"Get in Line" is a song written by Steven Page, Ed Robertson and Jim Creeggan and recorded by Barenaked Ladies for the soundtrack album of the FOX animated sitcom King of the Hill, released on November 2, 1999. The song's lyrics are loosely based on the King of the Hill character Dale Gribble, a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
Music video[]
The song's music video was the band's first to be directed by Phil Harder and was filmed in Seattle in 1999.
The video for "Get in Line" by Barenaked Ladies
The video begins with animated caricatures of the band members drinking beers with Dale Gribble while he tells them how he avoids having his mind read by aliens. The band members then become their live-action selves and perform the song in a cardboard mockup of King of the Hill's animated setting, while terrorizing the still-animated Dale.
Though some of the animation is original to the video, it also uses clips from previous episodes of the show; most notably, the scene in which Dale sprays pink insecticide is from the Season 1 episode "King of the Ant Hill".
There are two edits of the video, one with additional animated footage; notably, the "ah-ah-ah-ah" vocals are sung by the characters Hank, Bobby, Bill and Boomhauer, and when Dale is about to spray the yard with insecticide, he is joined by Peggy playing tambourine and LuAnn playing maracas.
Trivia/Notes[]
- Tyler Stewart has mentioned that recording the song was one of the first times the band used ProTools (the industry standard software for digital recording) and that some of the drum fills were assembled in post-production.
- In the liner notes for Disc One, Steve mentions that the song was written in a hotel room in Copenhagen, Denmark and a dressing room in Cologne, Germany; the band toured through these cities on June 30th and July 1st, 1999.
- In an episode of the podcast recorded during the Barenaked Ladies Are Me sessions, during the segment "What Were You Thinking When You Wrote That Song?", Steve and Ed mention that the song's main guitar riff was originally written for a cover version of "Stay" by Oingo Boingo that was recorded for a movie soundtrack but never released; the band then started using it for their cover of Duran Duran's "Rio" during live shows before finally using it in "Get in Line".
- According to Steve in the video's commentary on Barelaked Nadies, his own caricature looks more like Howie Klein and Ed's looks more like David Kahne; both were producers employed by Reprise Records at the time.