Never Knew Love

Album: Join Us (2011)
Play Video

Songfacts®:

  • They Might Be Giants is the team of John Flansburgh and John Linnell, who started working together in 1982. Twenty-nine years later, they released Join Us, their 15th album.

    Regarding this song, Flansburgh told Songfacts: "That's a collaboration that John and I put together. I think the idea was to put together something that was split. Kind of the meat of the song is this very simple slow unwinding chorus with the phrase 'never knew love like this before,' and it's very pretty and kind of dreamy in an electronic kind of way. And then the verses are these raging rock moments and very dense with words and very dense with ideas. It's a lot of crazy, compressed thought in the verses. So it's like any kind of musical duet where the roles are really divvied up, like the part that I sing is very rapid fire. And I can't even explain the point of view in the lyrics, which is coming from a very odd place. But it is on the topic of new love, but it just makes it much more mysterious a topic than new love really is. I mean, the first verse is all about how it sort of makes love seem like it's mountain climbing or something, that it's like this crazy adventure that you might not survive. But that's the story with They Might Be Giants, making the clear and obvious difficult and incomprehensible."

Comments

Be the first to comment...

Editor's Picks

Bill Withers

Bill WithersSongwriter Interviews

Soul music legend Bill Withers on how life experience and the company you keep leads to classic songs like "Lean On Me."

Curt Kirkwood of Meat Puppets

Curt Kirkwood of Meat PuppetsSongwriter Interviews

The (Meat)puppetmaster takes us through songs like "Lake Of Fire" and "Backwater," and talks about performing with Kurt Cobain on MTV Unplugged.

Song Cities

Song CitiesMusic Quiz

Nirvana, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen are among those who wrote songs with cities that show up in this quiz.

John Lee Hooker

John Lee HookerSongwriter Interviews

Into the vaults for Bruce Pollock's 1984 conversation with the esteemed bluesman. Hooker talks about transforming a Tony Bennett classic and why you don't have to be sad and lonely to write the blues.

Tom Waits Lyrics Quiz

Tom Waits Lyrics QuizMusic Quiz

Pool balls, magpies and thorns without roses - how well do you know your Tom Waits lyrics?

Chris Rea

Chris ReaSongwriter Interviews

It took him seven years to recover from his American hit "Fool (If You Think It's Over)," but Chris Rea became one of the top singer-songwriters in his native UK.