1999-11 Earpollution
Profiles: They Might Be Giants
By Paul Goracke, Earpollution, November 1999
Archived from: Page 1 Page 2
Many people don't really know what to make of They Might Be Giants; traditionally synth and drum machine-driven, their music is generally categorized as pop, or just downright weird. But closer examination yields intriguing complexities: an instantly familiar song's sound may be constructed from accordions or trombonesâhardly standard pop fareâor it suddenly dawns on you that the seemingly meaningless lyrics are referring to a nightlight, or a love song to someone not yet met. Should you take seriously John Linnell's 9th place in People Magazine's 3rd annual "Most Beautiful People" poll, or consider it an online protest vote? (after all, Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf ended up beating out Leonardo DiCaprio) What about John Flansburghânear-trademark spectacles and allâbeing among the Top 10 vote-getters (again, online) that same year for Time Magazine's "Person of the Century?" It doesn't matter, really; throughout the duo's 15-year careerâthrough ten albums, from "two guys with a drum track" to a full-fledged touring and recording bandâthe band has asked for respect but never demanded to be taken too terribly seriously. And their well-crafted songs, self-deprecating manner and sense of humor have been rewarded with a loyal and diverse fan base.
For most bands, ending a contract with a major label like Elektra would signalâat bestâsome down time. But since then, They Might Be Giants have released Long Tall Weekend, an album only available in MP3 format. They are working on another "in store shelves" release, and have designs on a children's album. They recorded "Doctor Evil," the opening and closing theme to this summer's Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (sadly, since the song was a last-minute addition, it didn't make its way onto the "first" soundtrack), as well as songs for upcoming Disney releases such as Peter and Jane, the home video sequel to Peter Pan. Television? There, too, with performance segments directed by Flansburgh for five episodes of ABC Nightline Primetime's "Brave New World," and the theme and incidental music for an upcoming Fox sitcom. Somewhere in there, Flansburgh has found time to write and record a theme song for The Smoking Gun website, Linnell has finished State Songs, his first solo album, and they've managed to maintain their Dial-a-Song serviceâa rotating selection of original tunes on an answering machine at (718)387-6962, free except for regular long distance chargesâand even transformed it to a less fragile website. Most recently, they have launched Radio They Might Be Giants, a netcasting mix of "things Giant."
Due to the (somewhat unexpected) success of Long Tall Weekend, label/distributor EMusic sponsored the band on a two-month nationwide tour. Forced to take a break from this hectic agenda of multimedia dominationâat least between soundcheck and showtimeâEarpollution finally had a chance to allow John Flansburgh the opportunity to catch his breath and do some looking forward, a little back...and plenty sideways.
You're playing almost every night, nowâmust be getting a little bit hectic.
John Flansburgh: That's pretty much the way touring isâit's all just one night stands. To be perfectly honest, I've been doing it so long, I'm kinda used to it.
Often, there's an opening band that's never done it before, and it's interesting...touring used to just seem like the most impossible thing. I just remember our first couple of tours, I was so exhausted and blown awayâjust the whole pace of it was really crazy. But now it actually kind of seems like a vacation sometimes, to be perfectly honest.
Like when you get used to working out, and don't go for a while you don't feel right.
John: Or maybe, like...becoming a heroin addict. [laughs] Part of it is that you resign yourself to some of the tedium, too. I remember being frustrated by how little I could get done outside of touring. You basically get to do a show and then you get to kill a lot of time. I used to find the killing time thing to be really frustrating, and now I'm just kind of, "whatever."
Once you get to the point you don't have to drive your own van...
John: Right.
Last year's Bumbershoot was a great show, by they way.
John: Oh, yeah! That, specifically, was a high point of that tour; it was really fun. What a weird hockey rink of a place that was, though.
Oh, the Rock Arena is horrible.
John: Yeah, but it didn't matter. It seemed like a really great crowd.
I was in a seat up on the side. I remember sitting there watching the people bouncing around to "Birdhouse in Your Soul"âpeople with dyed blue hair and all kinds of different types of peopleâand thinking, "you know, maybe there is hope for humanity when they can enjoy songs like this." [and ended up putting it on my "best and the rest" list for this year]
John: Well, we do get a very diverse audience, and...it's very strange for us, because a lot of times we'll talk to reporters and they're really hell-bent on pigeonholing us and pigeonholing our crowd: "you guys are nerds, you're so geeky!" And what's strange is that, for a lot of people, we're essentially a party band. They take it at face value, and they enjoy the humor of it, and they don't mind...it's just a completely different thing.
