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in: Tallahassee songs, Video, Alpha songs, The Jordan Lake Sessions: Volumes 3 and 4 songs

Game Shows Touch Our Lives

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Game Shows Touch Our Lives
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Album

Tallahassee

Released

2002

Artist

the Mountain Goats

Length

3:48

Previous track

"Southwood Plantation Road"

Next Track

"The House That Dripped Blood"

Game Shows Touch Our Lives is the fourth song on the album Tallahassee. It also appears as the 19th song on the 2021 live album The Jordan Lake Sessions: Volumes 3 and 4. It was performed by Kimya Dawson on Tallahassee Turns Ten.

Lyrics[]

Dug up a fifth of Hood River gin
That stuff tastes like medicine
But I'll take it
It'll do 

On the couch in the living room all day long
Music on the television playing our song
And I'm in the mood
The mood for you 

Turn the volume up real high
All of that money look at it fly
And you smoking like a chimney
Shadows crawled across the living room's length
I held onto you with a desperate strength
With everything with everything in me
And I handed you a drink of the lovely little thing
On which our survival depends
People say friends don't destroy one another
What do they know about friends? 

Thunderclouds forming cream white moon
Everything's going to be okay soon
Maybe tomorrow
Maybe the next day

Carried you up the stairs that night
All of this could be yours if the price is right
I heard cars headed down to oblivion
Up on the expressway
Your drunken kisses as light as the air
Maybe everything that falls down eventually rises
Our house sinking into disrepair
Ah but look at this showroom filled with fabulous prizes


Comments by John Darnielle About this Song[]

  • "I'll tell you how the song title was born. It was back when I had cable TV, or a satellite dish, rather. We sat around and watched a lot of TV in those days. That's why we don't have it now, 'cause we became hermits and it was really bad. So we're watching the E! channel one evening, and E! has run out of things to do True Hollywood Stories on, and bios. And so they start flashing in really grainy relief: Pat Sajak, Alex Trebek, Vanna White—yeah—Chuck Woolery, and the guy from Joker's Wild, whatever the hell that guy's name was. He was someone...anyway. So they're showing these, and they said "We laughed, we learned, in every way." And my wife ad-libs, she says "Game shows touch our lives." And I went "Oh, I gotta write that shit down!" -- 2005-06-18 - China Clipper - Olympia, WA
  • "You may hear a lot of talk in your life about the hour of reckoning. People saying, you know, people talk about the moments that they face, as if, you know, as if they got a notice from some office two weeks before the moment was going to come, saying, 'There’s a moment coming in two weeks, you might want to get your ass ready.' You won’t get any such notice, there is no such office for this delivery. Instead, you may be sitting on the sofa, three beers deep and two white Russians, staring at the television thinking to yourself, 'This can’t last forever.' Hoping, praying that it will --or won’t! -- last for the rest of your life, because whatever comes next, it could be worse! You have evidence in your past that it could in fact be worse. But at the same time, you know it won’t be that previous worse, it’ll be some new thing. We live in an age that preaches the value of new things, but I’m here to tell you there some new things that are not so good! Some new things suck gigantic asses! All day long! This song is a song about a couple of people who are face to face with some of those gigantic new asses to suck! They have a lovely television! I’m glad that I gave them a TV!" -- 2006-11-03 - The EARL - Atlanta, GA
  • "Look man, if you move across the country for somebody you figure you're gonna do more than just sit around and get drunk and watch television, right? Wrong." -- 2007-09-21 - Sonar - Baltimore, MD
  • "This is a song about how you find yourself in a relationship that's really not going where you had hoped it would go, and you say to yourself in the seventh year of that relationship, 'Why am I still hanging out here? You know, that's seven years off my life, I only have so many on this planet. That's seven years I've given to this -- well, I'll stick it out another seven, see what happens.' I'm here to tell you that you don't have to give those second seven, really, seven seems like a fair point at which to start cutting losses. But you know and I know that you're not even here tonight if you're into the whole concept of cutting losses." -- 2008-11-09 - Webster Hall - New York, NY
  • "There’s a Led Zeppelin song that goes ‘Good times, bad times, you know I had my share.' Well, this song takes out all the other stuff that was confusing the narrator, the parts about the good times and the having your share. This song is about having more than your share, more than everyone else’s share, bad times coming into your house and overflowing out onto your porch. Bad times. Bad times. Bad times! Game Shows Touch Our Lives!" -- 2015-04-19 - First Avenue - Minneapolis, MN
  • "This song is about you, me, and a big TV." -- 2015-11-12 - Brudenell Social Club - Leeds, England
  • ”This is about a couple who need a divorce” - 2022-05-11 - Aladdin Theater - Portland, OR

Things Referenced in this Song[]

Live Shows this Song Was Played at[]

Videos of this Song[]



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