2000-04 Toast Magazine
Brooklyn's Ambassador of Love John Linnell of They Might Be Giants defies the geek-rock label
By Nick Pruher, Toast Magazine, April 18, 2000
Archived from: https://web.archive.org/web/20030630173204/http://www.tmbg.net/articles/toast2000.html
John Flansburgh's name is misspelled "Flansburg" throughout. For this transcription, the spelling has been corrected.
There are those who would accuse They Might Giants of being a gimmick band. Others would call They Might Be Giants a geek-rock band. It would seem that John Linnell, the band's keyboardist, horn player, and accordionist, does nothing to dispel those labels with his first solo effort. But it only seems that way. As I found out from listening to the record and speaking with Linnell, They Might Be Giants defies labels.
Under the guise of a patriotic tribute to the 50 states, John Linnell unleashes his first non-Giant album, State Songs. Fifteen states in all are represented in this first installment, each with an unofficial anthem by Linnell. As you might expect, the songs are not really about the states at all. With lyrics like "We Must Eat Michigan's Brain," it's safe to assume that whatever relation the song has to the state is reasonably obscured. Still, there is an innocence about the album that keeps it from being gimmicky.
Linnell explains the concept for State Songs very matter-of-factly. After writing songs for more than 15 years, he says, you have to come up with lots of different ways to do it. "With State Songs, it's an example of going off and trying a very different method. You have all the titles already and then you go from there."
The plan is to eventually release several follow-up albums covering the other 35 states. Linnell credits the record label Zoe for agreeing to the project, even though it's not likely to be a huge money-maker. "They did put a sticker on all the CDs that says 'John Linnell from They Might Be Giants'," he says. So expect record sales to top Thriller.
Who better than a rock musician to shed some insight on our United States of America? After all, Linnell has been to every state but Alaska on his nationwide tours with They Might Be Giants. He says there's not much time to see the sights anymore, but in the old days, "We would do stuff like stop and go see the world's tallest Chippendale highboy or something." He has driven through the Wisconsin Dells but never stopped there. Linnell has, however, visited his fair share of wax museums, which he finds fascinating. "They can never quite capture the likenesses of the people. That's what's interesting about it," he says. "It's almost like an impostor, an actor playing Arnold Schwartzenegger, or a dead guy who looks like Arnold Schwartzenegger. There's something screwed up about wax figures in general. Although, I just saw a picture of some of the recent Madame Tussaud stuff. Obviously, if you try hard enough, you can make the figures look real. It was kind of creepy. It was a little like that Marilyn Manson video where the camera is panning around everybody and they're frozen. You can tell they are real people but they're not moving. All the wax museums I've been to are just like folk art. The hair on the figures is like doll hair."
Nowadays, Linnell makes a conscious effort to stay at home more often. "I like the state I'm in right now, New York," he says from his Brooklyn apartment. "I'm just about to get a house upstate here, so I'll be making my bid for Senate after that."
Linnell and his They Might Be Giants counterpart John Flansburgh are busy with local projects. They are recording new stuff with Joe and Phil Nicolo at their in-home studios. They are composing music for the forthcoming Nickelodeon series Slewy the Dog Boy and the new Fox show Malcolm in the Middle. And every once and a while, they put on a show. Most recently, they did a series of concerts to promote their new MP3-only album Long Tall Weekend.
Publishing the first album available strictly for download was not a gimmick, nor does it mean They Might Be Giants consider themselves pioneers of digital music. Says Linnell, "The company [emusic] approached us and said, 'We'll give you this money if you give us some recordings only for MP3.' It was such an obviously good deal that we said, 'Fine, here's the record.' We weren't thinking, (in a robotic voice) 'We are the future of music.' We don't have any vision of where the music industry is heading. We are 100 percent without a clue. And furthermore, I don't know anybody, personally, who has downloaded the album. I haven't. Nobody in our band has. Nobody in our organization has. I've seen people at shows who claim to have done it, but I don't personally know them. There's no proof. It's still this mysterious rumor that there is an MP3 out there that you can download. We were given a budget to include art as part of the package, but I don't even know how you look at the art. Does it go while you're playing the thing? Or do you have to print it out and make a house out of it or something? I don't really get what it means to have art for an MP3."
Despite Linnell's downplaying, there's no denying he goes out of his way to try new things. In State Songs, Linnell incorporates the sounds of a marching band and a car alarm into the music. His most ambitious experiment involved arranging music for a carousel band organ and recording it. Once again, what could be construed as a gimmick takes on more meaning when approached with Linnell's honest enthusiasm.
"I've been interested in mechanical music for a long time," he says of the carousel organ project. "It's a prohibitively expensive thing to get involved in; the big machines cost as much as a house and the small ones cost about as much as an SUV. So if you wanted to get an SUV and you changed your mind, you could get a band organ instead. They stopped making band organs in the '20s. They don't sound as expensive as they are. They sound kind of cheap, actually. They are very hard to keep in tune and, unless you're very good at cutting the rolls, it's very hard to make them sound precise. I think there is something poignant about a machine playing music. It's this flawless thing and yet it can never quite give you that human touch. You can always tell it's mechanical. The way they compensate for that is to over-arrange. You can't really tell from the record but the things are really loud. The bigger one I used is actually in a carousel in Washington DC. There may be machines that punch in the arrangements on paper, but all the guys I talked to punch it in by hand. First they would mark up the paper using a pencil and ruler, then they would take an Exacto knife and do the cutting. They had to do it exactly right or it wouldn't work."
The results on Linnell's album are, to say the least, interesting. But does interesting music necessarily mean "uncool" music? And what exactly defines "geek-rock" anyway? I have a theory as to why They Might Be Giants are often labeled this way. Instead of writing deeply personal, emotional folk ballads, John Linnell and John Flansburgh adopt a more third-person approach to songwriting. But as Linnell explains, "It's all sort of personal in that it's really us who are doing it. I feel like we're out on a limb just by doing our stuff. This is our lives. But I know people like Giddie Johnson who will actually just tell you in a song what sort of horrible things have happened to him. It's incredibly personal for him, and I don't think that's a bad thing. It's just not for us."
If coolness equals cynicism, then count They Might Be Giants out. Without irony, Linnell and Flansburgh bill themselves as "Brooklyn's Ambassadors of Love." It's been more than fifteen years and they're still not embittered by the music business. "We're totally jaded," Linnell jokingly says. "John pointed this out to me, and I never really thought of it in this way before: everyone takes for granted that cement companies are corrupt. They don't have a problem with that. Or contractors. People will say, 'Oh yeah, it's mob controlled.' But the minute anyone suggests that the music business might be the same, it's like this crazy scandal. Like John was saying, it's all business, of course it's corrupt."
So why is the laid back optimism of They Might Be Giants perceived as geeky, whereas Eddie Vedder's pretentious bitterness is perceived as cool?
Linnell, in a very observant manner, says, "Which one of us is pretentious, Eddie Vedder or us? In some ways, his trip is that he lacks style. He's putting his heart on his sleeve and telling you what he thinks. John and I are a little bit more calculated. I don't know if that's really true, but I have that impression based on the stereotypes of two different bands. But everybody is calculating on some level. They're only doing the things they can really do. We wouldn't be capable of truly selling out even if we wanted to. We'd fail miserably. We don't actually know what people want."
They're doing something right, though. They Might Be Giants have achieved critical and commercial success while still existing in the fringes of the business. In fact, right now the band doesn't even have a record contract. Linnell isn't worried, however. They Might Be Giants will continue to create their unique brand of pop music, regardless of the labels assigned to them.