Rhino / Wea
2005
A User's Guide To They Might Be Giants
About This Album
They Might Be Giants have a surprisingly large amount of collections in their discography; most of them, like Then: The Earlier Years, are dedicated to cataloging the band's first few years. Rhino's double-disc set Dial-a-Song remains an excellent, extensive overview, but until A User's Guide to They Might Be Giants, there hadn't been a worthwhile single-disc collection of the band's music. This is somewhat understandable, considering just how many songs They Might Be Giants have written over the years -- and at 29 tracks, this collection isn't that much bigger than some of the band's regular albums. As its title implies, A User's Guide to They Might Be Giants tries to represent as many of the group's different kind of songs as possible within a relatively small package. For the most part, it succeeds, balancing the Giants' best-known songs with some more offbeat choices. "Don't Let's Start," "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," "Birdhouse in Your Soul," and "Ana Ng" are all present and accounted for, along with educational/historical favorites like "Meet James Ensor," "James K. Polk," and "Why Does the Sun Shine (The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas).
Track List (try tracks 4,5,7,8,11,12,14,17,18,20,21,22 and 25)

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