1999-10-19 The Collegian
Interview with John Linnell
By Kris Maxwell, The Collegian, October 19, 1999
Archived from: https://web.archive.org/web/20031023090619/http://www.tmbg.net/articles/linnell.html
Kris Maxwell: Hello?
John Linnell: Hi, Kris?
KM: Yes.
JL: This is John Linnell calling from They Might Be Giants.
KM: Hi, John.
JL: How are you, sir? Sorry I'm phoning you late.
KM: I'm not bad at all, how are you doing?
JL: Pretty good. I must say, the information I have is that you are from The Collegian, but I don't actually know where you are.
KM: I am in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with the student-run paper here at the University of Tulsa.
JL: Very good.
KM: How are things in St. Louis?
JL: Well, we're playing at our usual little hole here.
KM: Mississippi Nights?
JL: Yeah, it should be fun.
KM: Is that where you guys recorded "Beneath the Planet of the Apes?"
JL: No, I mean I'm not sure, but that may be correct... I wouldn't be at all surprised.
KM: I think I was at that show...
JL: Oh really?
KM: That's a nice venue there... I like that place.
JL: We pretty much alternate between here and the Pointfest, those are the two gigs... Are you from St. Louis?
KM: No, I have some friends from there, the only place I've actually been is that Laclede's Landing area.
JL: Oh man, well that is the absolute nadir of St. Louis from what I can tell. Pretty much walk in any direction and it gets better.
KM: Like the whole wax museum thing, and the arcade and everything, right?
JL: Oh yeah, that's right.
KM: Craziness... So how's the current tour going?
JL: We're all, you know...We've avoided getting sick...
KM: Oh, that's good...
JL: Yeah, it's going alright. And we're nearing the end of this particular... yeah...
KM: Yeah, and you're going back out on the road for the State Songs, right?
JL: Correct. But not for long, I'm just doing a couple of major cities. Not Tulsa, unfortunately. Basically I'm booked to play 2 shows on the west coast—San Francisco and LA—New York and Boston on the east coast, and then Chicago. So we're pretty much making a semi-circle around Oklahoma.
KM: As you are wont to do. I think it's been something like 100 years since you've been here.
JL: Yeah probably. We did actually play... I'm forgetting now, maybe it was Tulsa come to think of it. We passed through Oklahoma City, but I think maybe we played a show in Tulsa at some point.
KM: Cool. So you are going to be out on the road. Do you know when and where you're going to be playing in LA?
JL: I do, let me consult my calendar... It's probably not in this particular calendar, but it might help me to look at the calendar. Oh yeah, I'm going to be in LA on the 22nd of November.
KM: Really? That's awesome, I'm going to be in Los Angeles at that time.
JL: Excellent. Please come down and bring 100 of your friends.
KM: I definitely will. That's great luck. I'm going home with my girlfriend to visit the family, so we'll definitely go catch the show.
JL: Excellent.
KM: So speaking of the State Songs, I guess that's what this is all about, how did that whole thing get started?
JL: Well, that's difficult to say. Like They Might be Giants, it was very informal when it started up. I didn't really have any plan for this project at all, I just started writing songs with states as the titles, in-between writing They Might Be Giants songs more than 10 years ago..
KM: Really? What was the first one that you wrote, do you remember?
JL: I don't actually... Although if I had to guess, I'd say it was "Michigan," which is very collegiate sounding... did you get a copy of the record?
KM: Yeah actually, and I had a question about "Michigan" specifically. I don't have the lyrics or anything, but does it say "we must eat Michigan's brain?"
JL: It does say that.
KM: That's great. I'm glad it wasn't my own psyche putting that in there...
JL: It's not just what you think.
KM: There's more out there supporting that idea...
JL: Yeah, that was probably the first one. It has this sort of football fight-song vibe, and I think it's probably the closest thing to an actual state anthem type of music.
KM: So how did you approach it? Once you started writing these songs, was it like you wanted to do songs about states, or you were inspired by the states?
