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Flood
Refer to caption
Cover artwork for the CD release
Studio album by
ReleasedJanuary 15, 1990
RecordedFall 1989
StudioSkyline Studios, NYC
GenreAlternative rock geek rock
Length43:24
LabelElektra
Producer
They Might Be Giants chronology
Don't Let's Start
(1989)
Flood
(1990)
Miscellaneous T
(1991)
Singles from Flood
  1. "Birdhouse in Your Soul"
    Released: 1989
  2. "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)"
    Released: May 14, 1990

Flood is the third studio album by Brooklyn-based alternative rock duo They Might Be Giants, released in January 1990. Flood was the duo's first album on the major label Elektra Records. It generated three singles: "Birdhouse in Your Soul", "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)", and the domestic promotional track "Twisting". The album is generally considered to be the band's definitive release, as it is their best-selling and most recognizable album. Despite minimal stylistic and instrumental differences from previous releases, Flood is distinguished by contributions from seasoned producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. John Linnell and John Flansburgh also took advantage of new equipment and recording techniques, including unconventional, home-recorded samples, which were programmed through Casio FZ-1 synthesizers. The album was recorded in New York City at Skyline Studios, which was better equipped than studios the band had worked in previously.

Promotion for Flood included television appearances, promotional videos, and an international tour. The album's mainstream promotion and success contributed to its status as the band's most well known album. Many fans, including young viewers of Tiny Toon Adventures, were first exposed to They Might Be Giants's music through Flood.

The album was initially issued on CD, LP, and cassette. Upon its release, Flood was met with praise from critics and achieved moderate success on sales charts. In 2013, the album was reissued as part of a CD series spanning They Might Be Giants' four Elektra releases. In 2014, it was reissued on LP in Europe by Music On Vinyl and in the United States by Asbestos Records for Record Store Day and Black Friday, and it was reissued again on LP in 2015 on the band's label, Idlewild Recordings.

Background

Flood was They Might Be Giants' first release on a major label. Elektra Records approached the band in 1989 following the unexpected success of their second album, Lincoln, which was released on the independent Bar/None label.[1] The record deal that Elektra presented was largely due to the work of Susan Drew, an A&R worker who had been following the band since 1986. Because of her confidence, the band was given an extensive level of creative control over their projects, in addition to the ability to take advantage of the label's resources.[2] Although They Might Be Giants recorded the album as a duo, they were joined by several guest musicians on brass and string instruments. The band also enlisted Alan Bezozi to help program some of the electronic drums for the album.[3]

Recording and production

"We had never been in an actual, real, multitrack studio before. We had been in an 8-track studio run by a friend of ours that was essentially a demo place. But I didn't know anything about how to make a real record ... [Langer and Winstanley] approach production the way that we approach songwriting. That is, we let the song take us in whatever direction it seems to want to go."

The album was recorded in the fall of 1989 at Skyline Studios in New York City.[5] Skyline was only a few blocks away from the Public Access Synthesizer Studio, where the band had recorded their previous albums.[6] Alan Bezozi and John Flansburgh worked together to create atypical drum tracks, including one that samples the sound of Flansburgh's kitchen sink and refrigerator being struck with a drum stick.[5] An Alesis SR-16 drum machine was used to program the drums.[7]

Two-thirds of the album's budget was exhausted for the production of four songs: "Birdhouse in Your Soul", "Your Racist Friend", "We Want a Rock", and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)".[5] These four tracks were produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley.[3]

Style and composition

Like many of They Might Be Giants' early releases, Flood features a range of stylistic eclecticism. The press release for the album notes the "rock rave-up 'Twisting' ... the [country] inflected 'Lucky Ball & Chain' ... the existential oom-pah of 'Particle Man'", and "tender night-light metaphor and melody" of the lead single, "Birdhouse in Your Soul".[8] Jon Pareles wrote for The New York Times that the album "shrug[s] off most typecasting". He added that through releases like Flood, They Might Be Giants and a new wave of alternative musicians were gainsaying the standard practice of sticking to only one genre.[9]