Y'know, there are a lot of Pearl Jam t-shirts in the audience. It's a pretty general audience in a lot of ways, and I think that's a good thing. We don't expect people to only be into usâwe're not only into us. We like a lot of different kinds of music, and I think that people can be into more than one kind of music. I just think there's something very short-sighted about the way the music press talks about what it means to be a music fan. I've got Hank Williams recordsâthat doesn't mean I wear a ten-gallon hat. You can like stuff that's outside of your culture and outside of your lifestyle, and you can be fully into itâyou can be a dedicated, long-term fan. It's not an experiment; it's not "checking it out."
I think I've bought every ZZ Top record made in the past 15 years; I don't think anyone would peg me for a ZZ Top fan, but I am! There you go...people like different stuff, people can like more than one kind of thing. We really respect that about our audience. It's not, "Oh, they like something else, too." We sort of think of ourselves as being out there on the left hand side of people's record collections, and that's a cool place to be.
I was looking through a bunch of reviews and bios, and wondering if you'd grown tired of the terms "quirky" and "eclectic" to describe you yet.
John: I think anything with the amount of variety in it that we have, in terms of rhythms and the style...to say we're eclectic is probably just an accurate description. It is kind of a grab bag, so it's perfectly valid. And quirky is probably valid, too. It is quirky, so it's not inaccurate. But am I tired of it? Sure.
[laughs] It seems like almost every blurb uses those words.
John: Well, they're in the business of summing stuff up, and that in and of itself is an odd thing to have to do. But you write reviews, you know what I'm talking aboutâit's hard to sum things up.
I had a weird experience yesterdayâI did an interview on the radio in Spokane, Washington, and the interviewer asked me why John and I had switched roles. Like it used to be that I sang the weird songs and John sang the sweet pop songs, and now I sing the sweet pop songs and he sings the weird songs. And I just never think of it that way. I mean, the guy was obviously "pro weirdo"âhe obviously didn't really care for sweet pop songs. Then I read a review in the paper that also kind of did this weird divvying up between my role and John's and said that I had become "bitter and condescending." I started reviewing the songs I'd written or performedâthe big contributions of mine to the records we've done the past couple years. I thought of the song "First Kiss" that's one of the new songs on Severe Tire Damage, and it's a love song to my wife. It's embarrassingly earnest; it's totally without double meaning, just an "I love you so much, baby, baby" kind of thing. I don't know, it's sort of...I guess the thing about reading any kind of review is that you shouldn't really listen to too much of any of it, because it doesn't really help. But I always wonder how people perceive things.
To be honest, it sort of shook me up, to have somebody say that I personally had become bitter. It kind of blew my mind, because I feel that there are a lot of things about my life that would almost demand that I become bitter. I think everyone feels tested by their lives, and I feel that I work really hard to not be bitter. We do a lot of the same things over and over again, and sometimes you feel like you're just pushing the big rock up the hill and it would be really easy to give in to...frankly, I'm kind of amazed that I'm not more bitter. But it knocked me back, I have to say.
What was the inspiration behind releasing Long Tall Weekend MP3-only?
John: We left Elektra last year, and in spite of what you read in the paper, we weren't exactly droppedâwe had come to some serious loggerheads with our little label there. But we left Elektra, and we had a bunch of songs that we had been working on. We wanted to get them out and into the world before we put out our next regular CD. It doesn't seem very healthy to have a big pile of songs that just get kind of lost. So, in some ways, it probably appears more like a hodge-podge of songs than it actually is. It is all from the last couple years, and a couple songsâspecifically, "Older" and "She Thinks She's Edith Head"âare slated to be on our next CD. So, the people at EMusic approached us about doing a project; I think they were just interested in licensing our catalog. We sort of suggested, "why don't we do this, because we want to get something happening now," and it just seemed like a neat idea.
I picked up Long Tall Weekend, and that was actually my first MP3 experience.
John: And did it work?
It worked. I wasn't, I guess...terribly happy with the whole experience. It's neat, it's cool to get the technology...but the distribution of it had me craving liner notes...or an album cover.
John: There are liner notes. But, what did you get when you got it, because that's one thing that I haven't...
Oh, you haven't done that yet?
John: No. You know, I should talk to the guys at EMusic, because we actually have this whole illustrated lyric sheet that's many, many pages, and we should send it off to everyone who has bought it.
