1997-04-25 The Indiana-Penn
They Might Be Giants coming to the HUB tonight
By Matthew Ferrence, The Indiana-Penn, April 25, 1997
"Editor's Note: Wednesday morning Matt Ferrence interviewed John Flansburgh from They Might Be Giants. Ferrence and Flansburgh discussed everything from the state of rock and roll to the most current They Might Be Giants disc, Factory Showroom. They Might Be Giants will be playing the HUB at 9 p.m. tonight."
Q: Why do you and John Linnell do so many of your own backing vocals on Factory Showroom?
A: It wasn't a conscious effort. We often do our own background vocals, even since the very beginning. I'm thinking of our first album. Like "Toddler Highway" has got this crazy four part non-vocal harmony to it. It's all me.
When you're writing a song you'll come up with a harmony part that is either...sometimes it's a very small part of the song but it's really intrinsic to the arrangement, then other times it's a really big part to the song and it's really intrinsic to the arrangement.
And in both cases you might have one person do both parts. The one thing about one person doing both parts, or multiple parts is that it makes the blend. It's very easy to come up with the blend.
There's another sort of more street level thing which is that John often cooks up really complicated vocal harmonies that are really difficult for me to pull off and we don't have unlimited amount of time in the studio. So it seems like its just easier to let him do all those parts.
John does do a lot of different things, a lot of underharmonies. There's no philosophy behind it.
Q: Were you trying to experiment with anything on the new disc, moving in any direction with the band? You added the horn section and the complete band with John Henry. But this one the horn section seemed to kind of slip away, but you kept the live band...
A: I think we just wanted to do something that was bolder. That was more, kind of, sonically adventurous and to get back to using the studio in a more aggressive way. Having live drums and the full impact of a live band is really interesting...
Q: But it kind of departs from the tradition of TMBG.
A: I don't feel like it's that important for us to maintain any tradition. There's a lot of things about They Might Be Giants' early records that I'm happy to leave by the wayside. So, it wasn't that important to us to have it carry on in the tradition.
At the same time, there's something about all our records with the exception of John Henry that is very specific, which is that they have a lot of rhythmic variety and hard left turns in the arranging.
Even though our intentions were probably essentially the same when we went about assembling the songs for John Henry, the set up just didn't allow that to happen as much. A hard left turn with a live band just sounds likes an interesting arrangement idea.
Whereas, what you're doing when you're working, taking full advantage of what's available to you in the studio, you can take a hard left turn and it's like you just fell into a black hole. You can really make it an adventure. And I feel like it's important for us not to restrict ourselves.
The one thing about John Henry was that we decided we would allow this sort of "we'll do it all as a band without overdubs" restriction. I don't think it was that meaningful. It actually sort of got in the way. I think there are songs that could have been recorded in a more interesting way if we had not made that rule.
It's also not to say that all of John Henry was done in a tracked up, uptight, Steely Dan kind of way. "Till My Head Falls Off" is basically a live take of everyone playing the song as fast as they possibly can, which is certainly in the spirit of live rock recording. You're genuinely listening to the band playing it. We basically just upped the tempo again and again, and that was the last tempo that anyone felt comfortable at.
We tried another take right after that even faster and it just, like, blew up on the launch pad. We see the value in recording together and we record a lot of things together, because you can work with another and listen to one another's parts and vibe to each other's subtle changes. In a weird way, just kind of having eye contact, having people there, you can do a lot of things musically that would be hard to do if it wasn't all happening at the same time.
But I think there's this second layer to Factory Showroom that really isn't there on John Henry, which is probably what people think of as really indicative of They Might be Giants' approach. We have kind of an anti-band sound. We have a lot of songs where in the middle of the song a new musical element will be introduced, like a new instrument that hasn't been heard for the first two minutes of the song will suddenly come in.
I think for a lot of people who are just rockers or come from a band background, that seems like a really jive idea. And I almost respect what they're saying. I understand where they're coming from, because it's very inorganic and it's sort of a cheat to just say, "I know how to make it more interesting. We'll just change." It's kind of like saying, "I'm tired of eating my main course. I'm gonna eat a candy bar in the middle of dinner."
It's a sensationalistic thing too. But I guess we're enough into the psychedelic experience of recording that we gave ourselves permission to do it. We don't worry about the philosophy of truth in recording. We just tend to think of recording as obviously fake. It's beyond theater even. You can completely fabricate something. And if it sounds good it is good.
