1990-05 Making Music
Land of the Giants
By Bob Winsome, Making Music, May 1990
Archived from: https://tmbgareok.tumblr.com/post/628973902120501248
GOD KNOWS, a top ten single is no guarantee of lasting fame. And They Might be Giants Birdhouse In Your Soul has just the right amount of bounce and humour about it for the tag 'novelty band" to be bandied carelessly around Is this the wrong end of the stick? The thin end of a wedge? The back end of a fridge? The Giants step forward to tell us where they're coming from.
"There's this whole thing that's like, 'Well, they're not very funny comedians.' And you just want to write a letter saying, 'Excuse me, we're not comedians, we're musicians...'" This is John Flansburgh. Both the Giants are called John. But that's no problem if you use our handy memory prompt. Flansburgh has a hard G, as in glasses and guitar. The wirier John is Linnell, as in the mnemonic 'Lad ingests not nearly enough large lunches'. He plays the accordion. And he agrees with Flansburgh, though he admits it gets tiresome complaining.
"The thing is, we're neither a comedy act nor this heavy-handed serious thing. And because heavy-handed seriousness has had such an intense vogue recently, we've really stuck out as this band that 'probably thinks they're funny'."
Of course it is a notoriously difficult thing to do, to be funny in song. They agree, but Flansburgh's quick to point out, "That's not what we're trying to accomplish. Being funny is just something that happens on the way, and we choose not to edit it out. We probably could, but I think our music would be a lot less interesting. We enjoy laughing - a lot. But it's obvious to me that it's not humour music. It's not about making people laugh - it would be really a different kind of music..."
What is their kind of music about then? Well, it's mostly about one minute 45 seconds - "Our standard song length." But if you want to know what it sounds like, all I can say is that they somehow manage to draw on most musical styles you can think of without ever descending into pale parody, and emerge sounding like no-one but They Might Be Giants. And lyrically, they're not afraid to tackle anything. On the new album, "Flood", for example, they sing with the same conviction about big subjects like "Women & Men" and being "Dead", as they do about smaller things like "Particle Man" and Birdhouse. But where does all this stuff come from? The sleeve notes credit all writing jointly to the band - how true is that?
"We've probably written most of our songs separately," reveals Linnell, and Flansburgh adds, "We each have a certain input. Sometimes it's very open, and sometimes you have a very particular thing in mind, and you want it executed that way. We have to play each other's songs, for sure, so we allow the other the luxury of making up their own part." There are limits, as John L points out. "He can't write a song that goes, 'John Linnell Sucks,' cos I have to hear it and approve it." Flansburgh turns to me in a conspiratorial aside, "But I've been working on one..."
PROLIFICITY
This is a prolific band. In four years they've released over 70 songs (short but beautifully formed). More than most people produce in a lifetime.
So do they write spontaneously, knocking songs together in the studio? John L shakes his head. "Everything we've done, pretty mach, is written and thought about beforehand. The more you think about what you're doing beforehand, the better it sounds. There are all sorts of studio techniques, using delay and stuff to add parts to songs, and that never seems as good to me as thinking of an extra part and having that added on. The band is, like, not lazy."
They Might Be Giants early live shows at small clubs in New York's East Village encouraged their prolificness. Rather than repeat a popular set, they were often asked to play all new songs each time. Although, John F. confesses, "Some of the songs were so stinky that we had to throw them out right away. We'd let them out for a public viewing and people would go, 'Aaargh', and we'd have to forget about them. One of the great things about doing lots of shows is that you actually get better at what you do. Guaranteed.
"When I first started writing songs (in the early 1980), I could barely play at all. It was very difficult for me even to play and sing at the same time. I would write cogs by figuring out a chord progression then doing a kind of Morrissey thing of singing a melody over that. An time went on I realised you can do it in a much more direct way by coming up with a melody first, then you just have to figure out how it's going be arranged.
"It's interesting, the first piece of musical equipment I ever bought was a tape recorder. I used to do these Brian Eno tape loop things."
At the time, schoolmate John Linnell was working musician, and the two got together occasionally to make tapes. "We'd just make them for friends. The ides was never at all to gig or anything." But these beginnings obviously had a profound effect on Flansburgh. "Some people play an instrument and they don't see a tape recorder for the first 20 years. I've always felt directly involved in the making of the recordings - it seems like a big part of it."
