1992-04-01 Flagpole
The Behemoth Giants
By Hillary Meister, Flagpole, April 1, 1992
Archived from: https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn94029049/1992-04-01/ed-1/seq-6/
"One thing that we find that works well is we do these very small songs, unaccompanied songs where it's just one voice and one instrument — it actually seems to bring a certain intensity to the big places that we play," said John Flansburgh. He is one of the Johns that makes up the two John band — They Might Be Giants. The other John is John Linnell, accordion player. Flansburgh plays guitar and... glasses? They Might Be Giants comes from what Linnell states as, "The name of a movie made in the early seventies. We wanted a name that was outward-looking and paranoid."
They Might Be Giants are silly, provocative and simply unpredictable. The two have at least eleven recordings including EPs, oddball releases and what have you complete with their brand of sophisticated absurdity. They're also beginning their tour right here in Athens, at the Georgia Theatre on Friday night, April 3. With each album come new surprises. On their latest Elektra recording, Apollo 18, they've utilized the shuffle mode found on newer CD players that rearranges the tracks and plays them differently every time you hit the button.
Flagpole: What is this shuffle mode thing? I have an "old" CD player and it has nothing like that on there.
John Flansburgh: I think most of the new ones, mine doesn't either — a friend of mine's does, but you just press this button and it just plays the tracks randomly. We have this song that's 20 different refrains, all sorts of song fragments put together in this one order. But we realized that we could actually index them separately; make the CD think of each little bit as a different thing. You could just press the shuffle button and check out a completely different arrangement of the record.
FP: "Fingertips" is definitely a strange little piece...
JF: Yeah, it sort of marches along. John has been talking about doing something like it for a long time — just creating a piece of music that was all unrelated, complete recordings. Similar to those "25 Golden Greats" late night TV collections. So, that was sort of the inspiration for it. I guess part of it was you hear some of these songs that you've never heard, a fragment you've never heard. It's often very intriguing that you want to hear the rest of it but you never do. So, part of it was just creating the enigma behind the fragment.
FP: Yeah, there are some strange little fragments — "What's that blue thing doing here..."
JF: [laughs] Do you remember — there was a TV commercial on where I grew up in Massachusetts that had this song on it that went [sings] "All the chapel bells are ringing..." Did you ever hear that?
FP: Sounds familiar...
JF: I actually heard that song in its entirety. I had never heard it until, at Christmas time, I was at my aunt and uncle's house and they had a copy of that record. It's a stranger song than the fragment but it was so strange to hear the full thing after hearing this little bit. The song's called [laughs] "All the Chapel Bells Are Ringing" and it's a really, really poorly constructed song, it's really dull. But it was really interesting to hear it...
FP: Tell me about your new album, Apollo 18, and your production duties.
JF: We produced the entire thing from top to bottom. It made the whole experience really happy and exciting.
FP: You didn't find it to be too much work?
JF: You know, it is more work in a sense, but we really have a clear idea of what we want so that made for a lot less problems in the studio. There was a lot less arguing and a lot more fruitful exploration. We do a lot of experimenting when we're in the studio, and the problem is where do you begin when you're working with a producer — where does the experiment begin and end?
FP: You know it in your head...
JF: Yeah and I think we're as riddled with self doubt as anybody. I guess somebody who is an engineer complimented the production on the record and said, "the best thing about this record is that it doesn't sound like it's self-produced. There isn't a part where all of a sudden like, 'wow! That guitar is way too loud." I think we really kept our eye on the big picture.
FP: You know what you want too, where it might be difficult to explain that to someone else.
JF: Oh yeah, yeah. And also unjustifiable. On the very first song, "Dig My Grave," the vocal is sung through a fuzzbox. I don't think there's a legitimate producer who would be... well, I can't imagine there'd be too many that would be overjoyed when the band comes in and says. "We want the song to have a horrible vocal — a really, really ugly sound. So, what do you think, huh?" There tends not to be that kind of spirit behind things. But it sounds really cool.
FP: What's the musical spokesperson thing for NASA entail?
JF: Our only job is to tell people about International Space Year. [It's] really a year long event... there are a lot of things happening in the scientific community about it, especially 18 different countries' space groups, like NASA is the representative for the United States. They're getting together to try to create an international space program as opposed to national space programs. It's specifically anti-military. The politics of it are that NASA is being linked up with the Defense Department and I don't think that anybody who grew up in the real prime era of space exploration feels too comfortable with that. A lot of really positive things come out of space exploration like figuring out things about the environment. It's not all just...
FP: Shooting up spy satellites...
JF: Yeah, it's almost like nationalist bravado or whatever. I guess it's just trying to reclaim space for the philosophical, the beautiful thing that it could be.
FP: Throughout most of your albums you seem to write about scientific matters or small, minute details most of us ignore like... nightlights ("Birdhouse in Your Soul"). Tell me about some of the songs on Apollo 18.
JF: Well a lot of times we just use physical things as metaphors and then there are times when they are observational songs. There are actually a few songs that we recorded now that are information songs. There's a song called "James K. Polk" on the EP last year that was about James K. Polk, that contained a lot of historical information about him. "Mammal" is certainly in that tradition. It's a different kind of song than most you hear. It seems cool. Remember Johnny Horton? He does historical songs that are hilarious.
FP: "Istanbul..." was kind of like that.
JF: "Istanbul," the politics of the song are kind of dubious. "It's not nobody's business but the Turks" is the problem. There's a whole bunch of Greeks that would disagree with those sentiments. Let's see — the song "Dig My Grave" — the title is actually taken from a number of folk songs that have that same title. In New York, you can buy the Folkways record catalogue for about a dollar at Tower Records [laughs], I mean every record has been cut-out and on sale in their bargain bins for pennies. So I bought all these Folkways records and one of the records had a number of songs on it called "Dig My Grave" and it was pointing out how the same song could be transformed by going from one place to another. They had a New Orleans version of "Dig My Grave" and a Maine folksong version of it and all these various versions. They were like different songs. I thought it would be interesting to do a complete update. The only thing it has in common is the title, really, but that's a good title.
FP: Final question... which one of you sings???
JF: We both sing. It's really 50-50. I sing "Dig My Grave," Linnell sings "I Palindrome I," I sing "She's Actual Size," Linnell sings "The Statue Got Me High," "Mammal," "Spider," I sing "The Guitar," Linnell sings "Dinner Bell," I sing "Narrow Your Eyes," "Hall Of Heads." I'm the guitar guy...