1998-01-13 WPI Newspeak
Interview with John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants
By Sarah Walkowiak, WPI Newspeak, January 13, 1998
Archived from: https://web.archive.org/web/20230226075927/https://issuu.com/wpiarchives/docs/1998_v26_i1
SW: What is your initial impression of WPI?
JF: I've only been here for about five minutes. I drove up the driveway the directions were extremely clear, and, uh, it looks like a gym to me.
SW: Where do you get ideas for the themes and lyrics in your songs?
JF: You know, that's a very difficult question to answer in a simple way, I think a lot of our songs sort of come out... a lot of times the melodies just sort of generate themselves and it's something like you're just walking down the street humming a song and you realize it's a new song, so you just kind of look like someone who's just humming to themselves, walking down the street... In terms of our approach to lyrics, I think that we try to avoid the sort of standard-issue "rock lyric", and at the same time sort of incorporate a lot of the things about rock lyrical writing that probably attracted us to rock music in the first place, which is that there's a lot of things about our songs that have a lot of cultural references that are presented in kind of a low-key, everyday kind of way. I think that it seems really disarming to people to hear a song that might've been written 40 years ago that has some cultural aside in it that is obviously from 1997.
I guess we just approach lyrics in a very personal way, and we just try to do what we do best and we don't worry how it's going to fit into the rest of the world that much. In general, I feel like we've, for better or for worse, gone our own way as far as bands go, I don't think it's ever bothered us that we don't fit into a movement or a trend. I think probably the closest we ever came to it was just kind of at the beginning of the whole college-rock/alternative-rock scene but even then, I felt like we didn't really fit in because we weren't some regional band that had two guitars, drums and bass and some desire to carry on the punk rock tradition. I think in general we always had a more complicated take on music than that.
So, it's hard to say, but I just think that for us, I feel like we've been very lucky just as a band because what we do is so different than commercial bands... It's been an interesting kind of journey for us to be a band that actually has sold records and found a national audience or international audience for itself. In spite of the fact that what we're doing is kind of on the margins of the culture, it's like something that doesn't exist on the radio ...and really is in general the kind of music for small audiences.
SW: What can you tell us about your upcoming album?
JF: I've got this Mono Puff [John's side project] album which is going to be released this spring. That's a very different record than the last Mono Puff record and most [They Might Be Giants] records. It's a very rhythmic, and very different kind of record. I worked with a DJ on a lot of it. Right now we're putting together this They Might Be Giants live album. Like a lot of live albums, it's a strange hodgepodge of different performances and incarnations of the band, with different personnel, and that's going to have probably a half-dozen new songs. There's one song on it called "They Got Lost", that's this very super self-involved story of the band. And so it seems like it's perfect for a live album. It's basically just about us driving around, getting lost. Which is a very common occurrence for us. It basically is thestory of our lives.
SW: How do you decide who gets to sing the vocals for each song?
JF: Mostly, there's always a primary writer for any song. In a lot of cases, there's a sole writer. John [Linnell] writes songs and I write songs and we both contribute them to the band. And in a funny way, there's kind of a style for the band that we feel like is an overarching thing. In some ways we feel like we're actually writing for this other entity beside ourselves. I don't think John or I have ever approached songwriting as a confessional thing. I think we think of it as more like writing a short story, we write a lot of character songs and we write from a lot of different points of view. It's not really that important who sings it, I think.
I've sung some songs that John's written... We've done a lot of songs together. I've sort of been the male lead in some songs that seem like they need a more straight-ahead voice, because John's voice is more... really like he always is John Linnell, whereas I think my voice has got more of an anonymous general male tenor qualities to it... There's a song that's going to be on this live album called "Reprehensible" that's very croony. John sang the demo, and it sounds really good, but it also very much sounds like him. And when I sing it, it sounds a little more anonymous. And it seems like that's what the song called for. You know, it's not... In a way, John's voice has got so much built-in character that sometimes I feel like I'm Art Garfunkel, I can do the official "tenor-guy" pretty voice thing when John wants it that way.