JL: I always have a hard time explaining this, because I don't feel like it makes 100% sense to me. John and I tend to write songs where we come up with a title or an idea that is encapsulated in the title. And that is also the chorus of the song, and it pretty much states the basic idea of the song. There are other ways of writing songs, but that's a very common one. So the thing about the State Songs was that it was a way of trying to leapfrog over that, and come up with a basic template for a song which didn't really tell you anything about what the song was going to be. In some ways it is an echo of the kind of pop song with a woman's name as the title. Like a song called "Betty" or something—you don't know what it's going to be about.
KM: You don't know where that's going.
JL: Exactly, but with the states, it's even more. You really don't know where its going.
KM: And listening to it, it seems like [the songs] have a varying degree of how much they actually have to do with the state.
JL: I'd say they're pretty close to uniform in that they don't really have anything to do with the states. But some of them maybe feel more like they could be about a state.
KM: Yeah, like in "West Virginia" you have the whole thing about the trees, and it sounds like it could be about the state.
JL: It refers to some symbolic things about West Virginia, but it isn't really about it.
KM: And then on the other hand, "South Carolina" sounds like it could be any state. Is there anything underlying there, or is it just a song you wanted to make and then decided on the state?
JL: Are you asking about "South Carolina" specifically?
KM: Yeah, for example, would that particularly have to have been South Carolina? Is there something about that song?
JL: I think that in a lot of cases that it was the rhythm of the name of the state that dictated the general meter of the music. Maine only has one syllable, so the chorus is this one-syllable high-note. So there are a lot of those kinds of things going on as well.
KM: So are you planning on, as the title songs suggests, going though and doing all the 50 states?
JL: I'd like to. It took me so long to do the 15 that are on the record. I hate to think that it's going to be another 10 years before I make the next record. But even if that were the case, I suppose I have enough time in the rest of my life to finish all 50 if everything goes well.
KM: Well, you're more than a quarter of the way done. So I guess that by touring around in a rock band all the time, you have been to all the states?
JL: No, I've never been to Alaska actually. We've never played in a few of the other states, like Wyoming. I think Alaska is the only state I've never been to though. Even in the last six weeks, we have pretty much covered the whole mess of them.
KM: So do you feel that you will have to go there to write the song?
JL: Alaska? No. I can write about it without going there.
KM: It's cold, that's all you need to know.
JL: It's cold, yeah [chuckles]
KM: That could be the song itself.
JL: That won't be what the song is about.
KM: Well yeah, it has way too much to do with the state. I know that you released about five of these songs on the Hello Record Club in 1994, and some of [the songs on the album] are different from those incarnations. What did you feel you wanted to change, or how have they evolved since then?
JL: Well, it's been a number of years. For a lot of them I used the same tracks, and just cleaned them up. I think in most of the cases I fattened-up the bass.
KM: It sounded like "Maine" had a fatter bassline. One thing that threw me off was "Pennsylvania." It sounds radically different with the strings.
JL: I wasn't too happy with the Hello version of that one, the piano just sounded very clunky. I like it better with Mark Feldman playing the violin.
KM: It seems like you've got a lot of instruments in there. How much of it did you actually play yourself?
JL: Well, I just played the keyboards and the woodwinds, and I did the programming.
KM: I wanted to ask you about that. They sent me a press release that said "see attached for information on programming the organ," and there wasn't anything attached. So you're going to have to serve as the attachment. What was the deal with the carousel organ?
JL: Well jeez, I wrote this whole essay on the carousel organ... There were two different ones on the record. One is this very large machine that lives in a carousel in a park outside of Washington, DC. Then there is another one that's in a guy's home. The bigger one has things like glockenspiel and drums and all these things attached to it.
KM: How do you have to go about programming something like that?
JL: It's an unbelievable chore. First of all I had to get the information about the ranges of everything, because they don't just play whatever note you want. They are extremely restricted in the range of notes and even the selection of notes within a range. For example, the big one didn't have most of the G sharps, the D sharps, and the A sharps.
KM: How old where these machines?
JL: I think they're both from the '20's. They didn't expect that you'd ever need those notes.
KM: It's from the pre-MIDI phase, made it difficult I imagine.
