Particle Man
| "Particle Man" | |
|---|---|
| Song by They Might Be Giants | |
| from the album Flood | |
| Published | 1990 |
| Released | January 15, 1990 |
| Recorded | 1989, Skyline Studio, NYC |
| Genre | Alternative rock, polka |
| Length | 1:59 |
| Label | Elektra |
| Songwriter(s) | John Flansburgh, John Linnell |
| Producer(s) | They Might Be Giants |
"Particle Man" is a song by alternative rock band They Might Be Giants, released and published in 1990. The song is the seventh track on the band's third album, Flood. It has become one of the band's most popular songs, despite never having been released as a single.John Linnell and John Flansburgh performed the song, backed by a metronome, for their 1990 Flood promotional video. Although it was released over a decade before the band began writing children's music, "Particle Man" is sometimes cited as a particularly youth-appropriate TMBG song, and a precursor to their first children's album, No!, which was not explicitly educational.
The name of the song, but in the plural, was used as the username for They Might Be Giants' official YouTube account.
The song describes four different "men": Particle Man, a microscopic being whose attributes are deemed "not important" enough to be discussed lyrically; Triangle Man, a belligerent entity who hates Particle Man, fights him, and wins; Universe Man, a kinder being, who is the size of the universe, and has a watch with hands relevant to the age of the universe ("He’s got a watch with a minute hand, a millennium hand, and an eon hand"); and Person Man, a "degraded" being who lives in a garbage can, and who is also despised, challenged, and defeated by Triangle Man. The song's author, John Linnell, denied the assertion that there is a deeper meaning to "Particle Man", stating on a phone interview filmed for Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns), that "nothing is missing from your understanding of 'Particle Man'". Band member John Flansburgh described it as "just a song about characters in the most obvious sense" and claims that the lyrics are not intended to allude to real people, though Linnell later said that "Triangle Man was based on a friend's observation that Robert Mitchum looked like an evil triangle when he took his shirt off in Night of the Hunter. Nothing else not explicitly stated need be inferred."
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