Regardless of the genre employed, They Might Be Giants are noted for unconventional lyrics, characterized by "bizarre" cleverness.[10] Flood includes abundant examples of this style, manifested in unusual subject matter, unreliable narrators, and wordplay.[5][11] However, John Linnell and Flansburgh took care to avoid using humor excessively, acknowledging the requirement that recorded music withstand repeated listens without losing value.[12] Linnell has pointed out that in general, he writes melodies prior to writing lyrics. This creates the challenge of fitting the appropriate syllables and stresses into each line; often, demos were recorded with dummy lyrics to simplify the process. Linnell's melodies are often based around scales.[13] D. X. Ferris, with commentary from John Linnell and John Flansburgh, outlined each individual track from Flood in a retrospective article published in Rolling Stone.[5]

"Theme From Flood" acts as a tongue-in-cheek introduction to the album, and it is regarded by scholars Elizabeth Sandifer and Alex Reed to be one of the first in a recurring trend of processional tunes composed by John Linnell.[14] It is followed by the album's lead single, "Birdhouse in Your Soul". Although the melody for "Birdhouse" was written years prior to the lyrics, the lyrics were "shoehorned in to match the melody", according to Linnell.[5] The narrative is given from the point of view of a child's nightlight.[15] According to John Linnell, the song was almost wrecked when he attempted to underscore it with a more dramatic drum track. Producers Winstanley and Langer opposed this decision and the drum track was scrapped. Linnell speculates that had this not been the case, the entire album might have suffered.[16] Reed and Sandifer also note that the song makes an unanticipated jump from the key of C major to E-flat major and then back to C major. The track's later shifts to F-sharp minor and A major lead to the division of the octave into equal intervals.[17] Reed and Sandifer call Flood in general "modular" in its movement between musical ideas, which they accredit partly to its largely digital composition: the band's MIDI sequencer made it easy to transpose sections of a song out of the original key.[18]

"Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" references both the current and previous names for modern-day Istanbul (Hagia Sophia pictured).

"Lucky Ball and Chain" employs the unreliable narrator motif, according to Linnell. Influenced by the country-western musical tradition, the song is a "simple regret song" dealing with "the one that got away".[5] The fourth track and second single, "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)", a cover of the 1953 original, was added by Flansburgh and Linnell to their repertoire in the early 1980s to lengthen their live sets. From that point, it evolved from a folk-inspired cover to the baroque pop rendition that appears on Flood.[19] A Casio FZ-1 synthesizer was used to perform the song in the studio.[5] "Dead", described by Rolling Stone as "one of TMBG's most abstract and personal songs", follows the story of someone dying and then being "reincarnated as a bag of groceries". According to Linnell, "The dreamlike relationship between returning expired groceries and returning from the grave after you expire appealed to me."[5]

"Your Racist Friend", produced by Langer and Winstanley, is a politically charged song which follows a fairly straightforward narrative.[20][21] The song, which depicts a social conflict, is considered to be the band's most clear "political statement".[5] On the other hand, the accordion-tinged "Particle Man" lightheartedly chronicles the disputes of four characters, the titular Particle Man, Universe Man, Person Man, and Triangle Man. Linnell has claimed that the character Triangle Man was inspired by Robert Mitchum's appearance in the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter.[5] The final single, "Twisting", was selected over "Your Racist Friend", in part because it was more lyrically ambiguous.[20][21] The song references both The Young Fresh Fellows and The dB's, two groups that influenced the sound of the track itself.[5] Flansburgh has noted that, while recording the song, Bezozi accidentally erased the entire drum track for "Twisting". Flansburgh then had to recreate the track from scratch.[21] The cryptic "We Want a Rock" features a violin performance by Mark Feldman, and "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair" revolves around petty concerns and their importance "when everything else is going haywire".[5] "Hearing Aid" features the mixing of standard They Might Be Giants sounds with an Arto Lindsay guitar solo and vacuum cleaner synth sounds, experimentations that Flansburgh found difficult to achieve.[5]

