Wow, man, me too. Even though it's not nearly their best album and I never listen to it I actually remember finding the CD (which I still own) in a store at the mall, buying it, and proceeding to memorize it.

Same goes for a bunch of other shit but this album is kinda weird to know by heart. I still think the album cover is beautiful though.

TMBG is definitely on my list of bands where I know most of their early stuff top-to-bottom.

I definitely know every note, verse, and chorus of Lincoln.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l0...2uqxo1_500.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51xUJbbGF7L.jpg

I actually think it is their best album, but yeah I also know Lincoln and the self-titled inside and out as well.

these few in particular:-

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/image....L._AA300_.png

not only do I know it by heart, I can play the entire thing on the guitar

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...500_AA300_.jpg

Dylan - Blonde On Blonde

I can recite the entire album's lyrics

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...500_AA300_.jpg

well, not this version, but the 1988 reissue

Yeah, I shouldn't have said "not nearly" - I definitely like Lincoln the most but Flood and the s/t are the other two good ones. Maybe Flood's better than s/t overall but the best songs on s/t are perhaps better than anything that came later. On topic: I know all three by heart too. Don't let's start.

wow.....it's so nice to see so much They Might Be Giants love :)....like both Janszoon and Engine....Flood was a very important record for me when i was young....and i agree that Lincoln is their masterpiece (maybe not masterpiece....but my go to album)....i have been known to make entire rooms of people shut the fuck up just so we can hear "i don't want the world, i just want your half" :)

Their later stuff is pretty awful though. That Malcolm In the Middle song sounds like it was done by blink 182 or some ****. They Might Be Blink-182?

jesus christ.....for some reason thinking about They Might be Giants flashed me back to my room in 1990 and the fact that my walls were covered with those god awful huge cd boxes :)

Well, I don't get around how you get around.

I sort of agree about s/t. It's little uneven—I'm not a fan "Hotel Detective" for example—but at its best it's fantastic. My favorite tracks are probably "She's an Angel", "Absolutely Bill's Mood" and "I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die".

Lincoln is a very close second for me, it's just that I love every song on Flood while there's one song on Lincoln that I don't really like ("Santa's Beard"). That said, Lincoln has some of my absolute favorite TMBG songs—"Ana Ng", "Purple Toupee", "Where Your Eyes Don't Go", "They'll Need a Crane", etc.—and it easily has the best lyrics of any TMBG album. Actually, now that I think of it, TMBG are generally pretty underrated in terms of lyrics. They have a pretty poetic way of expressing the simple and mundane, the opening lines from "Ana Ng" for example:

Make a hole with a gun perpendicular
To the name of this town in a desktop globe
Exit wound in a foreign nation
Showing the home of the one this was written for
My apartment looks upside down from there
Water spirals the wrong way out the sink
And her voice is a backwards record
It's like a whirlpool and it never ends

Yeah, s/t, Lincoln and Flood are great (as are most of the B-sides on Miscellaneous T), and Apollo 18, John Henry and Factory Showroom are pretty solid, but after that everything I've heard has been pretty meh. I feel like becoming a full band turned them into lazy songwriters.