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"Birdhouse in Your Soul" is a song by American alternative rock band They Might Be Giants. It was released in early 1990 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. It includes an atypical snare drum pattern and modulation among four keys. Production was handled by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley.

"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 early on for release as a single. An early two 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.

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. "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. The music also interpolates elements of "Summer in the City" by The Lovin' Spoonful. The car horn like trumpet sound in the bridge of "Birdhouse in Your Soul" recalls the sounds of traffic in "Summer in the City" and both songs use similar rhythms in their chord progressions. Linnell states that these references were inspired by the intense heat during the album's recording in the summer of 1989.

The music video for "Birdhouse in Your Soul" was directed by Adam Bernstein and filmed in New York County's Surrogate's Courthouse building in Manhattan in 1989. The video features Linnell and Flansburgh moving and performing erratically amidst a group of dancers dressed in red plaid shirts. In the video, the dancers wear masks made from sunglasses affixed with an image of the eyes of William Allen White, whose face is used frequently in the band's visual material. These props were designed by John Flansburgh. In an article on They Might Be Giants music videos, Emily Petermann speculates that the zombie like behavior of the dancers, coupled with the video's warehouse setting, evokes "oppressed factory workers". Petermann finds this view to be at odds with the song's "cheerful" music. On the other hand, the "non sequitur" lyrics and "surreal" musical elements—such as modulation—are complemented by moments of "nonsense" in the video, such as when "[Linnell and Flansburgh's] performance becomes embedded in a bizarre situation or the performance is abandoned altogether." Reviewing the single alone, Stewart Mason elaborates that, compared to previous releases, the high production value highlights Linnell's and Flansburgh's "knack for dynamics and arrangement." Mason also speculates that the song's popularity stems from the modest depth of its lyric, which is somewhat oblique on the surface but ultimately "easy to figure out", giving the listener a sense of pride in their understanding. Chris Willman, writing for the Los Angeles Times, predicted the track would become a "college radio standard".

A cover of "Birdhouse in Your Soul" was featured in the Pushing Daisies episode "Pigeon", which premiered on October 24, 2007. This version was arranged and performed by series composer Jim Dooley with vocals from actors Kristin Chenoweth and Ellen Greene. The cover also appears on the show's official soundtrack. In a 2015 Decider article revisiting the episode, Joe Reid wrote that the selection of "Birdhouse in Your Soul" contributed to "a moment that must have felt tailor made for the audience members who responded to it". The song was also covered by Neil Cicierega as Lemon Demon on his second album, Live From the Haunted Candle Shop, which was released on July 23, 2003.