1997-04 Kris Maxwell
Phone Interview with John Flansburgh
By Kris Maxwell, April 15, 1997
Archived from: https://web.archive.org/web/20031228163639/http://www.tmbg.net/articles/flans1997.html
The Flans Files
KM: Hello?
FLANS: Yes, is this Kris?
KM: This is he.
FLANS: Hey Kris, John Flansburgh from They Might Be Giants.
KM: Hey, how're you doing?
FLANS: How's it going?
KM: Not bad.
FLANS: Are you ready for this?
KM: As ready as I'll ever be, I guess.
FLANS: Ok, you got a tape recorder?
KM: Yeah. Paranoia test [fumbling] this tape call... this phone call is being tape recorded.
FLANS: Good.
KM: As long as you're OK with that.
FLANS: I'm more that OK with it.
KM: OK.
FLANS: I requested it.
KM: Oh yeah, so you did. Yes. Um, I can't remember her name, I'm sorry...
FLANS: Jill.
KM: Jill! yeah, she told me about that.
FLANS: Cool.
KM: So where are you calling from?
FLANS: Where am I calling from? I'm calling from Richmond, Kentucky.
KM: Ah, Kentucky... y'all doing a show there tonight?
FLANS: Yeah.
KM: Cool. How long have you been there?
FLANS: Actually I got here yesterday. I actually rode on the bus, which I don't normally do. I usually drive.
KM: Really?
FLANS: Yeah, so I got here early. It's like a 600 mile drive.
KM: Oh, goodness. Where did you come from?
FLANS: [jokingly] You're asking all these questions that make me feel like I don't know what I'm doing. Where was I coming from? I was coming from Florida.
KM: Oh, wow.
FLANS: We did a bunch of shows down in Florida in Jacksonville, St. Petersburg and Miami.
KM: So, a lot of time on the road?
FLANS: Yeah, a lot of driving. The drive to Miami was the real killer. It was 750 miles down from Raleigh, North Carolina. And then the show got canceled because of a hurricane, and there was no indoor contingency, which seems really dumb. But hey, I wasn't in charge of the gig.
KM: It wasn't your deal. You just play music.
FLANS: Yeah, I was just there to play. But we came a long way to not play.
KM: [laugh]
FLANS: We actually drove through the storm all the way down.
KM: Yeah, it must have been really rough.
FLANS: But anyway, let's get on to the formal portion of the interview. What's the tough question?
KM: Oh, the tough question?
FLANS: Yeah, hit me with one that will make me really stammer. Start with the one that you were kind of afraid to ask.
KM: OK [looking frantically through notes] Well, here's a good one: why do you make music?
FLANS: That's actually kind of easy to answer. It's really kind of a compulsion. I remember pretty well the very first idea for a song that I had when I was about 18 years old. It's almost like a low-grade mental illness. I think a lot of people present themselves as if they're doing something for very public reasons, but it's a lot closer to just hearing voices in your head, more than anything else. I wish it was out of some kind of ambition or desire to express some kind of general idea. There's no manifesto behind being a songwriter, at least not for me.
KM: It's just what you do.
FLANS: It's just one of the things that I feel like I don't really have a choice in doing.
KM: Oh really?
FLANS: Yeah, I wish it were some other way, but it kind of comes up. This is the way I get to live my life.
KM: Well, that's cool. So, what is the most important thing about your music to you? I don't know how you divide up the task of making up your complete sound, but the lyrics, instrumentation, mood...
FLANS: It's sort of a balancing act. I think some songs have been kind of saved by their arrangement. You might have a song that's not even that strong technically, like the chords might not be that interesting or the lyrics might not be that challenging, but there's some idea within the arrangement that's really fresh and new. That probably doesn't happen as often as others, and that's kind of like winning it in over time.
KM: ...some redemption for the song?
