2000-06 Shredding Paper
"They Might Be Giants"
By Jimi Cheetah and Mercedes Foster, Shredding Paper, June, 2000
Archived from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tabloidfootprints/35354227350/in/album-72157686470407945
John Flansburgh and John Linnell started making music as a team while in high school. In 1981 they moved to Brooklyn, and named their new project They Might Be Giants, based on the 1971 film. Shortly thereafter they came up with a gimmick that gained them national attention, Dial-A-Song, a Brooklyn, New York phone line with an ever-changing answering machine that's been hooked up ever since. (The number is still 718-387-6962, and still free if dialed from work!) Dial-A-Song lead to a record deal and their first self-titled LP on Bar None records in 1986. Still not fitting smoothly into the corporate music mold, their most recent album, "Long Tall Weekend", is an MP3 only release. It seems that lately They Might Be Giants is omnipresent; on ABC's "Brave New World" (with Ted Koppel, no less!), "This American Life" on National Public Radio, FOX's "Malcom In The Middle", etc. There is a complete discography on their official site (www.tmbg.com) and a ridiculously complete, borderline obsessive one on their "unofficial" site (www.tmbg.org). In fact, there are many such unofficial sites, and they are all freakishly ornate, with games and trivia and chat groups, etc. Now that I have seen the multitudes of TMBG fans through their obsessive websites, I should have asked if that scrutiny creeps them out.
This interview was conducted in San Francisco with John Flansburgh, who was very charming. John Linnell was elsewhere speaking with other people. We met him later, and he was nice and smiley as well.
Mercedes: What was with the "Brave New World" program (a science and technology mini-series that was on ABC Fall of '99)?
John F: We actually were very involved with that show, because we did the incidental music and the theme as well as these video performances.
Mercedes: How did you get involved in that?
John F: We did a benefit for WNYC which is the NPR station in New York City at Town Hall last year with the people from "This American Life". One of the things about [This American Life] is that it's all spoken word with music coming in and out of these stories. It's actually got a lot of music in it, but they always use the same music. They had like 25 cues and we thought it would be interesting to learn all their songs and when they did their live performance, they would just script it like their regular "This American Life" show, only they'd have a live band. It was a live show with a big audience.
Mercedes: So it was all the songs that they already used?
John F: Yeah. We performed a couple of our songs in the middle just to keep it interesting.
Mercedes: Aren't most of the songs they use popular recordings?
John F: They've got a lot of groove based, very simple songs, songs from the sixties. Anyway, we were the house band for that show, and we did this song "Older" that is on the MP3 that we just released. It's got this linear gag to it, basically, and in the audience was this guy Robert Cruldwich who used to be an NPR writer who basically writes what Ted Koppel says. He's one of the head writers at Nightline. He wrote all the "Brave New World" shows, and he's the star and the creator of the show. He's a very interesting guy, very different and non-corporate. He's a journalist, but he's got a very personal, philosophical style with a lot of thought-piece type stuff. He really enjoyed our show, and he thought that ["Older"] was on topic with the first episode of "Brave New World" that he was writing. So he asked us if we would be interested in performing the song on the show, and we're like, "Yeah." And then the producers of the show realized that they'd tried other performers writing songs to sort of fit in with their thing, and it was a tall order for us to write songs on the topics that they had going on. It's pretty prosaic stuff, it's not about poetic issues. It's not about the things people write songs about, you know? And even though we write about a lot of unusual topics, they're almost always our own obsessions, they're our own personal issues, no matter how strange they might seem, it's what were into. We're not topical songwriters, and it was strange writing about stuff that we didn't necessarily know that much about, or telling stories that weren't our stories. So it was a challenge, but it was an interesting project.
It's strange being on prime time TV, you actually get a lot of notoriety that you don't realize is available to a rock band. I mean, we'd never thought about doing stuff on TV, and all of a sudden we're doing a lot of things on TV. It's strange, because a lot of people end up finding out who you are even though they might not like you, which is weirder. It's cool for us, because I think probably more than a lot of other bands, it's really hard to say who's gonna like us anyway. We've always made a point of getting ourselves out there as much as we possibly can, because we're not like a cult band, or a lifestyle band. We're always excited when we find out that some interesting person is into us. We try to make it as wide open as possible.
Mercedes: What interesting people?
John F: This really blew my mind; Bob Dylan owns They Might Be Giants records. My brain caved in when I heard that.
Jimi: That's obviously someone you have a huge amount of respect for.
