In April 2020 I had tickets to see proto-quirk band They Might Be Giants perform their classic 1990 album Flood for the tour marking it’s 30th anniversary. Or at least, I had tickets from when I bought them in about December 2019 until March 2020, when the tickets evaporated into a powdery mist and blew away, carried forth into an unknowable future date. For much of the following year I went to great lengths to avoid mists of all types.

They tentatively pushed the show back a year, then readjusted, then rescheduled the readjustment, the tide came in, the tide went out, flowers bloomed in the meadow, streams became choked with salmon, a thousand Tuscan suns blazed to life, shone for an eternity, and dwindled to cosmic embers. Somewhere a little after that, a firm date was finally decided upon this past September. Even that was briefly in doubt as John Flansburgh was seriously injured in a car accident this June, one night after managing to commence the tour.

Since the initial cancellation, I’d spent over a year working remotely, got vaccinated, finally saw my friends and family again after the long absence, welcomed a daughter…you get the idea. By the time it finally rolled around, I was a completely different person.

Unfortunately, the person I was now was was a sleepy dad. The kind of guy who wants to want to go to concerts, but doesn’t actually want to go to concerts. And my pal who’d planned to go with me back in 2020 was similarly crushed under the weight of his 2022 life. So I gave my tickets away. C’est la vie. While I’d held out this future event as a personal marker of the end of my pandemic for two years, once it came time to mark it I’d been so battered by those years that I was in no mood. Seems appropriate.

Sensing, I assume, my particular circumstances, TMBG streamed the Minneapolis performance from the tour I missed. So after putting to bed the offspring that was nothing more than a twinkle in my eye when this endeavor began I finally saw my Flood show. It was lovely to hear them do a bunch of album tracks that they wouldn’t have played live in concerts for 30 years, or ever.

The most surprising of these was their treatment of Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love. Specifically, they played it backwards.

Flansburgh told the audience to cheer and applaud before the song, and they proceeded to do it in reverse. It has a geometric plinky-plonky riff and it’s fairly short, so it was a good choice for this kind of thing. The backwards version is called Stilloob, a fittingly imprecise reversal of ‘bullets’. This became evident later in the show when they played the recording of the reversed version backwards, to hear how similar it was to the original. The direction of time, nothing more than impediment. Truly, the Tenet of songs.