1999-10-12 All Things Considered
John Linnell "State Songs" Interview
Conducted by Noah Adams, All Things Considered (NPR), October 12 1999
Archived from: http://tmbw.net/upload/1085528838-JohnLinnell-NPR10-12-99.mp3
NA: I'm Noah Adams. We quote now from publicity material that accompanies a new CD from John Linnell. "John Linnell, one half of the conspicuous rock duo with John Flansburgh, They Might Be Giants, has created his first solo album. Find out why critics are already hailing State Songs as an album that's as big as all outdoors and all over the map." To be precise, Mr. Linnell has written 15 state songs. There may be another CD later. To be even more precise, these are not even songs about states.
JL: I decided to start writing songs with the names of the states as a way of avoiding having to come up with song titles. I had suddenly had 50 song titles, and I could write 50 songs based on that. And this is always one of my problems with writing lyrics is I'm just so lazy. I don't want to have to think up all the words and what the song means, exactly.
NA: So you don't want logic to interfere with it.
JL: Exactly. It's just a way to create more music without having to get bogged down in verbal ideas.
NA: Well, some of them are really, indeed quite understandable. "Montana is a leg" is perfect.
JL: It's grammatical, yeah. It's not true, and it doesn't strictly make sense, but it's- the explanation for that song is that the person singing is delusional.
NA: Without asking you to explain what it means, I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding the lyrics in the Michigan song.
JL: It's kind of, at least, it sort of dances around the idea of uncontrolled growth. Michigan is the exemplar of unchecked replication. It's just the idea of this amoeba-like growth. That's not really the case with the real Michigan, but it's my fantasy, I guess.
JL: One other reason why I was interested in writing the idea of state anthems was that I like the kind of style they usually employ in state anthems. Sort of archaic and kind of square.
NA: Kind of bombastic.
JL: Kind of bombastic and pompous, yeah.
NA: You're working here without Mr. Flansburgh, your partner.
JL: That's right.
NA: And you call this a sort of Ringo- a "Ringo walk" project.
JL: That's a term that we've really been beating to death recently. It refers to the part of the movie Hard Day's Night where Ringo is one walking around by himself and they're playing This Boy. And it's this special Ringo moment in the movie where he doesn't need his friends and he just wants to walk around on his own. And John and I have realized that we, you know, that we all need those times.
NA: And did you, have you played this for him?
JL: Oh, yeah, yeah. He really liked this record.
NA: Well, that's not what [laughing] that's not what you said in the liner notes...
JL: [laughs] I can't remember what I said. Why don't you tell me what I said, and then I'll try and-
NA: You said, "Mr. Flansburgh said when I played him the recordings, 'this doesn't sound like anything else.'"
JL: Oh! That's right. He meant it as a compliment. But, you know.
NA: One of the songs, Idaho, is a, I thought, a particularly welcoming song. This would be a very nice tune to hear just on the radio just as you're crossing the border into Idaho.
JL: I'm glad you think that, Noah, because I do think it has that kind of flavor of driving around late at night. The untold secret of this song is it's based on a probably apocryphal story that I heard about John Lennon, which is that he one evening took so much LSD that he thought he had to drive his house and his wife and son were in bed asleep, but he stayed up all night sitting at the window because he thought the house would crash if he went to sleep.
NA: On some of the records you're using band organs. What are they and do they actually work for real music these days?
JL: The band organ is the really loud thing in the carousel that makes all the racket. And to this day, I think many, if not most of them are controlled by paper rolls, like the action on a player piano. There's a roll with holes punched in it that has all the music printed on it. And I found out that there are a bunch of people who are around who still punch these rolls and And I cooked up arrangements of some of the State Songs for the band organ and submitted them to these guys.
JL: New Hampshire's was kind of the one I imagined as the big tour de force of band organ music. So I think I got a little too ambitious on that when I wrote an arrangement that incorporated the glockenspiels and the drums and everything. And I was kind of imagining it being this huge majestic sound. And it actually came out pretty homely by comparison to what I was thinking. But I really liked the way it sounded anyway.
JL: I don't think that the songs are liable to be adopted as the state anthems of the of the actual states, sadly. I mean, I was thinking initially that, you know, that might be a nice thing. But thinking about it, I think songs like "Oregon is bad" probably are not going to go down very well in Oregon.