) then think I’m fine with that. Because every time I turn around, I notice something new: in these songs and about myself and everything around me. A different fear. A different joke. A different version of myself singing along to a different dark verse. Maybe that’s what keeps me writing about all of it. It is one of the many reason I want to keep that imminent death much further down the road.
Bonus Track
There is a particular live version of this song from their Asbury Park Live album that I really love. You can hear how much fun Linnell is having with providing all of the lyrical might on his own without the sampled chorus of hims to play with. In fact the whole live album is fantastic. I highly recommend that you grab it from the TMBG shop (available as a download.)
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i was going to say this on your post of If I Wasn't Shy too; when i first heard all of Apollo 18 for the first time i thought they were both the same song. and thanks for showing off that live version of turn around, hearing it for the first time a few minutes ago made me go "oh shit, this is awesome!"