A song by American alternative rock duo They Might Be Giants
"I Palindrome I" is a song by American alternative rock duo They Might Be Giants. It was the second single from Apollo 18, released in 1992 by Elektra Records.
They Might Be Giants performed the song on Late Night with David Letterman in 1992.[3] Michael McKean recites the lyrics of the song in the documentary Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns.[4]
Composition
The title of "I Palindrome I" came from a demo written by John Flansburgh for They Might Be Giants's telephone service, Dial-A-Song. John Linnell adapted the lyric after attending a reading by the American poet Hal Sirowitz. The song's opening line, "Someday mother will die and I'll get the money", is a reference to Sirowitz's portrayal of mother-child relationships.[5]
The song contains several palindromes and references to the concept of recursion. For example, the lyrics contain the straightforward palindromes "Egad, a base tone denotes a bad age" and "Man o nam". The middle 8 consists of what critic Stewart Mason calls a "sentence palindrome", in which the words (rather than the letters) are the units in a sequence which reads the same backwards and forwards: "'Son I am able,' she said, 'Though you scare me.' 'Watch,' said I. 'Beloved,' I said, 'Watch me scare you though.' Said she, 'Able am I, son.'"[6] The lyrics also reference "a snake head eating the head on the opposite side" (an ouroboros), which reviewer Ira Robbins interprets as "a grim life mask [carved] from the conceptual clay of reversible phrases".[7]
Reception
"I Palindrome I" received generally positive attention from critics. Writing for Allmusic, Stewart Mason concluded that the song was musically appealing enough to overcome its shallow lyrics, which he felt employed wordplay for its own sake rather than "in the service of a particular idea or emotion".[6] In a review of Apollo 18, Karen Schlosberg said that the lyrics of "I Palindrome I" sound like "Edgar Allan Poe and David Lynch meeting the Monkees", creating an "unlikely sing-along hook".[8] In a 2016 Gothamist retrospective revisiting They Might Be Giants's studio albums, Ken Bays noted "I Palindrome I" as a highlight for Linnell's strong vocal performance.[9]