FLANS: Yeah. Primarily we approach songwriting in kind of a standard, 20th-century popular song way, which is really dealing with verses and choruses, trying to make them work together and have the song go somewhere within the course of three minutes. And so in a lot of ways, our songwriting style has more to do with the most conservative approach that you could have. But within that kind of writing there is still a lot of room for personal expression.
KM: Yeah, I would hardly categorize you guys as conservative.
FLANS: But if you think about people who are incredible instrumentalists, or people who are improvisational, or people who deal with experimental music, they do stuff that really defies form. For us, in a way, we've taken on the challenge of working within a formal way of writing a song. Our songs rhyme, our songs have melody, and those are sort of orthodox, very normal ways of working. In a strange way, I think there is something very old-school about what we're doing. Obviously, it's also perfectly personal to us.
KM: Original, to say the least.
FLANS: Thanks.
KM: What is your typical songwriting routine? How do you go about collaborating on getting one of these three-minute wonders put together?
FLANS: A lot of the time, we'll come up with a lyric idea that will be the first line in the song. In general, I think we have an overabundance of musical ideas. I think we feel pretty confident that we could write the music pretty freely. It's hard to come upon an approach to a lyric that's interesting enough to pursue over an entire song. So if you have a good turn of a phrase or something that will motor the whole song, that's often the spark that ignites the rest of it.
KM: A lot of your material seems as if it starts off as a pun or a jab at something, like "I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die."
FLANS: Yeah, I think we're moving out of the non-sequitur thing a little bit, but I know what you mean.
KM: I mean primarily in your earlier works...
FLANS: In a way that might be even sort of a shortcoming, but that is true. But I think there is also a thing about writing a song where you really do want to feel like the music is either supporting the lyric or challenging the lyric in a way that seems inspired. I think we could work on chord progressions all day long and still not be any closer to writing a new song, which is kind of unfortunate because there is something to be said for writing a good, inventive chord progression.
KM: Well, I think lately, on your newer stuff, John Henry plus, a lot of your musical side is more showcased. Your music has always been very lyrically strong, and you've got the weird instrumentation going on with it...
FLANS: Well we didn't put the lyrics on this record [Factory Showroom], and I think one of the reasons we made a conscious effort to do that was so people would experience the songs in their entirety, in a linear way, and not just read along.
KM: I was wondering about that, because this is the first time that you've not had the read-along. I have always found it more entertaining to sit through it and actually figure it out.
FLANS: We're not trying to puzzle people. Sometimes it is hard to understand exactly what we're saying, and sometimes maybe it's not even that important. I think there are a lot of good Rolling Stones songs where it is really not that important that you don't understand what he's saying, but they're still really great songs. But I think for us, we want people to hear the songs in a unified form. So much of it is this balance between the music and the lyrics and the melody and the arrangement. There are all these different elements that we've worked really hard to bring together, and having a lyric sheet kind of immediately skews people's attention to the lyrics.
KM: Yeah, if you're going to have that, why not include the sheet music as well?
FLANS: Actually, that would be really cool.
KM: We'd enjoy it a lot.
FLANS: Just print the chord chart in there.
KM: So, really it's not one thing, it's the big picture?
FLANS: Pretty much. I think that's probably typical of people who are songwriters. I don't think either of us are really just great instrumentalists or vocalists. For a lot of people, that's where their strength lies, and they start with a vocal line or a melody. For us it's kind of a package deal. Probably just because that's what we are better at.
KM: It's very interesting the way it all comes together.
FLANS: Thanks.
KM: How long have you been together, about 12 years?
FLANS: Our first performance was in 1983, and our first record was in stores at the beginning of 1987. It was a while before we started really getting our act together.
KM: So more than ten years.
FLANS: Yeah.
KM: So how have things changed for you over this entire span of God-knows how many years that you've been doing this?
FLANS: Well I've gotten fatter.
KM: [laugh]
FLANS: And Linnell hasn't really turned that corner yet. He's just as thin as he ever was.
KM: Well, I hear married life will do that to you.