SW: On your most recent album, Factory Showroom, the song "I Can Hear You" was recorded at the Edison Laboratories, how did you decide to go about recording the song that way?
JF: Well, we were invited by the people at the Edison Museum to do this public demonstration of their wax cylinder recording device that Thomas Edison invented in the 1890's. It's sort of hard for people to imagine, but basically the wax cylinder was not only the first recording device, but also it's kind of the predecessor of the phonograph record. It's basically the phonograph in a different format. But it also was the first mechanical reproduction of sound. Except for music boxes, nobody ever had anything where there was a speaker making noise back at them, so it was really a big leap forward in terms of what technology was bringing people. And the topic of the song is basically kind of a tribute to all the different ways that speakers intrude on our lives. It talks about car alarms that talk at you and intercoms and phones on airplanes and all these different ways that little squeaky, noisemaking devices are in our lives and the device it's recorded on is the original thing that did that. So, it's kind of a tribute to the wax cylinder recorder itself. And it was written for the demonstration.
It's a really crazy machine, it actually doesn't involve any electricity at all, which is really hard to imagine, but it was before electricity was widely available. I guess there were people doing electrical experiments, but it certainly wasn't like there were outlets in people's houses. So it's like this contraption that just has a spring loader that you wind up and this heated cylinder is placed on this thing that turns around and there's a couple of these giant cones that you sing into, and they collect the sound pressure of your voice, just the physical sound pressure of your voice into this little tiny cone, the tiny end of it kind of vibrates a stylus, that digs a groove into this warm, rotating wax cylinder and that creates the groove that makes the sound and it's such a crazy idea, yet it completely re-creates the phonograph setup perfectly and it was just a real interesting experience, definitely a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing to be sitting there with a hundred people at the Edison Museum singing into this giant cone and singing this crazy song, it was really fun. It was something I'll never forget, and it made for a really interesting recording and after we did it we just thought "Hey we could put this on a record" and it's not that far field. The engineers kind of looked at us funny when we got to that track when we were mastering the record.
SW: How did you get it from a wax cylinder to the recording?
JF: The engineer at the sessions, this guy Peter Gill, who has a lot of wax cylinder recording stuff, he actually owned the recorder that they made it on, because nothing in the museum can actually be used, because they don't want it to get degraded by use, so he brought in his own collection of wax cylinder recorders and we used his equipment. He's got one that actually has jacks coming out of it that he plugged into a DAT [digital audio tape] machine, so it's completely straight out of the 19th century directly into the very tail end of the 20th. So, it was cool.
SW: There was once an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures in which they had two of your videos. Did you guys have any involvement in this or have you seen it?
JF: Basically, when they started up the Tiny Toons thing, Stephen Speilberg's people called us up and said "We're starting the Warner Brothers cartoons over again, are you interested in getting a big check for permission to use two songs which you've already recorded?" and we're like "sounds good".
Now people are kind of used to the idea of Tiny Toons, but at the time it struck me as hyper-cute, because it's like the baby version of cartoon characters, so they're already cute enough, and it just gets to a point where it's almost like "How cute does it have to be"? It's sort of like baby Muppets. We were flattered, it was certainly lucrative, and in a strange way it's kind of opened us up to a completely different audience and a very, very wide audience. A lot of people found out about the band through that and they've certainly gone on to enjoy our music in a much more specific, focused way. So, it's just like anything else you do in a career like ours.
I just feel like it's important if you're in a band like ours and you believe in what you're doing. You've got to be open to the work that it takes to get your music to be heard. I think a lot of musicians have a very cynical attitude about how much the world is ready for them, especially if you're doing anything that is pushy or edgy or in your face or has some asset to it that makes it not automatically fit into the general scene. For us, it's actually a very positive thing to be thrown into the deep end of trying to make sense of this crummy world in which we live in. I feel up to the challenge, and it really is a challenge. What we're doing and what's considered the "groovy" thing to do are very, very far apart.
SW: It looks like we're about out of time. Thanks for talking to us.