| Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 | |
| Landscape: | yes |
| Background: | group_or_band |
| Origin: | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Associated Acts: | Horny Genius, Caroliner, The White Shark, Mr. Hageman, U.S. Saucer, World of Pooh, Sun City Girls, Babe the Blue Ox, Fly Ashtray, Job's Daughters, Brown Supper, Supreme Reality, Girl Feelings, Archipelago Brewing Company, Glorious Din, Sun Supreme, Total Fools, S.F. Seals, Three Day Stubble, Colonel Truth and the Berkeley Street Gurus, Pink Gravy |
| Past Members: | Mark Davies Anne Eickelberg Brian Hageman Hugh Swarts Jay Paget Paul Bergmann Gino Robair |
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 (often shorted to 'Thinking Fellers' or 'TFUL282') was an American indie rock band, which was formed in 1986 in San Francisco, California though half of its members are from Iowa.[1] [2] Their albums combine lo-fi noise rock and ambient sounds (referred to as "Feller filler")[3] with tightly constructed rock and pop songs. There is a small but fiercely devoted cult following for the band.
For the majority of the band's career, Thinking Fellers consisted of multi-instrumentalists Brian Hageman, Mark Davies, Anne Eickelberg, Hugh Swarts, and Jay Paget.
The band achieved their greatest critical and commercial success in the mid-1990s, when they signed with the indie rock label Matador Records. It was during this time that Thinking Fellers produced their most prominent albums, Lovelyville, and Strangers from the Universe. They toured the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and the UK in 1994 and made an appearance on the John Peel radio show on the BBC. In 1996 they toured briefly as an opening act for the alternative rock band Live but were not received well by the Live fanbase. Thinking Fellers has been largely dormant since 1996, having toured sporadically and released only one full album, Bob Dinners and Larry Noodles Present Tubby Turdner's Celebrity Avalanche, since.
Elf Power's 1999 album A Dream In Sound featured a cover of Thinking Fellers Union Local 282's song "Noble Experiment."
In 2001, author Jonathan Franzen referenced the band in his novel The Corrections. The character Brian, a snobbish fan of "west coast underground bands," listens to the albums of Thinking Fellers while writing the music software that will make him a young millionaire.
On January 7, 2011, the All Tomorrow's Parties festival announced a Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 performance at the ATP festival weekend May 13–15, 2011 curated by Animal Collective.
In 2017, Beverly Williams's book Survival Kit's Apocalypse quoted the lines "If the sadness of life makes you tired/And the failures of man make you sigh/You can look to the time soon arriving/When this noble experiment winds down and calls it a day" from the Fellers' song "Noble Experiment" from Strangers from the Universe. In 2019, The National interpolated those same lines in their song "Not in Kansas" on the album I Am Easy to Find.