1992-10 VOX
Melody, Quantity, Fidelity, Melody
By Don McSwiney, VOX, October 1992
Archived from: https://digitalcollections.ucalgary.ca/asset-management/2R3BF1FFHDZQV
John Linnell's name is misspelled "Linnel" throughout. For this transcription, the spelling has been corrected.
"Generally when somebody calls you quirky, they're reacting to what's unfamiliar about what you're doing, it just means that they haven't heard enough of you to feel like it's not the sort of natural language you speak." The language that John Linnell speaks and is speaking about defies logical translation, so you'll have to take pity on the critics who don't get it, they're just used to something a little more predictable and they get annoyed when people don't play by the rules. Linnell is half of New York's They Might Be Giants, fantastically successful by underground standards and widely vilified by critics for daring to be "too clever." Without debating how anyone in this industry can be too clever, (after a brief survey of video hits), I think it's safe to say that this irreverence, this total lack of concern for what people think has characterized the Giant's career from their humble beginnings and largely ensured their success...
"At this point," continues Linnell between bites of a ham sandwich, "I can't say that we're deliberately doing something to startle people, we're just doing the thing that we like. For people who like what we're doing it's not quirky at all."
One thing these two do that so many others don't is give credit to their audience. Credit that they might get the irony, credit to want to see things with a different perspective, and credit to try on new sounds for a change of pace. This guerilla mentality allowed them to walk in the front door of the music industry and sell over 100,000 copies of their first (self-titled) record from a record label the size of a postage stamp. With a crash and a zing, "Don't Let's Start" was on regular rock rotation across the country and people were being tweaked by the low-budget video on MTV's maximum rotation. The two Johns had become a phenomena, but they were doing it on their own terms. They refused a record company deal for the release of Lincoln and broke the album with a series of small club dates in New York. This was at a time when "Anna Ng" was kicking U2's butt off the college charts throughout the states - we're talking big business here.
In an interview with Tony Fletcher in Suddenly, Flansburgh realized this and explained their reluctance as a reaction to the "...big shift in record company attitudes, they're a lot more blunt about saying, 'We want to get this big producer in, we're going to have to do this, this and this.' And it's not the kind of band we are....We're self-created and we do things for personal reasons." Presumably with time and success They Might Be Giants bought themselves a little breathing room and respect and appear now quite comfortable on Elektra, still doing as they please, which Linnell says is the only thing they can do.
"In a way there's something very old-fashioned about what we do, and a little bit out of it. I often think that our records have this sort of new wave sound. Which to me is really out of it, it's like ten, fifteen years old. But that's the way we like to make records, the way they come out is the way we like things to sound you know? So if we change the way we work to try to sound more contemporary, we're just not going to be able to figure out what it is that other people are like. We really don't know how to do anything except please ourselves any more."
This partly explains the They Might Be Giants "creed" which is posted on hanging placards, each word caught between sets of grit teeth. "Melody, Quantity, Fidelity, Melody." The first part is pretty self evident, without melody the duo would have remained in their Brooklyn apartment building and continued their procession of lousy part-time jobs. As it was they set about writing songs, playing as much as they could as a frenetic two piece performing to a pre-taped rhythm section. Songs are what they are all about, and the way they are written both reflects their individuality and ensures that the biggest influences on the band are self-imposed, like too much coffee. Songs are written and then sequenced on the Macintosh and drum machine.
This technical process and the Giant's penchant for bizarre changes and off the wall breaks is one reason why they have remained a duo, as their own logic might prove a little unsatisfying for other rock-style musicians. "We have this kind of technical thing about our song writing which is just the way that we work, but I know a lot of bands who wouldn't really benefit by being more technical. There's something actually about what they do that's very valuable in its non-theoretical quality. There's a lot of bands who put it together with out even considering the name of the chord they're playing. I think that's really great. I find that kind of music a lot more refreshing and I think, if anything, it's kind of a handicap for us that we are sort of conscious of the theoretical aspects of what we do. As into it in a perverse way that I am, I also feel that it can distract you from using your ears and making a record on the way that it sounds, instead of sort of formal considerations."
"Formal considerations" don't really come to mind when listening to a They Might Be Giants record, unless those considerations have to do with things like commitment papers! When I'm asked what the band is like I usually describe them as "mental," implying that what they do, and how they approach songwriting and subject matter is so alien, that I can't imagine anyone having these ideas and walking the streets.
"I don't mean this in a mean way, but we do get asked that question a lot." Linnell looks so weary and disappointed that I am immediately mortified. "'Where do the ideas come from?' I can even imagine that I would want to know about some other band, like, 'Where do they get their ideas?' The more I've been forced to consider this question the more I don't even understand the question. We just make up the ideas, that's where they come from. We don't have a source of inspiration, besides from maybe drinking too much coffee, that we can go back to over and over again. I appreciate the question, but I've never come up with a satisfactory answer."
Undaunted, I asked him to describe the process that went into the song "Mammals," a bizarre lullaby affair with a medical school chorus, or "The Statue Got Me High." "Well in both those cases, they're examples of where you start with an idea that's kind of encapsulated in the title... everything else comes out of that. In both cases those [titles] were the choruses to the songs and that's the way the melody and the vowel sounds of the lyric worked. So then you have this chore which is to write the rest of the song based on what you come up with."
In some ways it kind of sounds like painting yourself into a corner. Remember the word "chore," it'll come up again.