I haven't seen that at all.
John: I've got to put that on my list of things to do.
I was even trying to hunt down a decent image of the cover to print out, because one of the first things I did was convert it to .WAV and burn it to a CD at work, so I could take it with me and carry it around with me.
John: Right, right. It's strange, because I know a lot of people who have been doing stuff with MP3 over the past few years, but it's just now, all of a sudden, the "MP3 moment." It's interesting, because I didn't really expect there to be as big a response as there has been.
I think a lot of it is just the availability of decent players. But just my little experience with it, I wasn't fully happy. I mean, I want something that I can take that little silver disc and just slap it in someplace and press play.
John: Sounds like you're a real CD fan.
Yeah. I'm very fond of the convenience of a CD.
John: It's interesting to me, as someone who basically started with 45s...I'm sure there will come a time in the not-too-distant future that people think of CDs with the same fondness that our parents or grandparents might have thought of 78s. Because they will be outmoded.
Or they'll think, "Oh my gosh, you actually had to store those in your house?"
John: "In those stupid little cases that break so easily?"
[laughs]
John: "Couldn't they have ever come up with a better design?" Yeah, it's strange that all these mediums...people grow so fond of them. I remember when I was a teenager, thinking that the 8-track format just seemed horrible. It was such a bad idea. Yet now when I see 8-tracks, I can't help but kind of feel like, "hey, that's kind of sweet."
But a lot of people...when I was running "Hello"âbasically, we only really had the ability to afford doing it in one medium. It was sort of at the same moment as the {{wp|Sub Pop]] singles club, and I just thought that making 45rpm records was really expensive and the quality was pretty low and mailing them was kind of expensiveâit actually costs more to mail a 45 than it does a CD. And I just thought, "Hell, everybody's into CDs. There's this weird perceived value that CDs are fancy, yet they cost less to manufacture. So I'll just do it on CD." And I was surprised at how much...it made me realize how much political correctness there is in the world. Especially fringe music. Among people who are into stuff that's kind of beyond the obviousâpeople who are more of actual music loversâthere's a lot of snobbishness about certain things. And what's really odd is that a lot of people thought it should be on cassette. I thought, "Well, that's not exactly a present to the songwriters, to put it on this format that just sounds godawful." I use cassettes everyday; I love cassettes, but for a different reason. I don't know, I guess I don't really have that emotional attachment to any of the stuff...except maybe records. And that just seems hopeless at this point.
You guys definitely seem to be fans of technology.
John: Actually, I don't think we're really fans of technology, so much as we have, you know...well, I think we have an un-neurotic relationship with technology. We use it exactly how we want to, and we're aware that it's out there, but we're not...I spend virtually no time online, to be perfectly honest. But I use the computer; I use a computer-based sequencer to do MIDI stuff, like every day. I've been using MIDI for 15 years now (or 10 years, 12 years). That's a big part of my life, so yeah, I mean some ways I'm a totally technical guy, but that's just one very narrow thing.
But you know, when we were starting out, there were a lot of bands that had synthesizers in the band, and the synthesizer player would be a guy in a lab coat. I think we always just felt, "Hey, you know, an electric guitar is not exactly a normal instrument." All rock music is kind of electrifiedâthere's no "normal" kind of electrified music, and it just seemed unnecessary to make it so conspicuous, or make it seem so strange. I think for a lot of people what's interesting about what's happening online is not the novelty so much as it is what they really can do with it. There are a lot of things about what you can do online that have kind of a gee-whiz quality to it, but you don't want to do it for very long.
That's what I've noticed about your stuffâit doesn't seem like it's done just to use the newest technology and play with the newest toys. You actually seem to be saying, "Hey, we can use this to do..." It comes across as, "This gives me an idea," or "I've always wanted to do something like this and the technology is allowing me to do it."
John: Right. And I have to say that probably the most important thing that's going on right now with us is this Radio They Might Be Giants idea, because what's amazing about it is that it essentially allows people to log on and listen to a radio station at their job, at their desk, that's programmed by us. It's not programmed by some guy in L.A. who's selling his programming ideas to other radio stations around the country, which is the way radio works. It's actually our thing and it's a tremendous opportunity to get people to hear our songs and get in touch with the band in a way that would actually be hard without going down to the store and putting down almost $150 in CDs. Also, it's just a nice format; it's a great way for people to hear all the different stuff that we've been doing over the past 15 years.