This custom was upset slightly when it come to "Flood" - their first major label release - and the employment of Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. Flansburgh explains: "The record company were info the idea of having some one produce the whole record. They didn't really see why it was such big deal that we produced it ourselves. We came up with the idea of them just working on the potential singles, so there would be something that would sound remotely like the radio. Part of that was sim ply making the songs longer. I wouldn't have wanted to put together "Hearing Aid" or "Minimum Wage" with Clive and Alan - even though I think they're really good producers. I don't think those songs need anybody else besides us."
The band are into structured songs, on the whole. They acknowledge the influence of The Beatles, Elvis Costello... (And art rock? "No, we liked the idea, but we listened to more glitter rock.") They admit a penchant for the music of the 1940s and 1950s, the songs of Cole Porter, Gershwin, and the interpretations of Sinatra, Nelson Riddle "There's so much information about songwriting in those songs," John Accordion points out. "Arranging information as well, like the way that vocal harmonies work. And the idea of using musical instruments as effects was appealing, instead of the more standard rock jam ethic. Like you could have an instrument that only played one note in the the entire song and it would sit right in the middle of the song."
"There's something really un-dynamic," adds John Guitar, "about hearing all the instruments blaring all the time. Nobody gets a chance to sound good." He proceeds to have a go at musical conventions in general. "People just think of a rock show in this very schematic way. It's supposed to have two guitars and a big set of drums and be incredibly, unpleasantly loud, and have smoke machines and lights, and be really bogus. We have a very stripped down way of doing things, which is true to they way we are as people. We just wear our street clothes on stage, and use a minimum of props. We want our show to be as entertainment packed as possible, but it's not so much about that excitement of seeing somebody sweating and smashing the drums. A lot of our songs are lyric or melody driven - it's not quite so physical. It's still pretty high energy. I mean, I don't think we're going to retire tomorrow..."
CARDBOARD
OK, so how do they make all that noise if there's only two of them? On stage the John duo rely fairly heavily on pre-recorded backing tapes, except for the odd quiet number. But what about on record? How many of those multifarious sounds are from real instruments, in the old fashioned sense, and how many samples? John L calls it, "Half and half." Session players are more in evidence on "Flood" than on They Might Be Giants' previous platters - three horns and a violin appear on around half a dozen of the album's 19 tracks. Most of the other noses - guitars, accordion, a diversity of keyboard sounds, from toy organ to hi-tech synthesis - come from the heads and fingers of the two Johns themselves. What about the percussion?
"The drums are pretty much all fake." Flansburgh mentions the improvement in this area since their early days - "We use computers - that's a very natural way of putting together rhythm tracks. You can really do a lot of very intricate stuff. That's probably why they sound more close to real drums." And, Linnell adds, they had some human help as well: "Flansburgh found this guy to do drum rolls and fills. He programmed them by playing on to, like, an Octopad."
For Flansburgh there are a couple of rhythmic highlights on the album. "On Constantinople, I wanted every drum to sound as if it was being played by a different person, not like a drum kit, more like a percussion group. That was an experiment. It's completely unquantized, totally loose - kind of 'six people in a circle beating on different percussion objects' sound.
"The song Hot Cha is all cardboard boxes. I cut up the box that the Macintosh computer came in and sampled it...
"There was a kick, and a snare, and I used a piece of metal from my refrigerator to be the crash. It's really satisfying to hear a wholly different set of sounds."
Another source of sounds is the network of people trading samples in New York. Whether tailor-made or off the peg, there's a liberal scattering of samples throughout "Flood". Some familiar - carhorns, doorbells, doors slamming, gun shots, bottles smashing - some too obscure to identify, and they crop up in the most unexpected places. All the saxophone you hear on the record is sampled - Flansburgh found some good sex quartet albums - although Linnell actually has a baritone sex which he sometimes plays on stage.
The Giants' musical abilities are amply demonstrated, but it's the breadth of their imagination and the freshness of their approach that makes them unique. And when it comes to making records, those are the vital factors. The Giants step back: "We're not really great musicians on a technical level, but we are very tuned in to what we need to do so make things work. If you're sensitive to what the song needs, you can find really simple solutions."
They might be right.