JL: They're really expensive, so they figured "what kind of music is going to be played on these?" Mostly very simple pop tunes, that don't have a lot of key changes. So that's what they designed them for.
KM: And how did you learn about and decide to use these?
JL: I've known about carousel organs for a long time, and I actually got interested as a kid in the one in Central Park in New York. It was this very loud machine that you could look at as the horse was going around the machine. You could peek in and see the drums getting hit and stuff like that, so that was kind of interesting. I think that I like the idea of mechanical music. And I like the idea that even thought it's inhuman, there's something very expressive about it anyway. It expresses a kind of failure on the part of the machine to completely execute something. It's got mechanical precision, but it's still not quite there. Part of the problem is that technically they're not quite perfect.
KM: It's missing that spark.
JL: Yeah, there's something sort of poignant about the fact that its not quite able to soar to [human] heights. And yet at the same time obviously they were designed to be these incredibly deluxe objects. It's very complicated, I don't know if I can describe in words what attracts me to those things, but I think they're very appropriate for this project, too. There's something about the sound of the band organ that I could hear in a lot of the songs.
KM: How many songs did you use them on?
JL: There's four. ["Illinois"] and "Iowa" are the smaller band organ, and "New Hampshire" and "Utah" are the larger one. In both of those cases all you hear is the vocals and the band organ.
KM: Ok, that's the heavy percussion in "Utah."
JL: Yeah, It's extremely crude. I hate to say this, but they guy who cut the roll for me didn't do a very god job on those two tracks, so the rhythms are a little sloppy and there are some wrong notes in there. Unfortunately there wasn't a way to fix that. It was just technically too difficult.
KM: Well it came off as aesthetic, so it turned into a feature. Those definitely lend [the album] a different kind of air.
JL: It's a really strange vibe.
KM: It reminded me of the Edison stuff you did [on wax cylinders] for Factory Showroom. Is there a similar fascination there?
JL: Well yeah, there's something fascinating about ancient technologies of music reproduction. You get the result, even when you're doing it now. If you use the old gear—and I'm sure Lenny Kravitz says this too—it's like you're time traveling. You can take the tools from them and apply the ideas from now, and it still sounds more like then than now.
KM: How much time did it take for you to actually program this stuff?
JL: Oh God, I can't even add it all up. The songs were written over a long period of time, and in order to score out the band organ parts, I had to be very specific. I don't even know if you want to hear all of this technical information, but there are four different parts on the band organ. It the equivalent of four sections in an orchestra. There's what they call the trumpet, the melody, the accompaniment and the bass, and you have to divide everything up into that. Like I said, there's these very extreme restrictions on what notes you get to play. The only way I could ensure that I would get back what I expected was to make tapes of a synth playing the same music. I gave them to [the programmers] along with the printed music. In the case of the guy in New York with the band organ in his home, he was extremely careful and conscientious about making it the right tempo and making the notes have the right duration. He obviously really worked to make it sound right. Unfortunately I think the other guy didn't even listen to the cassette.
KM: You should put his name in the liner for programming. "Not Me."
JL: I don't know if he understood what the point of the project was either. I don't know if he was really getting what I was doing.
KM: It sounds like it was a big challenge, but it gives the album a very different sound, apart from the obvious departure from regular pop music. Did you choose "Montana" as the single?
JL: I think that Rounder [the record label] was thinking about "South Carolina" as a single, and then they came up with this idea, what I have to credit them for, which was to make a vinyl single in the shape of the lower 48 states. So that will be coming out at some point.
KM: Ah, one of my other questions was "why vinyl," so I guess that's the answer.
JL: Although somebody told me that you can cut CDs as well.
KM: You can, I've seen ones for Star Wars.
JL: I just found out about that. I don't know if Rounder would be into doing that. So the thing with the vinyl was that once you start chopping into the 12-inch in the way to make it shaped like anything, you're really losing a lot of space.
KM: Yeah, you've only got the inside part
JL: So they said that as a result there wasn't enough room to put "South Carolina" on there, the song was four minutes long. So t had to be a shorter one, that's the reason they went with "Montana."