"Minimum Wage", which features only those two words, saw the band dabbling in sampling (specifically the 1966 Frank Sinatra recording of "Downtown"). The sound of the whip was crafted in the studio when the band was unable to find a suitable stock sound effect; the effect was a composite of a wind sound from Linnell's Moog keyboard and the crack of a wet towel, courtesy of Roger Moutenot. "Letterbox", which was also considered as a potential single from the album, was another track that had been in live setlists years prior to the release of the album. For "Whistling in the Dark", Flansburgh and Linnell wanted the bass drum to be extremely pronounced, although they were later unhappy with the result. Linnell noted that, lyrically, the song is about two men who engage in a fight, only for the listener to soon learn that they are both in prison. "Hot Cha!" references the name of a wooden horse in the Parker Brothers board game Derby Day; musically, the song is a mix of eclectic sounds (such as the noise of mallets and drumsticks banging on a sink and base of a refrigerator), samples (such as a door buzzer), and unique recording methods (such as running horn samples through a guitar fuzz box). In the cheerful tune "Women and Men", the band examines human reproduction from a "disengaged view", and "Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love" takes its title from a Mahavishnu Orchestra album cut of the same name. "They Might Be Giants" operates as the band's manifesto and was inspired by The Monkees song "(Theme From) The Monkees".[5] Flood concludes with "Road Movie to Berlin", which was written by John Flansburgh in Germany in 1989 (at which point the Berlin Wall still stood). The song deals with the clash between absurdism and existentialism that the band encountered while touring Europe.[22] Flansburgh's voice was slowed down for this song, an effect that he later called "creepy".[5] Due to the haste with which the final portion of the album was recording, the band accidentally forgot to include an entire verse of the song in the finished product; Linnell and Flansburgh felt that they did not have the time to fix it, so the mistake remained. The song also makes use of "synthetic or sampled" trumpet sounds, one of which was also included in "Birdhouse in Your Soul".[5]

Artwork

The photograph used for the cover of the album depicts a man rowing a boat made out of strung-together washbasins. The image was captured by Margaret Bourke-White as part of a series taken to document the Ohio River flood of 1937.[23][24] The cover, which was designed by band member John Flansburgh with Elizabeth van Itallie, originally featured only the photo; however, an emblem including the band's name, inked by Flansburgh's former coworker Barbara Lipp, was later added.[25] The emblem resembles the logo of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.[5]

Promotion

To promote Flood, Elektra produced a promotional video featuring Linnell and Flansburgh facetiously extolling the album's merits. One sarcastic quip was that the album included nineteen songs, which made it inherently better than other albums with fewer tracks.[26] The video also included a live performance of "Particle Man" and a sample of the lead single "Birdhouse in Your Soul". The band also produced a music video, directed by Adam Bernstein, for "Birdhouse in Your Soul". In April, the band appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson to perform the song with Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Band. Severinsen's unusually fast count-in resulted in a performance with a noticeably higher tempo than the album recording. Linnell and Flansburgh would later adopt a similar tempo for subsequent live performances.[1]

Tour

In support of Flood, They Might Be Giants toured North America and Europe, including a series of shows in Germany. Due to the scale of the tour, the band's road crew doubled in size—increasing from two members to four.[27] Linnell and Flansburgh have recounted the unfamiliarity of touring outside of North America. In Europe, they report that crowds acted differently due to cultural gaps.[28]

The band continued to tour as a duo, with Linnell playing accordion and Flansburgh on guitars, or occasionally playing a marching band bass drum. Large posters of postage stamps adorned the stage as props; the minimal arrangement was received as a boldly simple choice. Sets included a combination of old and new material.[29] As in the past, the band was backed by a tape deck playing drum tracks or a metronome in lieu of a full rhythm section.[30]

