"Birdhouse in Your Soul" is a song by American alternative rock band They Might Be Giants. It was released in late 1989 through Elektra Records as the lead single from the album Flood, making the single the band's first release on a major label. "Birdhouse in Your Soul" is the band's highest-charting single in both the US and the UK, and is one of their best-known songs. The song's lyric is narrated from the perspective of a nightlight. Due to its largely digital composition, it contains some unconventional musical elements for a pop song, including an atypical snare drum pattern and modulation among four keys. Production was handled by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. Background "Birdhouse in Your Soul" was one of four songs on Flood produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley; these four songs alone exhausted two-thirds of the album's budget. The track was selected for release as a single early on. An early one-minute demo version of the song was made available by the band via its Dial-A-Song service a year before they signed with Elektra. Recording and composition The melody to "Birdhouse in Your Soul" was written several years prior to its recording for Flood. John Linnell has stated that he "shoehorned" the lyric into the existing melody. The lyric, which is narrated from the perspective of a blue nightlight shaped like a canary, is hyper-associative, rapidly connecting disparate topics such as Jason and the Argonauts and The Longines Symphonette. Elizabeth Sandifer and S. Alexander Reed have noted movement between lyrical themes is a recurring motif throughout Flood. However, Linnell has commented that he feels the lyrics ultimately sound like stand-in "dummy lyrics". "Birdhouse in Your Soul" features an unconventional drum beat, which was programmed by Linnell, wherein the snare drum sounds on every beat. During production, Linnell created a demo using a more standard pop drum beat with the snare drum only on the backbeats. However, Langer and Winstanley emphatically rejected this change, which Linnell credits as saving the song. Musically, Reed and Sandifer note that the song makes an unanticipated jump from its initial key of C major to E-flat major, and then back to C major. The frequent key changes (18 in total) may be a product of the album's largely digital composition and production; they call the album in general "modular" in its movement between musical ideas. The track's later shifts to