1998-10-01 The Northern Star
Interview with John Flansburgh
By Christine Giovannelli, The Northern Star, October 1, 1998
Christine: Why "They Might Be Giants?"
John: It's just the name of a movie. When we named ourselves They Might Be Giants, I think it just seemed like it would sort of stick out on a marquee. Ya know. It just in such annual idea for a name. Being a full sentence and everything. But uh, the movie of the same name is not of any great emotional significance. It's just an okay movie.
C: So why did you change from "El Grupo de Rock n' Roll"?
J: Oh we were just introduced as that. We had a different name. We weren't ever called "El Grupo de Rock n' Roll". We were just announced as a rock group in the generic sense.
C: So what was your name then?
J: I can't say it's too stupid, too embarrassing.
С: Can you describe your sound?
J: Well ya know, it's rock music. I think what probably stands out the most to people as exceptional is that the lyrics are kind of more personal and less cliche. It's hard to say because we really do a wide variety of rhythms and song styles. It's not easily categorizable, in the sense that a band that a rock-a-billy band does rock a billy and a hard rock band does hard rock. We do a pretty big range of things. And I think our style that we are interested in pursuing our own sensibility. We live in a world where just like everybody else, where we are exposed to a lot of interesting stuff and we don't feel like we have to edit our interests or edit our influences. I think a lot of musicians feel like they have to filter what they do to be understood and they are probably right.
I think we are not very concerned about being understood or misunderstood. A lot of times we are misunderstood and that's not really a big problem for us. Because what we are doing is a little bit complicated and from song to song works on a lot of different levels. Some of our songs are very straightforward and pretty earnest. Some of them have hidden meanings that you really have to understand what the metaphor is to get it. And then there are other songs that are very lighthearted and just for fun. And I think any band that works that way (are) bound to be misunderstood, or miscategorized. We are not a novelty band. I think probably the biggest misinterpretation people have, from all the descriptions you hear about the band, is that they are just a party band or like a silly band. And I don't feel like when I look at contemporary bands we are any more or less self-serious than they are. Most good bands have a good sense of humor and we are sort of in that broader category of groups.
C: So would you say your lyric describing people's desire to wear prosthetic foreheads on their real heads is one of those metaphors?
J: I think in the culture that we live in it probably has a, as crazy as it sounds... Is Brazil a serious film? It's a weird topic but it is also very much a part of the world we live in. Look at how fake the world is. I was thinking about this the other day, you see a science fiction movie about the future and there are all sorts of people involved in ritual scarification and whatever and whatever freaky visions of the future that people have and I think... [Then he said some stuff that he wanted off the record about how weird it is that fake body parts are acceptable in society]
C: So is that why planet of the apes inspired you to write several songs about it in your last album?
J: The whole Planet Of The Apes thing... There are all these unmarked bonus tracks on this new live record that were created spontaneously, we do this thing on stage where parts of the show have been quarantined to create spontaneous songs. Like improvisational spontaneous music, with the band. And sometimes there are very slight guidelines and sometimes there are no guidelines at all. And it is something that we really started exploring in the last five years as a way to kind of create a live show that is interesting for everybody. It's challenging for us to cook up the staff every night. And sometimes it doesn't work but what is interesting about it is for the audience to see improvisational music happening in an absolutely spontaneous go on with out a net kind of way is very unusual. Most things are very set and it's an interesting thing to do. I enjoy it, we cook up these spontaneous songs that for a couple of uptight guys from New England it's very surprising to find myself at this late date in my career actually exploring improvisational lyric writing in public.
C: So you have a lot of freedom with your lyrics during the show?
J: We have virtually no freedom in the way we do 90% of our show. We are really into song craft and editing and we really sort of methodically work over our songs. We are really inspired by the Beatles and pop music from the sixties which is the music from our childhood. Which is much less riff-based and groove-based than music in general today, so we are really into arrangement and verses and choruses and interesting lyrics that develop over the course of these verses. So we are really into songcraft and have been for a long time and it felt like that was our strength but then we've been on the road for twelve years and over the course of the twelve years your whole attitude toward performing... I mean when we started we were crazy nervous and now we practically live on stage so our level of confidence about what we can do successfully in front of an audience has changed. So it has definitely challenged us. This other kind of thing. But it is also really fun. The parts of the show that are improvised are very obviously different then the set thing and it is just and interesting sidebar to the whole proceedings.
C: You spoke of who influenced you as a youth, could you touch on your beginnings as a two-man band?
J: We were both post college aged guys living in Brooklyn and we were living in the same building and we shared equipment like John had a synthesizer and I had a four track tape recorder.
C: Did you actually meet in High School though, on the school paper?
J: We actually met in grammar school. Which, John was a year older than me, and when someone is younger than you in grammar school you don't hang out with them unless you are a total weirdo. So we didn't really become friends and high school and yeah, we worked on the newspaper together. And then we just started sharing equipment and both of us were in Brooklyn. I was finishing up school and John was in this other band that had more professional aspirations than we did. They were like a band that seemed commercially viable. Which was not, I mean for the first five years of They Might Be Giants, we were doing it strictly for our own personal interest. And we started making these tapes in Brooklyn and started playing on each others tapes and collaborating and after like a year we started that and realized that we could actually perform. A friend of ours performed as a one man band with a drum machine and the fact he was actually performing in clubs inspired us to think that we could actually do something in a format besides... Having grown up with rock bands it's very hard to think of performing without a band. I mean we are not a folk act. A lot of times when we were working as a duo people would think that we were coming from a folk tradition because we weren't a full band. Actually, in a lot of ways, all we were trying to achieve was the sound of a band.