Reception

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[31]
Chicago Tribune[32]
Los Angeles Times[33]
NME8/10[34]
Pitchfork8.5/10[35]
Q[36]
Record Mirror4/5[37]
Rolling Stone[38]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide[39]
Sounds[40]

Flood received generally positive reviews, though some critics expressed reservations. Chris Heim wrote for the Chicago Tribune that the album is a rare example of success for a "quirky cult band" signed to a major label.[32] Steve Simels, writing for Stereo Review, compared the album's structural complexities to The Beach Boys at the peak of their career. Simels praised the album's originality and intellect, while heavily criticizing other contemporary music for lacking those characteristics.[41] Writing in Spin, Ira Robbins called Flood "another captivating variety show of art-rock, swing, the Bonzo Dog Band, cow-pop, show tunes and the Schmenge Brothers ... Boundless imagination, loopy mix-and-match arrangements and a gyroscopic sense of what makes a pop tune click are still responsible for the easy and abiding appeal of TMBG's ingenious material."[42] In a retrospective AllMusic review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that despite some inconsistencies and awkward selections, the album is musically superior to its predecessors. He observed that through Flood, Flansburgh and Linnell "exchange quirky artiness for unabashed geekiness". Six of the album's nineteen tracks are designated as AllMusic "picks".[31] Reviewing the album in 2022 for Pitchfork, Quinn Moreland commented that the duo's "ability to grab listeners with sharp, catchy songwriting was never more evident than on ... Flood, where their expansive imagination was matched by major label money."[35]

Reviews in the UK were also mostly positive. In a review for Q, Peter Kane lauded the record for its uniqueness and for the sheer quantity of tracks, which he said ensured that the listener would enjoy at least one song, and concluded that Flood was "as playful an entertainment as will be heard all year".[36] In NME Jerry Smith called the collection "a weird and wonderful varied combination of the zany, trivial, witty and wacky, delivered with a spritely foot-tapping ease that belies their bizarre subject matter".[34] Record Mirror's Iestyn George observed that "if it's to be faulted, the album is a mite too cluttered for its own good, but the virtues of imagination and originality that these native New Yorkers display are worthy of enthusiastic approval".[37] Andy Ross of Sounds believed that it was the duo's melodic talents that prevented them from becoming just a novelty act, and wrote that Flood was "a real cryptic crossword of an album, requiring perseverance and application with ultimately rewarding and fulfilling results".[40]

Conversely, Village Voice critic Robert Christgau and Rolling Stone's David Browne found Flood to be unremarkable overall. Both critics chastised the band's novelty, which they found to be wearing thin as time progressed.[43][38] In the UK Caroline Sullivan of Melody Maker felt that enjoyment of Flood "hinges upon one's general feelings about similarly zany characters like Talking Heads and Frank Zappa. If their very American, very beatnik, surrealism spells instant yawnorama, forget TMBG—they're the same thing, but minus the good tunes."[44] However, in a 2009 Rolling Stone article revisiting Flood near its twentieth anniversary, D. X. Ferris praised the album as both the band's most iconic release and one that revolutionized the college radio scene.[5]

Commercial response

Flood peaked at number 75 on the Billboard 200, spending 22 weeks on the chart. The lead single from the album, "Birdhouse in Your Soul", reached number 3 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. The single also charted in Ireland and the UK.[45][46] "Twisting", which was released as a domestic promotional single, peaked at number 22 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart.[47] The album also contains two of the band's most well known songs, "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" and "Particle Man".[48] The former was released as a single, reaching number 61 on the UK Singles Chart, but failing to chart in the US.[45]

Flood was the first album released by They Might Be Giants to receive the RIAA Platinum sales award—indicating sales over one million copies—which it achieved on July 10, 2009.[49] It is also certified Gold by the BPI in the United Kingdom.[50]