FLANS: Yeah. Well, I don't know. I think we've lowered the limbo pole a little bit. We were very nervous when we started out, about boring people, to a point where we were probably too edgy for our own good.
KM: It could be too much caffeine, too.
FLANS: Yeah. I think we felt very insecure in front of an audience. And the fact that we were playing for New York audiences, which are pretty critical, didn't really help. Our general thing was that we wanted to get our stuff out there and then split. It was a very uptight kind of show, and there were no breaks. It was cool in a way, but I think ultimately it's more pleasurable for the audience, and definitely more pleasurable for ourselves to just have a more laid-back approach. We see the value in repeating a chorus a couple times, and we see the value of having a song at a regular tempo.
KM: So when did you know that it was working, that you realized people liked you and that They Might Be Giants was going to be around?
FLANS: Well I think we always figured that people would like it more if we cut out the most boring parts of the pop song, which would be the guitar solo, the big long intro, the many repeated choruses and stuff like that. I think we just threw the baby out with the bathwater a little bit right at the top. To a certain extent, we're still working the same agenda. Most of our songs don't break the three-minute time barrier, but they *do* break the two-minute time barrier. It's been pretty much a continuous challenge for us, musically. Even making Factory Showroom, we were still trying to reconcile some of the challenges that had come up during John Henry just like trying to make a full-band record that was as tense as our earlier records. I think the way in which our first couple of records were made had an automatic edginess to them that was just kind of built into the mix, just considering the instrumentation we were using. We were happy to trade it in for a more full-blown sound, but at the same time we didn't want to lose the amount of personality that the band had always had. I think that was what we kind of lost track of a little bit on John Henry. I think that Factory Showroom is a kind of the best of both worlds. It is definitely a really loud, full-blooded band outing, but it is also a very extreme and strange record. It's very much in the spirit of what John and I started. I think it's very satisfying.
KM: [cough] Excuse me, I have a bit of a cold.
FLANS: Ahh, no problem.
KM: How did the stylistic change come up between Apollo 18 to John Henry?
FLANS: Actually, we had just gotten off the road promoting Flood for about a year when we started Apollo 18, and we were happy to stay at home and work on our MIDI files and write the songs. When we actually went back out on the road to support the record, it seemed like we needed to spice up the show. We flirted with the idea of working with a saxophone player and maybe a percussionist. All of that seemed a little but fussy compared to diving into the live band thing. So we just took it on as an experiment, we didn't really know how well it would work, and how positive the response would be from our audience. Almost right away we realized that in the venues we were playing, which were larger venues, we really benefitted from having a full band. We started out so slow and in such small places that the fact that we were working with a drum machine only meant that people could hear the words well, and they could understand the songs and understand the melodies. All of those audiences in those audiences in those early years were pretty much cold to what we were doing, so every little bit helped. If they could understand the song as they were hearing it for the first time, that was actually really positive. Now that we're making records, a lot of the people in the audience are already familiar with the material, and that's not such a big issue. And a lot of the places we're playing are really large, and even if we were playing with a drum machine, they're so cavernous that they probably wouldn't understand the words anyway. So just having the musical power of a full band has been nothing but a positive thing in the live situation. It just means a little bit more decision making when it comes to actually recording the record. We have to think about how we're going to arrange the song a little bit more. But in some cases, like on the new record there is a song called "Your Own Worst Enemy" that is all electronic, except for a cello, but the drums on it are very electronic. I still find that there's something very cool about working in more than one style or one approach.
KM: So there is still a possibility that you would still do some of the old-school, just the Johns and the drum machine stuff?
FLANS: Well, we've been doing it in a couple of different places, like in Chicago, Boston and New York, we've opened for ourselves in a two-man show. We do a couple of songs from the early days, we do "Number 3" with a tape and a couple of other things. But by and large, most things actually sound better with the full band. It has to be either a sample or drum machine specific kind of song to really sound more effective with that kind of background.
