1995-03 Cornell Daily Sun
John Linnell: The Dazed Interview
By Erica Eisenstein, Cornell Daily Sun, March 1995
Archived from: https://web.archive.org/web/20031018222137/http://www.tmbg.net/articles/cornell1995.html
DAZE: I've heard that the group's name was taken from Cervantes's Don Quixote.
LINNELL: Well, indirectly, yeah. The name comes from a movie. And in the movie they refer obliquely to that part of Don Quixote where he spears the windmill, and gets carried up by the, you know, whatever you call those things, propellers, arms ... sheaths! That's what they're called, "sheaths." Yeah, I guess we just thought it sounded interesting. We weren't really thinking "manifesto" at that point, we were just thinking "interesting name unlike other names that are around." We wanted something that was open-ended, that didn't sound too harsh but didn't sound too stupid, that didn't sound like we were trying to be cool, but we were trying to be cool.
D: Why Don Quixote? Are you guys big fans of literature?
L: Well, I never actually finished the book. But it seems like a good story. No, I guess we're big fans of music. That's where we're coming from, you know.
D: There's a line in one of your songs off John Henry where you say "I saw some of the worst bands of my generation / applied by magic marker to dry wall," and I was just wondering who you think the worst bands of your generation are.
L: Well, that's not, you know, we don't write autobiographical material. It's not really a personal complaint on our part. The song is from the perspective of somebody else. That's one of those things that for some reason, if you write a book or if you're writing a screenplay or something, you can say "I" and people know you don't mean yourself. For some reason if you say "I" in a song, people assume that it's as though you're sitting on stage actually speaking plainly, doing something other than creating entertainment for people. You can write from another perspective. In fact, that's pretty much exclusively what we do ... Well, obviously we write from ourselves. We only know ourselves. When you write a song about an experience somebody had, it's not an unedited slice of your own experience. I guess you could do that. I mean, there are people who do that, but that's not what we do. The thing to bear in mind is when in a song we say "I killed my parents," we're not actually confessing to something in the song.
D: You said in an interview that you think it's actually harder to write a good straightforward lyric than an obscure one.
L: I think that's true, yeah. It's really challenging to be simple. I think that's what I meant. It's not so much being obscure. But I think there's a way that you can say something that's direct and that's the challenge. It's harder to satisfy yourself writing something simple. It's easier to write something complicated and say everything you're trying to say. The more complicated a lyric is, the more things it suggests, and the more vague it can be. I like those sort of overloaded lyrics. Sometimes a lyric that's just utterly a mess can be really entertaining. There are bands that write lyrics that are pretty obscure that I think are interesting, like Guided By Voices. I don't really understand their lyrics too well but some of them are compelling anyway.
D: Do you worry about that when you're writing, that people won't understand your lyrics?
L: I think we could worry more about that. The thing is that when you're writing, when John and I write I think we're mostly talking to ourselves. We don't really think very hard about what is gonna happen to the song, and it's hard to write a song where the whole way you're thinking, "Now of course our mid-western demographic will miss this, let's see." It's much easier to write something that's personally satisfying, and I think that's where you tend to get into being unclear sometimes. Of course, we understand what we mean, even if you say something that's like in code, it's pretty obvious. But I don't think that when we write we're at the point where we don't have hidden meanings. There are things which are not obvious in the lyrics which maybe leave something out but if it leaves something out that means we're not telling you the whole story. That may not be enough for some people. You know how there are stories that sort of end in mid-air, and you think "Well, what happened next?" Well, in the story, nothing happened next. I feel like fiction writers get more of a break than song writers in that regard, cause you can have the story end in mid-air and people aren't going, "Well, I didn't get it."
D: Can you describe the creative process you guys go through?
