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A few weeks ago I fulfilled a '90s dream of mine and saw They Might Be Giants live in concert. I had been introduced to their music by some upperclassmen in marching band back when I was a freshman in high school. I'm not a die-hard fan, but I always thought they would be great to see and hear live.
They played four nights in Minneapolis, and their first set at each show was a different album. The album that they played at the show I attended was Factory Showroom (1996), which I wasn't familiar with, but it was a great performance. High energy, classic TMBG horns; what's not to like? After the album, their second set was made up of various songs from other albums. At some point, they announced that they would perform "Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love" from the album Flood (1990)...backwards. This is a song that I knew, but I wasn't quite sure what they meant by "backwards." In case you don't know it, here's a link to "Sapphire Bullets" as it's performed on the album (not backwards, in other words). They began playing the song. It sounded normal. What was going on? Then they started singing, and it became clear me what "backwards" meant - literally, sonically backwards! Here's a transcription of the instrumental intro and outro of the forwards version of the song:
These two measures serve as both an intro and an outro, and are repeated over and over again. Since each measure is symmetrical, it's clear now why the intro to the backwards version sounded normal - the outro played backwards is identical to the intro played forwards. It took the vocals to clue me in to what was happening. Here is the end of the final refrain of "Sapphire Bullets":
And here's what happens when John Flansburgh and John Linnell start singing at the beginning of the backwards version:
I've written in the syllables phonetically; "vahl" is the word "love" being sung backwards. Setlist.fm calls the track "Stellub," or, "bullets" backwards. For anyone interested, here's a video of the entire song sung backwards, filmed at First Avenue in Minneapolis in 2024.
I thought it was a really neat trick, and I'm sure it was really hard to learn. There are definitely songs out there that feature recordings played backwards as samples, but the fact that the band taught themselves to play this live places it into a different category for me. Music theorists call things writen/played backwards "retrograde," and the two main places we see this kind of composition is in 12-tone music and in canons. You could play any piece of music backwards, but J.S. Bach wrote a canon in his Musical Offering called a "crab canon" that was designed to be played forwards and backwards at the same time. It's also a symmetrical piece of music, so it sounds the same both backwards and forwards. It's pretty amazing, and you can trace the music in both directions in this video:
Doing things backwards seems to have an air of "wrongness," of being deviant from the norm. During the "Satanic Panic" period of the 1980s and '90s, it was alleged that demonic messages were hidden on recordings of popular music with backmasking, or being recorded backwards. Errant behavior is sometimes explained by other planets being in retrograde, or appearing to move backwards. The internet tells me that saying the Lord's Prayer backwards has some sort of anti-Christian meaning. I don't think that "Stelleb" is Satanic or wrong; I think it's clever. I think that pieces like this, and like crab canons, show an element of compositional curiosity, and speak to certain musicians' desires to question even the most obvious of given circumstances, such as the continuous, one-directional passing of time, even when those musicians are separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles.
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