Once upon a time, in the frozen tundra of southeastern Idaho, I was force-fed one CD for an entire school year. That CD was Flood by They Might Be Giants. My only roommate that year was this blathering dumbness named “John” who apparently didn’t own any other music at all. Given that this was September of 1990, we didn’t have the convenience of hopping on our dorm’s wireless network and downloading anything from iTunes because there was no iTunes. I don’t even know if they algorithm for compressing audio into a small-form file was a possibility at that point. Given that DOS was still the preferred OS at the time, I highly doubt anyone was sending anything of a 3-5MB size at that point. So I got to wallow in my misery as he constantly pumped out this all-out assault on my ears. I didn’t have a desktop stereo. I didn’t even have a CD player. I was happy to have an alarm clock that would play a tape. That was my good fortune. Thankfully, I *did* own a pair of headphones, so there was that small blessing.

Anyway, I spent my entire freshman year of college racking my brain trying to figure out how anyone could possibly stand these guys. When your opening line to your first (well, second, but first actual) song is “I’m your only friend, I’m not your only friend but I’m a little glowing friend, but really I’m not actually your friend, but I am.” What? What drivel is this? I could poop on a paper and let yaks dance on it. That would produce better lyrics than these.

Musical tastes evolve. As previously mentioned, I’ve actually dabbled with interests in The Sea Hags and UK Subs, so … you know, tastes evolve. Even up until my wife and I got married in 2000, I thought that these guys were just crap. Horrible, boring, stupid crap. I had no interest in hearing them at all.

Then we started watching “Malcolm in the Middle.” We got to the point that we’d sing along with the opening credits. We wondered who sang the theme song. Imagine my surprise when we found out that it was actually They Might Be Giants. I was stunned.

So that was about 10+ years ago. Over the course of those years, I’ve slowly but surely warmed up to them. Now they come on and I don’t cringe. I actually turn it up and enjoy it.