1992-02 Rock Star Interviews
Rock Star Interviews: Conversations with Leading Performers and Songwriters
By Petra Zeitz, February 1992
Interview with John Flansburgh excerpted from pages 236-242. Book published in 1993.
John Linnell and John Flansburgh have known each other since grammar school. They became friends in high school in Sudbury, Massachusetts, where they worked on the school paper and recorded some songs together. After high school they moved to different states. Linnell played in the Rhode Island band the Mundanes. Flansburgh played in a couple of hobby bands during his time at college in Ohio. Both of them moved to Brooklyn in 1981. They started working on their first home recordings and played in clubs in the Lower East Side district, calling themselves They Might Be Giants.
By the mid-eighties they started to get noticed on the downtown scene for their live performances. Many people in and outside the New York area discovered They Might Be Giants through their Dial-A-Song service. They offered songs recorded especially for this phone line and the only charge was that of a regular call to Brooklyn. The band's 1985 demo tape was reviewed in People magazine and they were approached by a small record label regarding an album release. A quick succession of events vaulted the band into the national spotlight. Their self-titled debut was widely praised and sold over 100,000 copies in its first year of release. The Giants also became MTV regulars.
After the release of their second album Lincoln, the band signed with Elektra records. In 1990, They Might Be Giants released their first major label single "Birdhouse in Your Soul" which became a Top Ten hit in the UK. Two enormously successful albums, Flood (1990) and Apollo 18 (1992), followed. They Might be Giants still rehearse in John Flansburgh's apartment in Brooklyn. The following interview with him took place in February 1992, after NASA had declared They Might Be Giants to be the official rock band for the 1992 International Year of Space.
Since you finished recording Apollo 18 you seem to be traveling the world to promote it. Is that the case?
Yes, we're traveling an insane amount. We're in a different city every day and I feel 100 years old.
You made the successful Flood album in 1990. How does Apollo 18 compare to it?
It's a wilder sounding record than Flood. We're very happy with the way it came out. It's the first record that we produced entirely ourselves, so we're very proud of it on a personal level. It's a very different record in a number of ways. John bought a couple of saxophones when we started making the record, so there's a lot of horns on it. We just have a better understanding of how to get around in the studio.
Didn't you want to hire a producer this time?
We hate working with other people. On most of the songs you just hear the two of us, but some friends of ours also play on the record. Usually we only have people coming in if it's an instrument we really have no ability to play. We have violins on a couple of songs and John tried playing the violin and it was really torture for me. So we hire a professional violinist when we need violins. By and large we're not afraid to do everything ourselves. I play mandolin on some songs. I'm not a very good mandolin player, but the spirit is there. We're not trying to be Steely Dan, you know, we don't want to be perfect.
How can you recreate your studio music in a live show when you can't play that many different instruments all at once?
A lot of melodies that are played by different instruments on the album, we play on an accordion or on the guitar. In a concert, John plays the accordion and I play the guitar. We also have a drum machine and a sequence space. It's very minimal compared to the record, but it's more rock'n'roll. The live show is a very different musical experience than our records.
Do you tour extensively every time a record comes out?
Yes, we spent all of 1990 on the road doing 170 shows. We also played in Japan, Australia, England and in Germany. It's funny, but we didn't get to places like Spain or France. I'm always interested in playing in the more exotic places. Being on tour in England is fun because we have a lot of fans there, but the fact that the culture is so similar to the Unites States makes it less exciting. At home, we usually play in theaters, but it really depends on the size of the city.
Do you enjoy playing festivals too?
When we first started doing it, it was very scary. You'd look out and there was just a sea of people. It was very hard to get used to. Then you realize that it's a very casual, happy experience. A festival is not quite as intense as playing in a club or playing in a theatre, so we started to relax about it. We used to be overwhelmed by the fact that it was the biggest crowd we ever played for. It actually is just the opposite because you're very far away from people and they can't hear you that well.
How long have the two of you played together as They Might Be Giants?
This is our ninth year of performing together. We met each other in grammar school and became friends in high school. John is a year older than me, and in school you can't be friends with somebody who is a year younger. It's against the rules. So it wasn't until we were a little bit older that we actually became friends. We worked on the high school newspaper together.
Were the two of you into the same music at that time?
In a way we're lucky, because we have grown up with the same music. We were teenagers in the same town and we discovered a lot of the things together. I think we have very different tastes in music , but we have a lot of similar experiences. John is very into melody and harmony; he's a very musical person. I certainly enjoy melody and harmony, but I also like to hear people screaming.
Are you the one who wrote titles like "My Evil Twin" and "Dig My Grave"?