Legacy

Flansburgh and Linnell in 2012 performing a dual Lincoln and Flood show

Flood is They Might Be Giants' best-selling album, and it is widely regarded as their most iconic.[5] Due to the acclaim with which it was received, the album is considered to have cemented the band's reputation as a staple of alternative and college rock.[51] Curtis Silver, in a retrospective for Wired, collected anecdotes from They Might Be Giants fans, many of whom were first exposed to the band through Flood. Silver concluded that new fans are drawn just as much to the band's old material as they are their more recent work, due to its sustaining accessibility.[52] In fact, many fans cite the band's earliest albums as their favorites—though often not Flood, despite (or perhaps due to) its longstanding mainstream success.[53]

In 1990, Tiny Toon Adventures aired animated music videos for two tracks from the album, "Particle Man" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)". Through the program, the band was exposed to a younger set of fans.[54] This ultimately led the band to begin releasing children's music alongside their "rock albums" over a decade later.[55][56]

They Might Be Giants has performed Flood live in its entirety on numerous occasions. In 2015, the band released the live album Flood Live in Australia, a recording of the album played live in 2013, in which the songs are performed in reverse order, starting with "Road Movie to Berlin" and ending with "Theme from Flood".[57] The band has performed multiple Flood concerts in the reverse-order format.[58] In other shows, the songs are played out of sequence. Between September 2020 and May 2021, the band performed a series of these concerts to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the album's release. It was originally to take to place between January and March 2020, but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[59]

Track listing

All tracks are written by John Flansburgh and John Linnell, except where noted

Side one
No.TitleLength
1."Theme from Flood"0:28
2."Birdhouse in Your Soul"3:20
3."Lucky Ball & Chain"2:46
4."Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" (Jimmy Kennedy, Nat Simon)2:38
5."Dead"2:58
6."Your Racist Friend"2:54
7."Particle Man"1:59
8."Twisting"1:56
9."We Want a Rock"2:47
Side two
No.TitleLength
10."Someone Keeps Moving My Chair"2:23
11."Hearing Aid"3:26
12."Minimum Wage"0:47
13."Letterbox"1:25
14."Whistling in the Dark"3:25
15."Hot Cha"1:34
16."Women & Men"1:46
17."Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love"1:36
18."They Might Be Giants"2:46
19."Road Movie to Berlin"2:22
Total length:43:24

Personnel

Chart performance

Album

Chart (1990) Position
Australian Albums (ARIA)[60] 99
UK Albums (OCC)[61] 14
US Billboard 200[62] 75

Singles

Year Single Chart Peak position
1990 "Birdhouse in Your Soul" Billboard Modern Rock Tracks[47] 3
UK Singles Chart (OCC)[45] 6
Irish Singles Chart (IRMA)[46] 12
"Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" UK Singles Chart (OCC)[45] 61
"Twisting" Billboard Modern Rock Tracks[47] 22

Certifications and sales

Region Certification Certified units/sales
United Kingdom (BPI)[50] Gold 100,000^
United States (RIAA)[49] Platinum 1,000,000^

^ Shipments figures based on certification alone.

Release history

Flood was released in CD, LP, and cassette formats both in the United States and foreign markets by Elektra Records. In addition to two vinyl reissues in 2014, the entire album was included in a two-part 2013 CD compilation that collected They Might Be Giants's work from their period with Elektra.[63]

Region Date Label Format Catalog
United States January 15, 1990 Elektra Records LP 60907-1
CD 60907-2
Cassette 60907-4
Europe 1990[nb 1] WEA / Elektra Records LP 960 907-1
CD 7559-60907-2
Cassette 7559-60907-4
Japan April 25, 1990 Warner Brothers Records / Elektra Records CD WPCP-3435
Australia 1990 Elektra Records LP 960907.1
Cassette 960907.4
Canada LP 96 09071
Cassette 96 09074
Philippines WEA / Elektra Records Cassette 60907-4
European reissue October 13, 2014 Music On Vinyl LP (180g) MOVLP1239
United States and Canadian reissue November 28, 2014 Asbestos Records LP ASB100
United States reissue
(with live bonus disc)
2015 Idlewild Recordings 2-LP

Notes

  1. ^ The album's European release date was sometime between February and March 5, 1990; the exact date is unclear.

