1997-11-25 The Justice
JustArts Interviews They Might Be Giants
By Steve Mirarchi, The Justice, November 25, 1997
Archived from: https://archive.org/details/thejustice16reel16/page/n289/mode/2up
Published beside a review of Shows/1997-11-19. Portions of this interview were reprinted in an April 1998 edition of The Lincoln Journal, the Johns' hometown newspaper.
Attempting to pin down the ever-elusive nature of They Might Be Giants is a project doomed from the start. The band is wildly popular, yet they receive very little radio airplay. They write songs about former presidents, ancient cities, newspaper ads and art appreciation. Their sound ranges from dance rock to slam-pop to accordion sentimentalism. In every aspect. They Might Be Giants are all over the map. Luckily, vocalist and guitarist John Flansburgh likes talking about the band. The Justice caught up with him before his soundcheck, where he talked about their down and dirty live shows, the evils of decoder rings and his disgust for cheap puns.
the Justice: You have an album named "Lincoln," the opening band on this leg of the tour is Lincoln, and there's a town not far from Waltham named Lincoln. What's the relationship?
JF: To be perfectly honest, for the sake of my parents who still live in Lincoln, our relationship is off the record. But I grew up in Lincoln, and Linnell grew up in Lincoln. I don't think the opening band has anything to do with the town or our album; it's an odd coincidence. It does look strange on the bill; it's like, "Tonight! Pink Floyd and Dark Side of the Moon!" It doesn't really quite work.
the Justice: It does seem appropriate to the band's peculiarity. Speaking of which, I've read interviews where you or Linnell will say that your lyrics aren't meant to mean anything.
JF: I don't think either of us would say that exactly. The thing that doesn't make sense to us is how much people read between the lines on things that are really meant to be taken at face value. We invest a lot of time in creating songs that work at face value. That's where we want to jump off: when people start putting on their decoder rings and saying, I get it. It's like "Animal Farm" by George Orwell! We use metaphors, but we're not that abstract. They're songs: they're not that much more complicated than any kind of sophisticated pop rock song.
the Justice: Is that a paradox? A sophisticated pop song?
JF: It's difficult to write good lyrics: it's probably the trickiest part of writing an original song. It's funny because when people ask us who our influences are, we'll often cite Elvis Costello, probably just because he's a Beatles-based songwriter: he writes economical, short songs that are highly melodic-all the things that we like. But the thing that's strange to me is that a lot of people will probably say, 'Oh, Elvis Costello,' because he has a lot of nonsequiturs and a lot of low-rent wordplay.
the Justice: Low-rent?
JF: Yeah! There are a lot of cheap puns in Elvis Costello songs, and I've never really liked that element of what he did. Even if some of our songs might run parallel to that, I still think it's the weakest part of our songwriting. I can see how people would even see that there's a similarity there, but I don't think in either case it's really the strength.
the Justice: What is the strength, then, of your current album "Factory Showroom"?
JF: I think we write melodic songs, and that's probably our not so-secret weapon. We've written a lot of songs that are sort of tricky that I think appeal to people who like songs that work on more than one level. What we're doing is not "good ol' times" straight-ahead rock 'n' roll. I love straight-ahead rock 'n' roll, but to be perfectly honest I'm a little bit tired of it, and I think a lot of people who love rock music are interested in things that take it to another level or another place.
the Justice: You seem to do that in your shows, where for instance in "Exquisite Dead Guy" you hoist the heads on the poles. Is there an exquisite dead guy on the top of the poles?
JF: It's rock theater; it's like Alice Cooper. Don't look behind the curtain. They're disembodied heads: there's a shock value to it. I file that under good old rock 'n' roll gimmick. It's fun for us; it's a refreshing part of the show just because it's so messed up and different than what most shows are like. One of the things that's nice about the show is that there's something very crummy about it.
the Justice: Crummy?
JF: Yeah, the way that most rock shows are staged is a smoke machine, soap opera aesthetic where if it's not glistening and shiny and on hydraulics then it's just not worth taking to the rock stage. Most stadium shows very much are designed to impress a person with very odd taste. I guess for us, we like the theatrical part of it, but it never seemed that important to us that it actually slick. We go for street-level, with everything presented with structure showing, or a fair amount of honesty. We're not trying to fake anybody out; it's something that anybody could do. To see a ventriloquist dummy head being operating by someone, and you can see them operating it, there's not that much of an illusion there. That's something that we pursue with each show: to keep it straight.
the Justice: Getting back to your records, I love the rawness of your last album "John Henry."
JF: It's an interesting record, but it's the only record of ours that I have a problem listening to because I feel like there was a lot of energy that could have gone into it. We were working with a preconceived template of what we were going to do, which is to make a record with a set lineup. I don't think that's necessarily where our strengths lie; I think the sort of X-factor of our song arrangements is one of the most exciting things about what we do. There are very few bands that are as free as we are to leave players out of a song. We do songs that I don't play on; we do songs that John (Linnell) doesn't play on. It's a very graphic kind of arranging.
the Justice: The horns will come in, the accordion comes in...
JF: Right. The flexibility of it is much more like the way that a pop producer would approach producing a song than a band like the Rolling Stones. As great as they are, there's also this formula of a five piece band; this is the way it's going to be; it's very set. The Beatles were very flexible about what their roles were, and they were multi-instrumentalists.
the Justice: Are there certain songs on "Factory Showroom" that are indicative of where the band is headed?
JF: I think we approach each song and meet whatever it requires. It's difficult for us to ever get a grip on what the overall direction of the band is because sometimes the thing that's on your mind the most is the thing that's maybe most exceptional to the rest of the record. In a lot of ways, a song like S-E-X-X-Y as a production is really exceptional: we've never done anything like it; it really stands out in this exciting way. But it's also a very crass and ugly disco song. It doesn't necessarily suggest that we do more of those; in a way it seems like: mission accomplished. It's hard to say how things will evolve. This most recent record was for us a really interesting project: we felt confident about our ability to both record electronic music and to direct the recording of live musicians. We're finally at a point where we feel equally comfortable with both.