John and I wrote "My Evil Twin" together. "Dig My Grave" I wrote after I saw a lot of thrash metal bands play. Some of my friends are into thrash metal and they took me to the shows. It was the first time in a few years that I actually got a chance to see a lot of bands perform. So I think a little bit of that seeped in. The title of the song is actually taken from a bunch of folk songs that all have the title "Dig My Grave." I have this record that collects four of five versions of a song called "Dig My Grave" and they're really mild folk songs. I thought it was great and so I wrote another song called "Dig My Grave."
How did you come to be chosen by NASA as the official band for the international year of space?
It was an amazing accident. We were talking to people at NASA about getting photographs for our album cover. So they knew who we were and they knew that we were going to be having a record with a space theme or a space title. So they told us about this program and thought this might be something that we were interested in. We were very flattered that they thought we would be good spokesmen. I don't know if we are. I don't even know what we're supposed to do. They've already told us that we don't get to go up in a rocket, but we have had unlimited access to their photo files, which was very nice. The international space year is actually independent of NASA, but it's a program to promote international space exploration and try to create an international space agency. They want to specifically stop the space exploration as being an excuse for military research. It's a really powerful, positive thing. We were happy to be part of it.
Do you feel patriotic?
No, we're not patriotic. It was nice to be involved in something that actually could create something better out of the government. The international space year was set up to get back to a more positive idea of what it means to explore space. It's one of the few things about technology that I think gives people a better spiritual feeling.
Are you fans of science fiction adventures and shows like Star Trek?
We're not the kind of people who read science fiction at all. We're more interested in the amazing real aspects of science. We don't like the fantasy elements. It's the actual difficult beauty of the world and space that we're interested in.
You changed your record label a couple of years ago. Why did you want to sign with a major company?
We wanted to release our records on one record company worldwide. It was really practical because if we had stayed on an independent label that had that capability it would have been fine. But it was just getting to be a real headache and one thing about independent record labels in the US is that they tend to not stay in business for more than five years. At the time it seemed like a big accident was about to happen and we wanted to make sure we weren't the victims of this accident.
Isn't it difficult to be a top artist on an independent label and suddenly become one of many on a major label?
In some ways it's exactly the same. In other ways it's quite different. When you're on a big label the rules that have been set by the superstars are obeyed for you. We don't have to debate a lot of issues. For instance, we don't like to do autograph appearances because it makes us feel strange and we can just say to a major label, “We're not going to do it” without them taking it personally. Whereas when you're working with a smaller label they have a very practical understanding of what it means to do something or not to do something. They get really mad if you're not willing to do it. In some ways, you're actually more free when you're on a major label. But there are also struggles: We had to take a stand to produce this record ourselves. We really wanted to arrange our songs and we thought it wasn't up for debate. The difference between major and independent labels is nothing compared to the difference between working with people or working by yourselves.
You're living and working in New York. Isn't the music scene rather elite there?
I have a lot of musician friends in New York who come from a very different musical background. What has made us friends has nothing to do with music. It's interesting to me that somebody would say that the scene is elite, because I go to parties and I don't feel that I don't belong there. When we started playing in the East Village it was a very jaded, cynical version of the Fillmore in San Francisco during the hippie days. They had three bands on a night and they made a point of the three acts having nothing to do with one another. That made it more like a community in a way because you all were performing. Ultimately it happens at the same time. It was challenging to us and I certainly don't think musicians in New York stay in their ivory towers.
How would you describe your music if you had to categorize it?
Usually when people ask me to describe it, I describe what instruments we play and that our songs are two minutes long and that they have verses and choruses. I think we're like the Beatles only with messed up lyrics. There's no easy category for what we do. We're pretty much by ourselves and it would be weird if another band came along that was like us.
If you have to choose an opening act, would you have somebody who is a bit like you or rather a band that's completely different?
We always like to work with people who don't have drums. We usually had solo performers opening for us; a lot of times they had things in common with us. They were singer/songwriters with a sensibility that was so much like us, but that's not necessary. I think it would be nice to have a girl group open for us. Sometimes I feel like the whole rock business is so male-oriented that it's really boring. There are just not enough women in rock. There are not that many of them and when they get famous, it always happens really fast.
Is it difficult these days to actually survive in the music business?
You know, we're not ambitious. I live in the same apartment I lived in before we even started the band. My rent is very low. We're happy with being able just to make the kind of music we want to make. We're really on our own and I don't feel like we're in competition with anybody else. We're just doing our thing.
Has your band name anything to do with the baseball team the Giants?
It's funny, because on the New York sports pages, whenever the Giants lose they always say "They Might Be Giants." It's actually the title of a movie made in 1971. The movie is not very good, but we thought it would be an interesting name for a band. Since we named it that, everybody in the sports world is very into using it. But we're not the kind of people who are interested in sports.