Fingertips: A Flash Experiment
The other day I was thinking about the song Fingertips, by They Might Be Giants. If you don’t know this set of songs, they were on the Apollo 18
Of course, people usually played it just straight through, and now at concerts, TMBG will play the whole thing from beginning to end.
Two days ago, I was thinking was how cool it would be to have the songs be titles of stories. TMBG has got to be my favorite band since 1989, and I decided this would be an homage to them- a flash story for each Fingertips song. I have two written, and will unveil them (hopefully) daily. If I skip a day, forgive me. I may bring in a friend or two to help out.
And now: Fingertips: A Flash Experiment!
- Everything Is Catching On Fire
- Fingertips
- I Hear The Wind Blow
- Hey Now Everybody
- Who is that Standing At My Window?
- I Found A New Friend Underneath My Pillow
- Wreck My Car
Fingertips: A Flash Experiment by Mur Lafferty is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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Brilliant. Can’t wait.
What a great idea! I love this album.
This is a super fun idea, Mur. I can’t wait to see what you do with it. I bought Apollo 18 on tape when it first came out, so I had to listen to the songs in order every time – there was no shuffle feature on my tape walkman! Last year I had the pleasure of seeing them perform it live. I was amazed how well they nailed it, switching for genre to genre, tempo to tempo without missing a beat. Amazing stuff.
Good luck with this.
I like it. It’s a good idea.
What I feel happiest about though, is that when I read your tweet mentioning “Fingertips”, it turned out that, that referred to what my mind wanted to think it referred to. In other words, when I saw “Fingertips”, I thought, “What? That weird multi-song segment thing from TMBG’s Apollo 18 album? No, surely not, but what else could it be?”
“I hear the wind blow / I hear the wind blow / it seems to say, `hello! hello! I’m the one that loves you so!’ ”
The one about the heart attack and the one about not being able to understand someone were always a little scary to me.
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Furry cows moo and decompress.
I shouldn’t bury the lead here, I’m excited to see how this project turns out. Now the “why” (which I typed up first):
That was the first TMBG album I bought (in high-school), on recommendation from a friend (who went on to be in the great geek band Wookieback and is now doing some christian-ish stuff with Sufjan Stevens under the band name “Half-handed cloud” and even I’m not on board religiously it’s some great music). I recall all the fingertips songs (alas the CD made it out of my collection at some point), but don’t think the REALLY cheesy funky CD player I had at the time, which about the size of a Sega Genesis, actually would shuffle tracks (that, or my memory is getting worse than I thought, because I didn’t remember the “designed for shuffle” thing even after you mentioned it).
I repurchased a couple of the songs off the Amazon MP3 store last year and now my 5yo son loves to sing Turn Around, much to the chagrin of my wife.
Fantastic idea, Mur. I’m really looking forward to this!
What a wonderfully intriguing idea. I think I know what my next music purchase will have to be.
I can’t believe I still haven’t listened to that particular TMBG album yet. I’m a bad fan.
Speaking of They Might Be Giants, You should post a link to the Manic Mondays you did
[...] didn’t know that Mur Lafferty was a They Might Be Giants fan. She’s taken to writing flash stories for each of the tidbits in the "Fingertips" song from the TMBG album "Apollo 18". Right now, I’m [...]
Wonderful idea, looking forward to reading the stories, most of which should be up by now (I’m a bit behind on my blog-reading). It may even make up for being left out of that shuffle goodness.
When I first heard Fingertips, I thought: wouldn’t it be a nice idea to shuffle this CD and have all those little tunes between songs? (I didn’t know until five minutes ago that that was the idea behind it.) But I couldn’t. Maybe the European distributors didn’t get the idea, or maybe it’s a cheapo reprint and I’m being punished for waiting do long, but the Apollo 18 CD I have has all of Fingertips in one file.
[...] Yikes! Over a month since I posted the last Fingertips! Bad Mur! Fingertips: A Flash Experiment, is a project where I’m writing a different flash story for each bit of the They Might Be Giants’ “Fingertips” songs from Apollo 18. See info here. [...]