1990-04 UBC Discorder
< Archived Interviews & Articles
Two Guys Named John
By Laurel Wellman, Discorder, April 1990
Archived from: UBC Library Archives
"We have nothing against intellectuals," says John Flansburgh. One half of New York-based duo They Might Be Giants, he's sitting in the chilly basement greenroom of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre wearing a parka. He's eager to defend the band's music against charges by Rolling Stone that it's overly cerebral.
"People hear our music and they don't understand how it could not be a self-conscious thing. We're most misunderstood in that people think there's this very distant approach to the way we write our songs. I think basically we put our songs together in very much the same way the guys in Metallica do. We just sit with our instruments and sing, and we have to be really completely wide-awake and really excited by the sound that we're making, and go, 'That's really cool! I can't believe how cool that sounds!' It's this very real-life, passionate kind of thing to do. It's not something that we listen to a record and go, "That's an interesting rhythm. I think we should take that apart and apply it to our many ideas."
"The main thing about it is I that we don't go to the trouble of . explaining anything to ourselves until it reaches the interview . stage," adds John Linnell, They Might Be Giants' other member.
Linnell and Flansburgh met in elementary school in Lincoln, Massachusetts (hence the title of their second LP). "The first thing I ever heard about John (Linnell) was that he was in the hospital because he had lost his spleen. And everyone in my class had to write him a get-well card," says Flansburgh. Twenty-nine and thirty respectively, he and Linnell have been friends since high school. "You know how kids don't intermingle between grades. It's kind of a sign of being socially retarded, but we became good friends." The band, which has been together seven years, formed a few years later in New York, where Flansburgh was attending art school at the Pratt Institute.
"I would never have imagined art school could be so square," he says. "I couldn't tell anyone I was in a band or I would have lost all my credibility as a student. I was performing at the Pyramid Club on Wednesday nights and coming in to class on Thursday completely bleary-eyed and they were like, 'What happened to you?' And I was like, 'Oh, nothing."
The band chose the name They Might Be Giants from the title of a 1971 movie starring Joanne Woodward and George C. Scott, even though, as Flansburgh says, "It's kind of a sucky movie. We just gave ourselves that name because it seemed like an interesting, paranoid set of words."
"Sometimes I wonder if the name is even that great," says Linnel. "I think we've had a hard time convincing people that They Might Be Giants is not about me and John. People think we're egomaniacs because we're saying, "We're giants, man. We're big."
"But basically, every band name gets used as a weapon of torture," observes Flansburgh.
The Giants' early lack of a record deal inspired the band to start their Dial-A-Song phone line, still operating today at (718) 387-6962 and featuring a new song every 24 hours. "We were just guys in a local band in New York doing a lot of home recording," says Flansburgh. "No one was interested in what we were doing so we had plenty of time to write songs. We thought we needed a way, other than playing in clubs, to get our stuff heard."
The band members do most of their songwriting separately. "People are so anxious to hear that you're twins and best friends and inseparable that when you admit that you do stuff apart they suddenly think you're completely not working in tandem," says Flansburgh. "It definitely is a partnership and I think it is a very positive collaboration. Basically, one person starts a song and guides it through, and the other person offers up an honest appraisal of it, which is a valuable thing to have."
"We obviously have a certain distance on the other's ideas," says Linnell. "We feel equipped to criticize the other person. If some random person was telling me that they hated my song I probably would not be as inclined to change part of it or throw it away."
The success of the poppy single "Birdhouse In Your Soul," a song which is in some ways atypical of the group's work, surprises Linnell. "I think it's too bad in a way. I feel least proud, in some ways, of the lyrics to "Don't Let's Start" and "Birdhouse." The way that songs are set up to be blockbusters, it's hard to do the most specific stuff, the stuff that seems the most meaningful to us. I think of "Chess Piece Face" and "Whistling In the Dark," songs with a lot more going on in them, because they have such a specific mood that they're giving off. You have a strong sense that they've been done correctly and that they're really saying what they're trying to be saying."
"Also, they might seem like more singular songs," says Flansburgh. "When you do a song like "Chess Piece Face," you're on your own. You're dealing with songwriting on your own personal terms. When you're writing a pop song it's like you versus the entire Lennon-McCartney catalogue."
"The melody came first," says Linnell of "Birdhouse In Your Soul." "I think that's how you come up with your most oblique lyrics, by having a melody that's completely done and knowing that certain syllables are probably going to work better in certain places. You really end up going, 'Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch,' by default."
In a similarly organic manner, the title of the new album, "Flood," grew out of the way in which the Giants compose their material.
Says Flansburgh, "We just thought it was a good kind of a, a..."
"Name," Linnell says.
"Good name. I don't know."
"It was his idea," claims Linnell.
"We have a lot of tapes and computer disks when we're putting things together, that hold ten different songs or ten different sounds or whatever," Flansburgh explains. "I end up giving things group names that have nothing to do with what's on them, because there's no way to describe it otherwise. And so I just named a disc "Flood" just because it seemed like a word. I don't know, I heard it on TV or something. I wrote it on the disc, and John saw it and went, 'Huh!'
"It's an interesting word. It's a very non-emotionally loaded natural disaster. Everything gets naturally upset in this very complete way, but it's not very hysterical. People don't go 'FLOOD!' We just like the idea of things being completely shifted. Things happen in floods that are interesting. It re-draws the horizon line in a way that makes you rethink everything. It's a living-with-disaster title and cover."
Because there are only two band members, They Might Be Giants tour using backing tapes. Onstage, Linnell plays saxophone and accordion, while Flansburgh plays guitar, harmonica, and a marching band bass drum so heavy that during the Giants' European tour he developed severe backstrain. Their current tour, recent signing to a major record label, and the release of "Flood" has dramatically increased the band's visibility.
"I have to admit I feel kind of ambivalent about people considering us to be somehow rock Stars rather than just an interesting band," says Flansburgh. "I really enjoy being the alternative, rather than the oppressive person you can't avoid in the culture."
The Giants gave a lot of thought to their decision to jump from U.S. indie Bar/None to Elektra. "They seemed like the least sucky of all the major record labels," Flansburgh says. "They have 10,000 Maniacs, The Sugarcubes, Tracy Chapman, and Motley Crue."
"And Metallica," adds Linnell. "We also got the impression that they among the major labels were going to not interfere as much in what we're doing. I don't think we would have signed a major if we didn't feel we were going to be able to do what we wanted, or at least have the amount of control that we had on the first two albums."
"There was really a reason why we stayed independent as long as we did. We probably could have gotten a major label deal right after our first record, because we sold a lot of records, but it was important to us that we just do the thing that we're interested in and not have to deal with so much of the market forces," explains Flansburgh. "We feel very lucky that we're with Elektra, because it's entirely possible that a big record company would have really tried to ruin us."
He adjusts his black-framed glasses and reflects. "I don't listen to our old records and think things failed, but I can tell when we're stretching out. It seems like a good thing to be in a band that is interested in stretching out."