Being born in 2003, I'm part of the generation that was the target audience for TMBG's kids music, but being from a non English-speaking country was obviously the reason I didn't grow up with their albums. (I think I would've ADORED Here Comes Science if I had known it existed). But I watched plenty of Playhouse Disney, it was the only channel my mom allowed me to watch aside from Discovery Kids. So my earliest exposure to TMBG was through the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Their voices were dubbed over of course, but the instrumental songs were the same. I would literally forget that show existed for the next 10 years, but I figured I'd get it out of the way since it was technically my first TMBG experience.

I would've probably kept being one of the countless people who heard TMBG somewhere without even knowing, but the circumstances aligned perfectly for me to like this band.

As a younger teen I liked grunge and metal. I hated any music that used too much piano or synth stuff. My favorite band was Primus. After failing to introduce my circle of real life friends to them, I turned to the internet to find other fans, as I always end up doing with everything I like. Instagram was my social media of choice at this point in time, and I saw someone who made some fan art of them and I followed them.

I checked their profile and saw they also posted a lot about this band called They Might Be Giants, a band I had never heard about in my life up until that point. I told myself I'd check them out sometime. They kept posting memes about it and other pieces of fan art and I finally decided to check them out. I looked them up on YouTube and the first result was Birdhouse In Your Soul.

My first thoughts were "oh this video is kind of uncanny, it rocks", "his voice sounds interesting" and "damn, I should get a turtleneck". As for the song, it was one of those things I found kind of grating at first but that I just knew I'd love upon giving it a second or third relisten. And that's literally what happened. I looked them up on Spotify and when I saw they made the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse theme (this was before they split up their adult and kid music) I flipped my shit. So I had listened to them before after all! I just never knew! That was so intriguing to me. I just had to know more!

Not even a month had passed when I started obsessively reblogging gifs on tumblr. Teenage me thought young John Linnell was cute. Adult me thinks he looked like a lesbian, and maybe that's why I found him cute. But in a more serious, less weird note, I was so happy when I realized they were releasing songs EVERY WEEK. Being there for Dial-A-Song 2018 was awesome, even if my knowledge of the band was limited and my presence in the fanbase was new. I think the rest is history. I got into a couple other bands over the following years, some of which I started calling my favorites for a while, and most of which I don't listen to anymore, but I've always been able to come back to TMBG. That's why they're my favorite band.

I got fully thrown into the hyperfixation again when I got super obsessed with Snowball In Hell. There was something about it that really scratched an itch in my brain, it just sounded warm but depressing at the same time, I related to it because by that time I had been working the same job for over a year and was frankly sick of it (I still work that same job lol) and I just love any songs with spoken word samples. My brain decided it was finally time to get fully back into TMBG, so I re-listened to all of their albums, rewatched Gigantic, started venturing into their demos, and most importantly: I showed them to my mom. That's how I know my hyperfixation was powerful, if I'm unashamed enough to show it to her.

She ended up recognizing the Ana Ng video! She doesn't remember where she saw it, but she knows she did at some point when she was about my age. She likes them now, she thinks they're funny. She also says John F and John L look like a dad and his teenage son.

I bought myself a TMBG shirt. I love it :o) I love this band a whole lot.

Additionally, if you feel like roasting my taste in TMBG music, here's my 20 most favorite songs by them as of now. No particular order, and this is subject to change.