Two-Headed Boy

Jeff Mangum wrote "Two-Headed Boy", the fourth track of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, 4:26, with a companion, "Two-Headed Boy, Pt. Two" (5:13), as the last track. It was recorded between July and September 1997 at Pet Sounds Studio in Denver with Robert Schneider. It was not a single and has no video that we found. We found no statement from Mangum on what it is about; PopMatters's P. J. Sauerteig reads it, in a 2015 piece quoted on Wikipedia, as a metaphor for two people who failed to merge into one body and now feel interdependent and trapped. Spin placed it among the album's childhood and surreal imagery and as a fan sing-along.

Setlist.fm shows it in 190 setlists, with "Pt. Two" in 175, of 327 for the band. At the Lincoln Theatre in Washington on January 27, 2012, Mangum played "Pt. Two" to open and the song later. At the Orpheum in Boston on January 16, 2014 he opened alone with it, which WRMC's Kate Leib called a warm-up, an icebreaker after all these years, and played "Pt. Two" in the encore. A tape of the Lounge Ax in Chicago on May 1, 1997, on the Internet Archive, predates the album recording and does not include it.

Covers include the Swell Season, the Dresden Dolls, Andrew Jackson Jihad, Robin Pecknold at a Seattle benefit in July 2011, and an acoustic version by Surfer Blood. We could not tell which version our upload carries.