References

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b Gigantic (A Tale Of Two Johns). Dir. AJ Schnack. 2002. Plexifilm, 2003.
  2. ^ Reed, Sandifer 2013, p. 21–23
  3. ^ a b Flansburgh, John; Linnell, John (1990). Flood (album liner notes). Elektra Records.
  4. ^ Alter, Gaby (January 1, 2002). "They Might Be Giants". Mix.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Ferris, D. X. (October 8, 2009). "They Might Be Giants' 'Flood': Track by Track Guide to the Geek-Chic Breakthrough". Rolling Stone. Retrieved September 25, 2013.
  6. ^ Reed & Sandifer 2013, p. 24.
  7. ^ Reed & Sandifer 2013, p. xiii.
  8. ^ "They Might Be Giants: Flood" (Press release). Elektra Records. 1990.
  9. ^ Pareles, Jon (January 28, 1990). "Mentally Hyperactive and Proud of It". The New York Times.
  10. ^ Paste Staff (June 14, 2006). "Paste's 100 Best Living Songwriters: #81–90". Paste. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
  11. ^ Reed & Sandifer 2013, p. 2.
  12. ^ Flansburgh, John and John Linnell (May 1990). "Zany? Oh, Pur-lease ...". Interview by Adrian Deevoy. Q.
  13. ^ DeMain 2004, p. 164.
  14. ^ Reed & Sandifer 2013, pp. 32–33.
  15. ^ "Birdhouse in Your Soul by They Might Be Giants". Songfacts. Retrieved January 6, 2015.
  16. ^ Reed & Sandifer 2013, pp. 38–39.
  17. ^ Reed & Sandifer 2013, p. 83.
  18. ^ Reed & Sandifer 2013, p. 82.
  19. ^ Greenberg, Eric (December 4, 2012). "They Might Be Giants Turns 30". USA Today.
  20. ^ a b Reed & Sandifer 2013, p. 37.
  21. ^ a b c Reed & Sandifer 2013, p. 77.
  22. ^ Reed & Sandifer 2013, p. 30.
  23. ^ Flansburgh, John; Linnell, John. "Q & A: Flood" (Interview). TMBG.com. Archived from the original on July 26, 2001. Retrieved May 26, 2012.
  24. ^ "Behind the Picture: 'The American Way' and the Flood of '37". Life. 2014. Archived from the original on November 1, 2012. Retrieved March 31, 2015.
  25. ^ Flansburgh, John (May 3, 2012). "John Flansburgh: Observer Media" (Interview). Interviewed by Debbie Millman. Design Matters. Archived from the original on July 12, 2012. Retrieved September 2, 2013.
  26. ^ Reed & Sandifer 2013, p. xii.
  27. ^ Catchpole, Karen (March 1990). "What Do Giants Eat?". Sassy.
  28. ^ Reed & Sandifer 2013, p. 28.
  29. ^ Collins, Andrew (June 9, 1990). "The Appliance of Giants". NME.
  30. ^ Santo, Jim (November 1994). "Beat the Machine". The Music Paper.
  31. ^ a b Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. "Flood – They Might Be Giants". AllMusic. Retrieved September 22, 2013.
  32. ^ a b Heim, Chris (February 8, 1990). "They Might Be Giants: Flood (Elektra)". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved September 22, 2013.
  33. ^ Willman, Chris (January 28, 1990). "They Might Be Giants 'Flood' Elektra". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved September 7, 2016.
  34. ^ a b Smith, Jerry (March 10, 1990). "Giant Steps". NME. p. 36.
  35. ^ a b Moreland, Quinn (June 5, 2022). "They Might Be Giants: Flood". Pitchfork. Retrieved June 5, 2022.
  36. ^ a b Kane, Peter (March 1990). "Daft". Q. No. 42. p. 76.
  37. ^ a b George, Iestyn (March 10, 1990). "They Might Be Giants: Flood". Record Mirror. p. 18.