Linnell explains "Mammals": "It kind of seemed like the typical way to write a song like "Mammals" is to use 'mammal' in sort of a metaphor way; as sort of an oddball that isn't connected to the rest of the lyric necessarily or is the name, there can be a lot of different ways to do that. But I was thinking, that seemed like a lot of work, and maybe the easiest thing and the most interesting thing was to go to the encyclopedia and read the article about mammals and try and write a straight-forward song and it's kind of more challenging in a way. That worked out kind of well. We've got a couple more songs where there's just information in the song, from the textbook more or less."
This process he describes, and words like "chore," seem to contradict the Giant's creed of "Quantity." One of the other big problems many reviewers have with TMBG is the fact that they've released over 100 songs on just five records. This seems to imply a lack of quality control and creates the impression that Linnell and Flansburgh can write songs as easily as the Tories can lose money.
"I think we've given people the mis-impression that we write a lot of songs because there's 18 or 19 songs on each album. The fact is that John and I have been doing this for ten years and writing songs for even longer, but almost all of them are from that period. We've made four albums and a thing that compiles all the B-sides, and there's some new B-Sides, so I think the total is about 100 songs now, but that's 100 songs in ten years, so that's 10 songs a year and there's two of us, so that's five songs each per year, so that's one song every three months, so that's a real low average if you ask me, that's pretty pathetic. I don't think we're really prolific song writers at all, and I know that it takes me personally a long time to get up the steam to write a song and plus I have to be in a situation which I'm almost never in these days: At home with nothing to do and then have the idea. I find it really difficult, I don't just knock them off."
This mis-impression isn't helped much by projects like "Fingertips", "twenty ten second songs tacked on the end of Apollo 18 whose brevity lends an air of disposability. Like most people I assumed that they were fragments and out takes pasted together for fun. In fact the project was specially written and recorded for the record. "They were all recorded for that project. We had special people come in and sing them; it took forever. Actually it was really fun recording it, the final recording and mixing of it was actually a pleasure - but putting it together took forever. It took a month to make the demo of it because, I was still kind of writing it while I was assembling the demo. Working at home with a razor blade and a tape recorder, so that was kind of a chore. I actually had it ready for Flood and we kind of had enough stuff already and I felt like, 'Well, I'll just forget about it for now." It almost seemed like that was going to happen this time, and thought, 'This should really go on this record. Because I like the whole way the sequence of the record works now with "Fingertips" and "Spacesuit", [Flansburgh's instrumental] I think it really works in a cinematic way."
It is with this tour that you can see how far They Might Be Giants have really come. Their North American tour largely sold out, they are taking a week off to play an eight day Off-Broadway run in October. Instead of a station wagon and a sound man, they have an entire tour package and all the trappings of a big act on tour; it's taking some getting used to. "When we first toured we had just our sound man and me and John. At one point we had a station wagon with our stuff in the back, and we did a tour of the South that way. We gradually increased the crew and sort of got used to dealing with more people, and gradually getting to the point where there's people who do jobs and you can't really look over their shoulder because they've got a lot to do and you've got to trust a lot of people. It's a little more like a real organization where there's people with responsibilities and it's peculiar to us. We never got into this to be anyone's boss. That's a peculiar situation that we have to adjust to. We have to take on certain responsibilities that we never considered or thought that this was the way to get those responsibilities."
The other big difference is that for the first time ever, Flansburgh and Linnell are touring with a real band, rather than the series of tapes they have used since beginning the project ten years ago, this is also a little different. "It's really, dramatically different," confirms Linnell. "The other thing is that we spent so long doing a tape show that it's just been a long time since either one of us has been on stage with a drummer on a tour. We did a couple of shows in New York a long time ago with a bass player and a drummer but it was an upright bass and the drum kit with brushes so it was sort of a jazz rhythm section. This really is a rock band. We've got a really loud rhythm section. I don't know if they're abnormally loud, cause I don't have anything to compare them to, but about a week into this tour I figured out that if I wear ear plugs I can suddenly hear everything that's going on on-stage the way I was when it was just John and I.
"The dynamic is so utterly different, it's hard to even put into words what's so different about it. Aside from the obvious things like there's this kind of spontaneity going on on-stage that we just couldn't have before. It's also a little more of a 'normal' show in another way which I kind of regret. I think there was something about our stage show when it was just me and John which was a little more un-distilled. The trade-off is that it's just so much more of a rocking, for lack of a better word, kind of a sound. We've got a really great drummer for one thing, he's this guy [[[Jonathan Feinberg|JD. Feinberg]]] who obviously has got it completely together and is a really good listener and pretty much learned all the songs on all our records before we even auditioned him. He's just extremely gifted. The bass player is Tony Maimone from Pere Ubu, and he has his own distinctive style that I think really perfectly complements what we're doing. It's really a pleasure to play with someone like that. I've been hearing Tony's for years and years and I know that he's also an extremely versatile bass player, as well as very powerful. It was a real honour to get him to come and play for us. Kurt Hoffman is the guy who plays woodwinds and keyboards, he's somebody who we've known for a long time, who we personally like a lot. It seems like we've picked a really good bunch right off the bat, and that's made it a lot easier to get going. I played in a band before I was in this one and we spent about a year getting to the level of tightness that this band achieved after about a week and a half."
The band will likely stay together to record They Might Be Giants next album, which should make for an interesting change. The last part of the Giant's creed, "Fidelity," doesn't really brook discussion, since it's plain these Johns just won't do anything they don't want to. Reflecting on the agony of songwriting. Linnell pretty much sums up the biggest limitation on They Might Be Giants, "Sometimes it's really a lot of work. It doesn't get easier. It seems like the more you do it the easier it should get but it's more difficult to challenge yourself to come up with something you like."
In the final analyses it's just like Dylan said, "If you've got to serve somebody, serve yourself!".