KM: I guess "Louisiana," the unreleased b-side, was short enough to put on the other side?
JL: Apparently.
KM: So what's with "Louisiana" being a b-side?
JL: To be honest with you, I recorded that one and mixed it in my home. I wasn't going to put it on the record. And they asked for a b-side that wasn't on the record, and that was the recording that I had available.
KM: So is it a demo version?
JL: It's sort of on the demo tip, although I think it is a nice production, but like I said I did the whole thing in my little home studio.
KM: You're not ready to put it on an album?
JL: I wasn't thinking of it.
KM: Well I can't wait to hear it. Just a couple more things about the album... I noticed that the theme song goes into the "Arkansas" motif at the end.
JL: That's right.
KM: Is there something special about "Arkansas?"
JL: I just thought it was funny that in the lyrics [of the theme song], it keeps going on about "my favorite one." It's something people ask me and John [Flansburgh] all the time about They Might Be Giants, "what's your favorite song?" I don't know why, but it's like we have an allergy to telling people what our favorite songs are. But I thought it was funny to have this incredibly biased thing right there on the record, that says "here's the best song on the record." Again, it's not really what I think. I mean I don't think "Oregon is bad," and I don't think "Arkansas" is my favorite song, but I just thought it was funny to express an up-front opinion like that.
KM: It's like having a character singing. Whoever it is that sings that first song, it's their favorite song.
JL: Yeah, in a way.
KM: Speaking of They Might Be Giants, let's shift gears here for just a second, when is the new rock album due out?
JL: Well it's not due out on a particular date. It will be coming out next year sometime. Unfortunately we don't have a record deal. We have a lot of stuff recorded, but we don't have a schedule for putting it out, and it's not finished, so I couldn't say at this moment.
KM: It seems like you've got a whole lot of material...
JL: There is a great deal on our plate at the moment.
KM: What about the children's album?
JL: That's the thing that will probably come out first. We do have a record deal for it, and we have a bunch of songs ready for it.
KM: Is that going to be on Rounder as well?
JL: That will be on Rounder, yeah.
KM: I don't know if you've been reticent to talk about it or if nobody has asked, but what is the idea behind the children's album?
JL: It's probably that we tried to explain and it just wasn't interesting. It's really just a children's record. We were asked by Rounder if we could do this, and we thought it would be an interesting project for us because a lot of our music is already considered safe to play for kids. Parents who own other rock albums would often pick They Might Be Giants as the one that they think their kids will like. Also for whatever reason, I think kids are attracted to what we do. So this is giving us a chance to define the difference between the stuff that we normally do, which is undiluted They Might Be Giants, and the stuff that we would do specifically for kids.
KM: Does it have anything to do with the fact that I have heard that the next album is probably going to be more rock-oriented, with less of the esoterica?
JL: I don't even know if I agree with that statement, because we haven't finished the record. Who the hell knows?
KM: It might end up being lounge tunes by the time you're done with it.
JL: [joking] Well, we're going to jump on that lounge bandwagon. I don't think that's necessarily true. There are some really rocky songs that we've got now, but I think we'll probably do a lot of other stuff.
KM: Well you've definitely been hard at work this year. I can't even count on one hand, or maybe both, what you've been doing, with the movies and television and things like that. Is it a TMBG renaissance? Are you at a heightened level of activity, or are we just hearing more about it?
JL: We didn't stop being busy before, but one of the things that's happening now is that we're diversifying in a much more extreme way that we have before. We're doing TV, movies, and we're currently getting ready to do the music for an awards ceremony. We're going to be doing the walk-on music. It's just a very odd thing, but for some reason they thought we would be appropriate. So yeah, it's been a crazy year. We're going to be doing all the incidental music for Malcolm in the Middle which is a Fox TV show... and... I've got to go do sound check now.
KM: Well it's been a pleasure talking to you, and I will definitely try to come out and catch your Los Angeles show. I look forward to more success with State Songs and hope to talk to you again sometime.
JL: Great. OK Kris, nice talking to you. See you around.
KM: Thanks a lot John, bye.
JL: Bye bye.