Whether surveying animal classification ("Mammal"); a what-if love story encompassing opposite points on a globe (the great "Ana Ng"); or the inexorable march of time through the very song being sung ("Older"), TMBG - of which the other half is John Flansburgh - has invariably made vertiginous mental leaps eminently singable. Linnell's work, however, has always been the more resonant, wringing improbably piquant emotion from the most abstruse subject matter. 

On his first solo album, Linnell has stayed true to his penchant for puzzles and encyclopediana; State Songs (Zoe/Rounder) is, as the second of 16 titles has it, "The Songs of the 50 States" - sort of. 

Except that leaves only 15 songs for the rest of the 50 states. 

And rather than the literal-minded but unexciting litany of state birds,  rivers and industry we might be led to expect, these state songs are, um, something else.  "Montana," for example, is largely a monologue by a hospital patient who feverishly voices this unexpected revelation:  "It seemed to me Montana was a leg.  A leg.  Now I get it.  I'll tell the person next to me, then haul off and die."  Somehow, Montana's "leg-ness," however that may

manifest itself, makes it possible to accept the inevitability of death.   Fair enough.  But there's graver news about "Iowa": "She's a witch.".  "Oregon,"  meanwhile, "is bad/Stop it if you can/Here it comes, here it comes/Now it's after you." 

While a sprinkling of Golden Book-type facts make their way into these compositions, Linnell has opted instead to use the device of the U.S. map as a meditation on states of mind. The states he chronicles here are generally obsessive, delusional, paranoid, fragmented, hypo-manic, in short, everything the stately classroom narrative of our 50 United States seeks to repress.  We are disunited, even within ourselves, as these songs constantly remind us. 

But the lunatic bent of State Songs also finds in its psychotic counter-myths and warped digressions the visionary madness that shaped this nation's impossible contours in the first place. Sure, the West Virginia tourist board will hardly have much use for the mysterious ditty that uncovers in that  state another West Virginia deep inside, and even Maine might not know

what to do with the triumphal tune that places it "at the top of the charts" for having "crushed my evil heart."  But Linnell's medication-ready travelogue captures the truly homespun - not from beauty-pageant runners-up and chili-cookoff champions, but from seething conspiracy buffs, crackpot mystics, winners of nuisance lawsuits and even a talking boat.

The aforementioned title track, "The Songs of the 50 States," is closest in style to the sprightly, skewed power-pop for which They Might Be Giants are known.  But it also holds the closest thing to a key Linnell is prepared to offer.  "The time has come for us to sing about a certain place," he declares, "where everything is in the control of men who are controlling my mind."  The anthemic mode - "I hear the melody, the harmony, the pounding rhythm/The ideas, notes and words" - gives way, once more, to madness: "keeping me awake, late at night/Can't get them out of my mind."  These controlling men and insomniac voices are at the heart of State Songs, affirming that, as the purely American poet William Carlos Williams once noted, "The pure products of America go crazy."

But the insanity roiling beneath Linnell's inspired opuses also gives them a depth and intrigue that make them endlessly fascinating.  And as always, he has succeeded in making the most bizarre and seemingly indigestible lyrical conceits into tasty pop confections.  With nods to an array of national subgenres (stadium fight songs, anthems, pageant themes, rustic musical theater, surf rock) he's made something distinctly, weirdly, proudly American.

Now I get it.

--Simon Glickman