KM: What about the accordion? I know a lot of people miss that, and it seems that it has almost disappeared in Factory Showroom. A lot of people want to know if we'll ever get to hear the accordion again.
FLANS: It is a big part of the live show, and I really like the sound of it. It's really a song-for-song thing. On a song like "S-E-X-X-Y" or "Till My Head Falls Off" it would be hard to imagine those songs being accompanied with an accordion.
KM: It just doesn't fit?
FLANS: Yeah, it wouldn't really fit in. It just comes down to what the song dictates. We've never felt like there's anything wrong with it. We didn't think we had to change our image, or anything like that. And obviously within our fans, there is a great affection for the accordion. It just doesn't come up as often as it did at one time. It's not that intentional, it's just the way it turned out. I think if we tried to get to a more pared-down kind of sound it probably would come back into the picture more. Right now we're enjoying working with all the different kinds of production things that we're doing. As a songwriter it's really a gas to write for horns and strings. You run the risk of sounding like Spinal Tap's late period when you really want to overproduce yourself like that. I think for us it actually works. I don't think it's for everybody. A lot of people who bring in additional voices into a rock band format are just one some kind of ego trip, like they're just changing up because they've already done everything else. But for us, it's the kind of thing that if we'd had the ability to at the beginning we would have taken advantage of it.
KM: Speaking of the full band feeling, the full band sound, how do you come up with these other band members? All the fans I know consider They Might Be Giants to be just you and John.
FLANS: We're the songwriters for the group, and we've been doing this for a very, very long time. The other people are brought in as side men, and living in New York you really have access to the most incredible working musicians you can find. We've had a pretty steady lineup for a long time. We just recently lost our drummer Brian Doherty. I'm not exactly sure what he's moving on to right now. But it's a unique situation. I don't think anyone could walk into They Might Be Giants and say "Ok, you guys have been working together for 14 years, but this is how I'd do it." I don't think it's really appropriate. We have a very established sensibility and we're basically looking for people to support our approach to things. And we work with great people. Graham Maby, our bass player, is one of the all-time coolest musicians around. Every show I do with him, I feel like I'm getting so much out of it. You just know that your playing is getting better because it's almost a challenge to play on the same stage with him.
KM: And try to impress him?
FLANS: Yeah, and just not to screw up. He just doesn't make mistakes, he's a monstrous player.
KM: So you guys tour, what, 90 percent of the time?
FLANS: Well, we tour about every other year, for about a year, and then we make a record. So we'll be getting off this tour soon.
KM: So how do you keep it interesting?
FLANS: Sometimes it's not that interesting. Sometimes it's just traveling. You spend maybe 22 hours of the day waiting to be on the stage, so there's a lot of anticipation about doing a show, it's the reason you're there. It's a naturally exciting thing to do just because of the people, the lights, and it's loud, and it is sort of automatically exciting. Then basically your entire day revolves around doing that, so there's a lot of anticipation to do a good job. So it seems to work. I'm on the road with a lot of sound people and light people who have done a lot of different kinds of shows, and they talk about other people on the road. I'm always amazed at how performers can get from their own shows, form their own careers; they can get very blasé about it. I've never really taken for granted that people are going to be interested in what we're doing. We always feel like we've got to put our best foot forward.
KM: I'm sure your audiences really appreciate that.
FLANS: I think total strangers really appreciate it. That's the way we keep on getting a larger audience for what we're doing. We don't just act like we're there begrudgingly.
KM: Doing someone a favor.
FLANS: Exactly. It's very strange. Performers and musicians are a weird lot, I have to say. Well you know what, I'm getting waved at so I have to split.
KM: I thank you for your time. I'm planning on catching the Kansas show.
FLANS: Oh, great!
KM: So hopefully I'll get to say hi or whatever, and get to talk to you again sometime.
FLANS: Alright, thanks Kris, it's been a pleasure.
KM: Thanks a lot for your time.
FLANS: OK, bye-bye.