  38. ^ a b Browne, David (February 22, 1990). "They Might Be Giants: Flood". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on November 11, 2007. Retrieved September 22, 2013.
  39. ^ Considine, J. D. (2004). "They Might Be Giants". In Brackett, Nathan; Hoard, Christian (eds.). The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (4th ed.). Simon & Schuster. pp. 808–809. ISBN 0-7432-0169-8.
  40. ^ a b Ross, Andy (March 17, 1990). "They Might Be Giants: Flood". Sounds. p. 47.
  41. ^ Simels, Steve (April 1990). "They Might Be Giants: Flood". Stereo Review. Vol. 55, no. 4. p. 75.
  42. ^ Robbins, Ira (February 1990). "They Might Be Giants: Flood". Spin. Vol. 5, no. 11. p. 73. Retrieved March 6, 2017.
  43. ^ Christgau, Robert (2000). "They Might Be Giants: Flood". Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s. St. Martin's Griffin. p. 306. ISBN 0-312-24560-2. Retrieved September 22, 2013.
  44. ^ Sullivan, Caroline (March 31, 1990). "They Might Be Giants: Flood". Melody Maker. p. 35.
  45. ^ a b c d They Might Be Giants | Artist | Official Charts Company. Official Charts Company. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
  46. ^ a b The Irish Charts Archived June 2, 2009, at the Wayback Machine. IRMA. Retrieved April 9, 2014. Enter "They Might Be Giants" in the "Search by Artist" box and click "search".
  47. ^ a b c Billboard Single Chart History for They Might Be Giants. Billboard. Retrieved September 10, 2012.
  48. ^ Mason, Stewart. "Particle Man – They Might Be Giants". AllMusic. Retrieved February 10, 2013.
  49. ^ a b "American album certifications – They Might Be Giants – Flood". Recording Industry Association of America.
  50. ^ a b "British album certifications – They Might Be Giants – Flood". British Phonographic Industry.
  51. ^ Miller, Dan (June 18, 2011). "The Gibson Classic Interview: They Might Be Giants' Dan Miller" (Interview). Interviewed by Courtney Grimes. Gibson. Archived from the original on March 15, 2012. Retrieved August 8, 2013.
  52. ^ Silver, Curtis (March 13, 2013). "After 30 Years, They Might Be Giants Just Simply Are". Wired. Condé Nast. Retrieved December 1, 2013.
  53. ^ Reed & Sandifer 2013, p. 125.
  54. ^ Rivait, Lindsay (March 5, 2008). "Here Comes They Might Be Giants". Lance.
  55. ^ Ricks, Rosy (October 30, 2011). "They Might Be Giants at the Pabst—Oh, Boy". Third Coast Digest. Prime 7 Media.
  56. ^ Blisten, John (July 12, 2011). "They Might Be Giants Grow Up Again with "Join Us"". Billboard. Retrieved May 21, 2013.
  57. ^ "Flood Live in Australia". They Might Be Giants. February 23, 2015. Archived from the original on March 13, 2017. Retrieved March 12, 2017.
  58. ^ Reed & Sandifer 2013, p. 126.
  59. ^ Pearis, Bill (October 7, 2019). "They Might Be Giants expand 'Flood' 30th anniversary tour, add 3rd NYC show". BrooklynVegan. Retrieved October 13, 2019.
  60. ^ Ryan, Gavin (2011). Australia's Music Charts 1988–2010. Mt. Martha, VIC, Australia: Moonlight Publishing.
  61. ^ 7, 1990/7502/ "Official Albums Chart Top 100". Official Charts Company.
  62. ^ "They Might Be Giants Chart History (Billboard 200)". Billboard.
  63. ^ Sinclair, Paul (November 6, 2013). "They Might Be Giants/Elektra album 2CD reissues, including Flood". Super Deluxe Edition. Retrieved November 21, 2013.

Bibliography