Q: Does your extensive studio work on the album make it difficult to make the transition to live shows?
In a way the fact that some of the studio stuff is studio based. makes it easier to reduce or just leave it behind, because you just know you're not going to be able to put that idea across in the same way. And that's fine. In a way that's a kind of relief.
I think if we worked in the in-between way we'd be tempted to do a lot of the really boring stuff that a lot of live acts do these days with computers and synching stuff up and playing clip tracks and stuff like that, which I don't think really works. I've seen a lot of different bands, and almost categorically, the ones that play the clipped tracks sucked.
Which is not to say there's anything wrong with using technology in your show. I'm thinking of a band like Soul Coughing. Their keyboard player only plays samples, he doesn't use any MIDI keyboard controllers or anything that has, like, an organ sound in it. Everything he does is sample based. But he uses it like a keyboard.
If you could hear the full note, you'd realize it's a sample of something else, not necessarily even an organ. He's really listening to sounds and manipulating them. It's very tech-y, in a way. But it's really interesting.
I think the thing about bands that are locking up to DAT and clip tracks, and sequence stuff, is that they are worrying too much about making it perfect. Often people don't even want it to be perfect. I think they want it to be interesting.
One thing people really don't like, which makes me glad I wasn't in a band from the age of 12 and stopped being in the audience, is that people really don't like watching a band that looks like they're working really hard. As a musician you're kind of trained to think technical playing is important and rehearsal is important and your practicing is important.
So you get a lot of bands. where the guy's like squishing up his face and it really looks like the band is really sweating the details. And there's little reward for that from the audience. People really don't like that.
Q: What do you think of the current status of the music industry, of the same-sound bands, of execs not signing bands that sound new and fresh, choosing to stick with the old, proven way?
It's interesting to hear a fresh voice in rock music. For us to hear someone who has a different approach, a really different approach, can be really inspiring, even though we might not ultimately hear a lifetime of work from them.
I guess it wasn't Harry Shearer but the other guy from Spinal Tap was on "Politically Incorrect." The subject drifted to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.
He made this point that I thought was kind of interesting, that the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame neglects one hit wonders. And one hit wonders really, in a lot of ways, push rock along faster than any of the legacy, heritage acts that are promoted as the grand tradition of rock music. The Kingsmen doing "Louie Louie," that one recording is as important as Little Richard's entire career. Or "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson is more influential than the whole Rush catalog.
It's easy to look at the state of music and say, "this is the worst ever," but the reality is - speaking to someone who was a teenager in the mid-seventies - it was definitely worse then. I know it was. It didn't have any of the style or aggression that the contemporary scene right now has.
Even though there's a lot of the grunge stuff that seems like obviously packaged rebellion, at least it's packaged rebellion and not, like, packaged package. When I was a teenager, in the pre-punk era, Chicago, the Eagles, Linda Rondstadt and Rod Stewart were setting up shop. And they were really hard to get out of the way.
Even all through the eighties they were totally in the way, all the sort-of first generation of alternative rock bands were stopped dead in their tracks by Rod's people, or the undead.
Q: Moving back to the new disc, They Might Be Giants has done a number of covers by obscure bands over the years, "New York City," "World That Swings," why?
A: There's always a very specific reason that you cover any given song. Covers that we've done in the band on records like "Istanbul" and "Why Does the Sun Shine" kind of came out of the desire to create this other kind of musical category, like the sort of educational song. It sort of comes out of children's music, but it always just seemed like an interesting kind of song format to us.
Since covering those songs, we've actually started writing educational songs in that style. "New York City" is kind of a category unto itself. As to why we did it, the idea of having a guy sing a song that is essentially a "girl-group" kind of song... They have the power of a rock 'n' roll pop song form, but also instead of "come over here, baby, I wanna make love to you" blues base male lyric, it has a sweeter kind of lyric.
I think it's just interesting to have the gender difference. I can relate to the song. I think it's a great song that's got a really great immediate lyric about falling in love. If you've fallen in love you know what it's about. It's the kind of song I'd like to be able to write but I can't.
So, in a way, it's something that I really relate to but realize that I'm not really good at. So it seemed like a good time to cover.