L: It's hard to say. I think it would be easier to work on the stuff if it were easier to describe how to do it but I don't really know how to write a good song. It's just sometimes you come up with something good, that you like, but I don't really know where it comes from. It just seems very lucky sometimes. And then often you feel unlucky because you don't have any ideas and you don't know what to do to get them. We don't really go through the newspaper or go to the movies and try to steal ideas. I mean that's probably what happens in a way, you do "appropriate" other stuff but it's not direct, you don't actually plan it out.
D: I know that your band has expanded recently. I was wondering why you decided to so this and whether it's going to be a permanent change.
L: Well, we never know what we're going to do next so it's difficult to say what's permanent. I think the permanent thing as far as They Might Be Giants goes is that it's John and my project. I mean, if we stopped working together that would be the end of the band, and that's the one thing that defines it. So, other than that we have a band now but I don't really know if that defines the project. I really like the people we've got now. Our bass player is Tony Maimone, and he spent about 17 years of his life in Pere Ubu. Our current horn guys are Timothy Newman and Jim O'Connor. Jim played with the Monkees, and both of those guys have done a million different gigs.
D: A friend of mine told me that you started by taking over the P.A. system at your high school and playing one of your songs. Is that true?
L: Uh -- not exactly. That sounds like something John [Flansburgh] said. I can barely even remember this but he worked at what was the radio station at our high school for a period of time. The radio station was just a guy in a room playing records and it lead to a loudspeaker in the cafeteria -- that was it -- and I think what happened was that John played music that he and I had put together over that thing, and that was one of the first things that John and I had ever done together when we were like 16. I had forgotten all about that until just now. That was probably the first collaborative music we did together. But we also worked on the high school newspaper together and that was kinda how we got to know each other.
D: Do you remember what song that was?
L: Oh, it didn't really have a name, it was just some noisy thing that was done on tape.
D: Who were your favorite bands in high school, when you were first starting out?
L: Well, this is embarrassing but I was really into Frank Zappa when I was in high school. I hate that because I really wish I could say that my favorite band was The Velvet Underground. Unfortunately I was heavily influenced by Frank Zappa. There are a lot of things about his music that I don't like now. I feel like he had a very condescending attitude towards his audience and it kind of taught me not to be like that. But on the other hand I always thought his music was really interesting early on. Unfortunately he got into this routine of being really gross.
D: So who's John Henry?
L: Well, he's this folk figure from the 19th century. There was this song about John Henry, he was born with a hammer in his hand and he was a steel-drivin' man. The thrust of the song is that he had a battle with a machine. They were trying to figure out who could drill through more rock, a steam drill or a human being. John Henry was the apex of human railroad workers, and he won, he beat the machine. But he exhausted himself and died. It was sort of a conclusive battle. Well of course the machine took over and of course people now use machines to drill things. It's kind of a story about the Industrial Revolution. For us it's related to the fact that we now have a band composed of human beings whereas throughout the 80s and early 90s we used machines to make all our records. So there you have it.
D: One of my friends thinks the song "Particle Man" is about promoting homosexual rights because of the pink triangle. And I read this book about people who had contact with aliens and the triangle was supposed to be the symbol of aliens coming down to Earth, so that's my personal theory. I was just wondering what it really means.
L: Well, they're both interesting, but Triangle Man isn't really a symbol for anything specific, it's a more extremely open-ended metaphor. There's no code to that song. It's just about a character that is for no moral reason sort of over the weaker things. It's just a story about unfairness wins out
D: And I must know, please, what does Ana Ng mean?
L: I mean it generated out of this simple idea of imagining someone on the exact opposite side of the globe. There's only one person for you and they're located at some point at random on the globe. In Ana Ng, the person is located at exactly the opposite pole. That's all there is to it. Then there was this Pogo cartoon that I read when I was a kid. The characters are going to dig to China and one of them is wondering what's on the other side of the world and he actually pulls out a revolver -- it was weird to see a gun in one of these comics -- and he shoots through the globe.
D: In the last track on John Henry you say "No we're never gonna tour again." Are you kidding, or is that just not about you guys?
L: No that's not about us.
D: Good!