C: Were you improvising with synthesizers and whatnot?
J: Yeah, we had a synthesizer that was a pretty basic one and we got into drum machines very early on in the drum machine thing. We did a lot of home taping. We were very excited by the home recording process. And found it very satisfying. And we sort of backed into having a club career in New York City. We started playing pretty much every weekend and the East Village scene took off and we got pulled into that realm. From there we started making records and touring.
C: So how did you get discovered?
J: There were about a million different things that were incremental that you could point to as our lucky break. We were a new band for about six years. It was really laughable for a band that started in 1982, it was very amusing. The reviews would be like "new bands to watch out for in 1991". We didn't do very much stuff in public for a few years, like from 1986 to 1991 or 1992, and a million different things happened. I think every band has a different trajectory. And one thing that is interesting about this band is that we have the slowest trajectory of any band every made. We've always been able to work and there has never been a point we it was like, we can't go on this way. It's always been perfectly fine.
C: Would you say that because you didn't compromise is why you took off slower?
J: I think it would be delusional to say that you are not compromising. I feel compromised by my body type. Saying that a record is done is a huge compromise. Sending a record out into the world is a huge compromise. I mean, I have never felt there weren't basic compromises to be made. I think people are very unrealistic about that kind of stuff. We are picky and I think if you asked people we work with they'd probably say we are perfectionists. But at the same time, we like to get things done and we want people to hear what we do. And we like to have a good time. So I don't know I don't feel like, I've done a lot of things that people might find compromising, but I feel like when you are in a public forum no one asked you to be on stage. It's a presentation, I guess I just never think of it that way, I don't think of like, which part I control and which part is controlled. I think we are constantly sending our little message out to the world and hopefully someone will find it.
C: So you wouldn't say that...
J: I've been on television shows that are hosted by people that I don't... I mean I don't have that much respect for a lot of rock musicians but I am in a rock band. I don't feel compromised by the fact that I am in a rock band, I just want to be in a good one. You are always working for a culture. But that doesn't compromise what you do.
С: But you're not just producing a product for the people?
J: Oh no. Well, you know people have a lot of different attitudes about that. We probably fall under the category of people who are really... Our notion of what we do is pretty much like self-expression. We are not trying to change people's minds, or world-views or hairstyles. We would never pretend that we have that kind of influence over people And I am not saying that that stuff is not significant. There are times when bands are clearly the cultural lighthouses by which people lived their lives, whether it's Bob Dylan or Green Day. Those are bands that are culturally important.
In some ways a band like ours as culturally insignificant as we may seem, I think we are spiritually important because we exist in the world and yet we are free of... we don't have to figure out a way to talk to everybody, we don't have to figure out a way to have everybody understand us. We are just doing our thing, it's clearly a take it or leave it kind of deal. And I think a lot of people find it interesting to hear two not particularly physically attractive guys singing interesting songs about subjects that you won't hear about any other way. And that in and of itself is kind of valid whether or not it might change these people's lives. The music that changed my life was not designed to change anybody's life. So I don't think you have to be thinking in those terms to achieve that kind of stuff.
C: I am assuming that your music has evolved over the years.
J: yeah, some sort.
C: So I was wondering how your last album fits into that evolution.
J: Well, we just did this live record that's sort of a survey of our entire career. But what's different about it is... that is that there are songs on this album that we wrote in the 80's that we didn't record until last year. And the evolution of the way that we approach the material is really obvious. In terms of calculating something I think we really want to show is how far we've come musically over the course of that time. A lot of the songs are much more full blown in performance than they are in the original recording. And that's kind of exciting.
Of the 17 listed songs on the record 5 are brand new and then there are all these crazy Planet Of The Ape songs in the end. Anybody making a live record, you're working against the long and shabby history of live records. Most live records are made under extreme duress. We are fortunate that the band isn't breaking up and we have plenty of other things to do. What happened essentially is we were doing a radio show where you are in a recording studio with a live audience doing this true radio show for spin radio network a couple of years ago. And it was just such a great show and that was really the inspiration. A lot of people have seen a lot of shows and to actually figure out a way to bottle that was a little bit of a challenge. And for a long time we thought that was impossible, because there are a lot of things that just happen once that were hard to reproduce. And I think we kind of met that challenge. It's a pretty good package and a pretty good representation of what we do live. And that was the goal.
C: What piece of advice would you give to aspiring musicians?
J: It's a hard question to answer, honestly. Because every situation is different. I think people should not worry about doing stuff too fast. Many musicians are very calculating about their careers. They think of themselves as having a career, and figure out how to have a career. We were pretty far into having a career before we realized it was happening.
C: What did you do while you were beginning?
J: I was a magazine designer. I started as a mechanical artist which is actually a job that doesn't exist anymore... This was like in 1987. But in terms of advice I think that people worry about, if they do this now, it will stop them. Just make your independent record make your single, let the creepy coke dealer put out your flex-disk. Just don't sign any long-term deals. And don't worry about people stealing your songs. Nobody is going to steal your song. People get so paranoid about this stuff.