I called Terry Pratchett, because he loved stories too, and told him that I’d found something he’d like better than chocolate. “Shoehorn with Teeth” became the theme song of the Good Omens signing tour. When we were under stress, we would sing it together. We were under stress a lot.

I bought “Birdhouse . . .” as a single, the first CD single I’d bought. There was an Ant on there too, crawling up someone’s back in the nighttime.

I bought Flood as soon as it arrived in the shops. In a break from They Might Be Giants tradition it didn’t sound like it had been recorded in someone’s back room. There were guest instrumentalists, a lush sound, strange samples. It still sounded like They Might Be Giants, but this time they were bigger giants.

The songs were, for the most part, dispatches from an alternate universe, slices from stories and lives we would never quite know. That didn’t stop me thinking about them, though, or making up my own tiny stories to go with them.

It was the first album to come with its own theme, for a start. The world would end, but that was all right, because this album had begun. Yes. It had “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” a song by a proud night-light who is descended from a lighthouse. It had “Lucky Ball and Chain,” which looked back on an unusual marriage.

It had “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” which I was sad to discover had never been performed as a sand dance by Wilson, Keppel and Betty. It had “Dead” on it, a song about final things and the meaning of life. “Your Racist Friend,” which comes into my head whenever I find myself having a conversation with anyone who begins a sentence with “I’m not a racist, but . . .”

It had “Particle Man” on it, finest of all superheroes. Terry Pratchett liked “Particle Man” so much that he put a watch with an Aeon Hand in it in one of his stories, which I thought was very unfair, because I had wanted to steal the idea for a story myself.

“Twisting” made me sad—I was certain there was a suicide in there somewhere. “We Want a Rock” was surreal in the best sense: it only made sense if taken literally, and then it gained a dream-sense. Perhaps everybody does want a prosthetic forehead, after all.

I think that “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair” is really called Mr. Horrible, and I am afraid of the Ugliness Man.

It had “Hearing Aid” on it. A song with an electric chair in it that somehow seemed to be filled with sweetness and gentle age.

“Minimum Wage” put visions of stampedes in my head, with the cowboys all carrying placards. “Letterbox” was the kind of tiny horror movie in a box I loved, its lyrics all tumbly and twisted.

“Whistling in the Dark” is what we all wind up doing, after meeting people who are not unkind, but still leave scars.