Yeah, I've had the opportunity to give it a few listens, and found interesting stuff, like some selections off the "Hello" CDs, which I'd always been meaning to check out.
John: Part of it is that as we've gone on as a band, we've been involved in a lot of one-off things, like the Austin Powers "Dr. Evil" thingâit's been in movie theaters for months, but our recording is only available at Radio TMBG right now, because the soundtrack album that it's going to be on isn't out yet. We do a lot of one-off things that we put a lot of energy into, and it's nice to be able to collect them in a place where people who are specifically interested in the band can find them. I think everyone knows the Compilation Blues, where you're buying a record for one song and one groupâthere's something a little dreary about that. Also, I think that the more autonomous bands can become, the healthier it is for the whole music scene. This whole narrow-casting, web-casting thing is going to be a tremendous boon to all sorts of...it's really good for fringe artists, basically. It's probably bad news for the mainstream, middle-of-the-road stuff.
Having done so many interviews the past couple months just to ponder this and the effects of it, one side effect of all the activity among semi-professional musicians that I don't think people realize is that if you're a songwriter or in a band, the first few people that hear your music are really important in how much enthusiasm you have for it. I think a lot of people are going to get a lot of positive feedback, even though it might just be on a very low level. It might not be some overwhelming thing, like, "Here, you've got a record contract!" I don't think it's going to change the nature of how hard it is to get ahead, but I think it will make musicians evolve a little fasterâthey'll be able to find an audience for what they're doing. I think I'm just very positive in terms of getting people feedback, getting people encouragement, making people realize what works. I remember when we started Dial-a-Song, it was a real education for us in basic stuff about what people could tolerate. If you put something on that was kind of unfocused or meandering, they would just hang up!
It wasn't so much the messages that were left, as it was the hangups 30 seconds into it. You just couldn't help but think, "Wow, maybe it's not that interesting." Maybe we've got to figure out a way to get people's attention: make it a little more graphic, make it more immediate. It really affected the way we wrote our songs. It made us think about melody and simplicity and what it takes to communicate a musical idea. I think if anything, what it really did was make us streamline our ideas. We had to telegraph what we were thinking in a more direct way.
We were lost in home recording, multi-tracking, building up 15 vocals on top of 15 guitars on top of 15 handclap type of tracks. So we were doing a lot of textural things that didn't really add up to a lot. And it made us realize that writing songs can be a very simple and very direct exercise. Production isn't the only...when you're doing it over the phone, production just becomes meaningless.
Earlier, I was making a list of the things that make me think of you as being technological; you may not even realize some of these when you think about it. I started off with the obvious stuff: keys, sampling, MIDI, three different web sites. But then there's things like Apollo 18, which was recommended to play on shuffle.
John: Oh, right.
And I think of Dial-a-Song as something else technological, it's just not computer or web like most people think "tech." There's Radio TMBG; releasing an MP3-only album; the Broadcast.com Irving Plaza concert. [which seems to have been lost in cyber-limbo since Yahoo! purchased them, but check out last year's House of Blues performance or even this year's performance if they ever get around to archiving it properly] And to me, I think one of theâand I mean this in a very complimentary wayâgeekiest things, is "I Can Hear You" off Factory Showroom. Done without electricity; to me that's just a "fan of technology" thing to do.
John: For me, that song is not specifically about electricity so much as the speaker. It's hard for people to imagine living in a world without speakers, but the introduction of the wax cylinder was also the introduction...except for music boxes, there was no such thing as amplification through something like a horn. It was just something that hadn't been developed yet. Now, everywhere we go...between the two of us there are four little speakersâtwo receivers and two speakersâthat we're talking into, and it's just a part of our lives that affects us in every way.
What's weird is that a doorbell, or a clock radio, or an intercom...all that stuff goes back to Thomas Edison creating the wax cylinder recorder. We were making a recording on this wax cylinder, so it was kind of a meditation on the long chain of things that have come since this one invention. It's kind of crazy...think about when you're seeing a science fiction movie, how unbelievable certain things seemâsay somebody touches their forehead and something jumps out, you just go, "Whoa, that's pretty weird." But speakers are a very weird idea, that this little circular thing can recreate pretty accurately the sound of music or a voice. That's a pretty haunting idea.
It's a very nice song, and I think the way you recorded it adds so many layers to it.
John: Yeah. It was very much inspired by our ability to record something on it...it was written for the event. Because we had the opportunity to record a song on a wax cylinder, I wanted to write a song that was kind of a tribute to the device. It's not a sentimental songâit's kind of funny songâbut I do think it's...I'm just fascinated by sound and especially fascinated by the mechanical reproduction of sound. It just seems very amazing.
