1998-10 Ink Blot Magazine
An Interview with John Linnell of They Might Be Giants
By Jesse Fahnestock, Ink Blot Magazine, October 1998
Archived from: https://web.archive.org/web/19990502084440/http://www.inkblotmagazine.com/Interviews/fr_TMBG.htm
After a decade as one of the country's most active live bands, They Might Be Giants have finally seen fit to release a live album, called Severe Tire Damage. In typically atypical fashion, they've included five new tracks among the old favorites ("Ana Ng," "Birdhouse In Your Soul") and strange diversions ("Spider") that make the Giants live show such an entertaining revue.
Ink Blot asked John Linnell, the non-guitar-playing half of the Giants' singing/songwriting/multi-instrumentalist partnership, to share his thoughts on the TMBG live experience, their catalog of pop gems and whether they've become "The Legendary They Might Be Giants."
Ink Blot: It's been a real evolution from two guys and a drum machine to a live album (Severe Tire Damage) that credits 15 different horn players. Yet just last year you did some shows as just the two of you again.
John: That was really just to promote the record we had out, which was a boxed set that collected pretty much everything that we released in the '80s. So we were doing a show that was just exactly like the old show. But we feel more comfortable playing with a band now.
Ink Blot: Was it exciting to play the old way again?
John: I'd forgotten how nerve-racking the show used to be when it was just us and the tape. 'Cause there are these awful moments where everything stops and you don't have musicians onstage with you to comfort you and support you. We used to have things go radically wrong … really crazy mishaps involving the tape. The whole atmosphere was just so nervous and tense. Now, the guys that we work with are these seasoned professionals that don't make mistakes that the audience ever knows about.
Ink Blot: Do you feel like seasoned professionals yourselves?
John-Well, we are professionals. And we're seasoned, so I guess we're seasoned professionals.
Ink Blot: You've been around for over a decade, you've got a boxed set, a live album...does it ever feel like you've become an institution to your fans?
John: We don't want to think of ourselves in those terms. We don't want to be "The Legendary They Might Be Giants." We're still active and forward-looking.
Ink Blot: Do you think people have come to expect certain things from you?
John: They absolutely have. And a certain percentage of the time we can deliver that, and then sometimes we kinda need to challenge them and challenge ourselves to do something that's not what they're coming to see. We try to strike a balance between the two, because, you know, we like the audience to like us.
Ink Blot: Having dabbled in just about every kind of modern music - jazz, polka, punk, salsa, country - are there any surprises left for you as musicians? What's left to explore?
John: I think that we probably have turned a corner about trying to cover all the genres. We kinda figured out that we're not really a band that plays every genre; that isn't the point of what we're doing.
Ink Blot: I see you're still doing some of the jazz stuff.
John: I'm not sure which songs you're referring to.
Ink Blot: "Lie Still Little Bottle," "She's Actual Size."
John: Oh, right. I don't think of "Actual Size" so much as an homage to jazz. It doesn't refer to jazz so much as to a kind of popular music that existed before rock. As exemplified by the work of Sammy Davis, Jr. I wouldn't call that jazz, but you know, there's a lot of pre-rock music that we're into.
Ink Blot: You've used a lot of weird sounds on your records. Do you have any unfulfilled wishes in terms of stuff you'd like to do live?
John: Not so much unfulfilled wishes -- it's more that we don't seem to run out of possibilities. But like I said, it's not so much about playing every kind of music. I think that we have a particular thing that we do, and that's what our voyage of discovery is. Figuring out "our bag."
Ink Blot: Who's the perfect opening act for TMBG?
John: We have certainly played with bands that we didn't like, although I'm not going to tell you who they are. But there were also a lot of bands that we didn't know much about until we started touring with them, and we've really gotten to like them. Recently, we played with Soul Coughing, and we played with Cub, which is a band we covered before we were super-aware of what they did exactly. They were a great band for us to play with. We've had some real perennials, like Brian Duwan, who plays the zither. We started doing shows with Brian in the late '80s.
Ink Blot: A lot of people find humor in your songs. Are there any songs that you or John have written that make you laugh?
John: No, they don't make us laugh, unfortunately. They probably made us laugh when we wrote them. I think the good ones last beyond the part where they make you laugh.
Ink Blot: What do you think the saddest TMBG song is?
John: I don't know. What were you thinking of?
Ink Blot: "They'll Need A Crane."
John: Oh yeah! That's a sad song, yeah. A lot of our songs that sound happy are sad. But it's the kind of thing that we can't really say over and over again. It's hard to make [that] case. People have to already think that, or you're just pounding your fist on the table. "I'm sad dammit! Why don't you believe me!" But there are a lot of sad and dark things in our lyrics.
Ink Blot: Even before I knew what drugs were, I always assumed your songs were littered with coded and not-so-coded drug references.
John: There's only a few, and they're very up-front. "Lie Still Little Bottle" is a drug song, about pills, which John Flansburgh wrote. Based on research he did in the laboratory, I think - not from any personal experience. There aren't too many, though. Most of the songs that somebody would think are connected with drugs somehow are just...well, in a sense maybe they are, because we drink a lot of coffee. Really a lot. That has the effect sometimes of altering your state pretty radically.
Ink Blot: You've written hundreds of highly melodic pop songs over the years. Consciously or unconsciously, you must have stolen a melody or two.
John: Oh yeah. There's a bass riff in "She's An Angel" that is totally taken from "Sweet Home Alabama." I think the statute of limitations has finally run out on that one, though. Or maybe not - maybe they'll come after us. That was consciously taken from that song. I also realized that "Purple Toupee," after I'd written it was - this is pretty embarrassing - that it pretty much directly came from the theme from "St. Elsewhere."
Ink Blot: Do you guys ever take a break from songwriting? With Dial-A-Song (Brooklyn-based phone number that provides fans with a new tune every day), can you ever afford to?
John: Oh no, we don't write songs enough, as far as we're concerned. We're often just on the road, and that makes it impossible to write songs. For me to write songs, I kinda need to have the day off. Because if I get started on something and the time runs out, that pretty much kills the momentum of [the song]. I can't really work in bits-and-pieces very well.