Songfacts®:

• The guy in this song is a strange character who practices cloisonné, which is an ancient method of working with metal using an enamel process. He's seems really bothered by Sleestaks, and asks at the end of the song, "What's a Sleestak?"
  
  John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants told us: "You know, I did not know what a Sleestak was until I met my wife, who does an imitation of a Sleestak, which is, I guess, a creature from a television program called Land of the Lost. I'm exactly too old to be familiar with the program, but it's the monsters in The Land of the Lost. So the character in the song is this very unreasonable guy who seems kind of out of it. I actually captured the out-of-it-ness from my own personal experience. Because it's such a weird thing - do you have any friends from the UK? Because becoming friends with people from the UK, they all know this program Dr. Who, like in this encyclopedic way. It would be like if Star Trek and Star Wars was combined, it's this incredible big deal for people from the UK, and they're constantly referencing things from Dr. Who that I have no idea what it is. But the way they reference it is so casual, it's not like they say, 'Oh, it's like Uhura and the way she talks into the little teleporter thing.' They don't even say what it's about. They just say the character's name. Like they would just be like, 'That's like Uhura.' It's like an inside thing that everybody knows. And so that's kind of what that song, that reference is about. It's that weird thing - there are touchstones in the culture that are ubiquitous to some people that are actually complete mysteries to others. But Sleestak is so much fun to say. Capitalized, by the way. You gotta capitalize it. I don't know why, but that's what our copy editor says."