You know, I still don't quite understand how it works! I don't get how musical energyâthe whole bandwidth of energyâis being reproduced in a speaker. I've had it explained to me a million times, but it still seems quite magical to me.
That it actually catches all the subtleties..
John: Yeah! And all the highs and lows coming off the same surfaceâjust crazy.
New albums?
John: Yup! We're making a new album. We've got a lot of it done, we've got a lot of new songs. We're actually playing a bunch of them in the show.
Cool.
John: We do a song called "Cyclops Rock" that's a pretty rowdy rock song, as well as this other song called "It's So Loud in Here." Those are kind of like the two big rock warhorses and, in terms of the general direction that the record is going in, itâstrangelyâseems like it has a lot of rock songs on it. The other songs that we've finished...there's one song called "On The Drag" that's a total rave-up, and a song called "Rest A While" that's also pretty high energy. So it seems like the next record is going to be...well, it's not like a return to rock, because in a way I don't think we've ever rocked this hard. "Just as the whole grunge thing has blown over, we're getting into it!" [laughs] "If it's too loud, you're too old, man!"
[laughs] I saw on Radio TMBG that the new album apparently has a working title of "Unreliable Narrator".
John: Yes, that is the working titleâwhat did you think? It's a term in literary criticism that basically refers to someone telling a story who you can't trust the story that they're telling, and that sort of appeals to me.
I thought maybe it implied a little bit of a concept album.
John: Oh. Well, I think in a way we probably should have called our first four albums Unreliable Narrator, but it's too late to go back and change the titles.
[laughs]
John: Maybe we should call it Unreliable Narrator, Volume One. I don't know...we'll probably come up with a better title.
Any ideas when that might end up hitting the stores?
John: I would love to put it out next month, if we could. There's a lot of it that's already done. It's more about timing it to coincide with the right momentumâto be free to do a tour behind it and devote the amount of attention that's going to make it work and get noticed in the marketplace. So it's sort of on the heels of thisâthe MP3 thing has actually gotten a lot more attention than we were expecting. I mean, consequently we're out on this big national tourâbut it will definitely be out sometime next year.
Earlier this year, you were on NPR's Talk of the Nation and you mentioned two albums.
John: We're also going to be working on a children's album. That was another thing that's kind of gotten put off from this year, just because we've been doing so much...we've been doing a couple of television and movie jobs that have taken up a lot of time. We have three songs in one Disney movie and two songs in another Disney movie that are both coming out next year. We're also doing all the incidental music for this sitcom called Malcolm in the Middle that's going to be on Fox. In August, we recorded 2 hours of incidental music, that was just this unbelievable amount of music. We were just in the studio, going, "alright, Cowboy Song, here we go!"
So you're obliged to a children's record?
John: Well, we've signed the contract. We took the money, and now we've got to make it. [laughs] Basically, we were talking with tv people about making a children's TV show, and John and I thought it would be best...rather than pretend we've worked in that idiom before and felt comfortable with itâwe thought it might be smarter to actually try writing children's songs and see if it worked. Because writing children's songs is really different than writing regular songs...all these jobs really feel different.
When we get to the other side of making the children's record, I think we'll have a better idea of whether or not we want to commit ourselves to doing a children's TV show. Because in some ways, the stuff that we do is complicated...we're very accustomed to writing complex songs with sophisticated intentions. I doubt if we're particularly interested in watering it down into something that's palatable for children, and I'm not sure if we're going to feel like we can keep it together to...obviously, a good children's song is a very sparky and interesting piece of music. There are not that many of themâa lot of times children's songs kind of suckâso it's an experiment, and if it turns out well I think we'll pursue it, but if not, it will have just been a noble experiment. We've written some songs for it already (we wrote this one song called "Clown Town" that I'm very proud of), but I just don't know if it's really our bag. I think only time will tell, but we've got that album coming up, and the rock album.
One more quick questionâdid you ever find out who recorded the schoolchildren singing "Particle Man" on Then?
John: You know, I think we found out who the guy wasâI think he contacted the office almost right away, but I wish somebody had actually made a point of making me memorize who it was, because I feel kind of guilty. We did actually find out what the school was, we just never...I just haven't memorized it. They're from Texas, though. But you're the first person to ask about it. People love the song, but nobody's been curious enough to ask who it was.