John F: Well, yeah. You'd have to be some shade of jackass to not respect Bob Dylan. You might not be a fan, but the reality of it is no matter what you're into, it was different before he hit the scene. Even if the only thing you like is the Clash, and I'm sure there's a certain percentage of people reading this interview who only like the Clash, the reality is the Clash wouldn't be the Clash at all, they would be as jive as the hokiest Eddie Cochran song if it wasn't for Bob Dylan. That's actually probably an understatement!
Jimi: He broke an amazing amount of ground.
John F: In so many different ways! It's kind of weird, he was psychedelic as well as political. He pushed it out in a couple of different directions. He's an interesting guy. Personally I find Bob Dylan really inspiring. Every time I hear Dylan records, I think, "Yeah, he can just write a song! He can write songs about anything!" And it's so free! For me, if I can write a song with two verses, it's a really good day. What we do is so much about compressed thought and we write really tight. Bob Dylan's the classic example of someone who writes really loose, it's like fourteen verses later and he's still riffin'. But what's strange is it's all kind of on topic. "Like A Rolling Stone" is a really long song about one thing. Are you familiar with that song "If You See Her, Say Hello"? That song tears me in half. It's so obviously, tangibly about... I mean, I'm sure the names and locations have changed, but the heartache in that song is so real. It's a very cool song.
But anyway, enough about Bob Dylan!
Jimi: That deals a little bit with what your influences are, which we swore we wouldn't ask.
John F: Influence is a funny question, you know?
Mercedes: I just hate that question when I read it in an interview. Obviously, you pull a lot of emotion out of Bob Dylan songs. I was introduced to your music pretty much as a kid, and I really grabbed onto certain songs and identified with them emotionally. How much emotion really goes into the songs you write?
John F: Well, that's an interesting question. We're not confessional songwriters in the sense that somebody like Bob Dylan might be, you know? And that's probably why we're not particularly successful, because we don't really try to be. For a lot of people, being into a songwriter is about an emotional connection they have with that songwriter. I don't know if you're familiar with the idea of the unreliable narrator, a story told by somebody you can't quite trust. Having grown up with Alice Cooper and Randy Newman and other songwriters who had this projected image, and they're writing from a point of view that might not be a reasonable point of view, writing from a character, that was a way for us to get into songwriting. It was a way for us to feel brave and secure enough that we could actually write our own songs. Writing a song is a very strange thing to think that you can do. I mean, the Beatles write songs, other people. I remember when I first started writing songs, it was so weird, I can't believe I wrote! When I got into it through home recording, and put the guitar track down and sang along, it would assemble itself within the tracks of my 4 track tape recorder, and it would come out sounding like a song, and it was a very mysterious and electrifying thing! They suddenly sounded like songs, and I did it!
Jimi: You cracked the formula.
John F: Yeah! But it had this otherness to it. I guess the thing is that for us, we have more distance from what we do, and we kind of view it in a more critical way and a more secondary way. It's not just, "These are my feelings and they're pouring out of my soul." That's not our style. I think we're more like fiction writers. Which is not to say we don't have personal issues in a song, a lot of our songs are actually about very real issues of people's lives. In a lot of ways, I think they are complicated in a way that's very adult. I just think that confessional stuff is not our bag. We're more into song craft and having an interesting set of ideas and images that will challenge the listener. I think there is something ultimately hooked into pop songwriting, really really focused pop songwriting. We sort of got off on this Dylan tangent; we were very un-Dylan-y.
My biggest problem with rock music in general is that there's no room for complexity. There's no room for adult emotion, and adult emotion is much more complicated and compromised and confusing. Adolescent emotion is this very pure thing, "I'm 15 years old, I can't take this world, I'm going to fucking kill myself." You know what, I'm not 15 years old, I can't take this world, and I know I don't want to kill myself. I've got to figure out a way to go on. Dealing with frustrations and anger and all the conflicts and compromises of adult life, whether it's relationships or your job or whatever, all those things are different kinds of issues. It's interesting for me to try to write a song that's about things that aren't just The Greatest Love or The Hardest Life or whatever. I'm interested in street level emotion. I'm interested in real emotion, which is so much more complicated than that. It's so easy to be melodramatic, it's easy to pull out this chain of cliches that sort of fill in whatever the blank is. I think that audiences are interested in more interesting things than that.
I'd love to write a straight love song, I've tried many times, but it's very difficult, it's difficult for us. Obviously, other people have an easier time of it. I think it's a noble thing when it succeeds, and sometimes they succeed without even being ambitious. There are some simple love songs that are quite beautiful. I like the ones that are sort of halfway sad. I really like that Carole King song, "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow". That's a very tangibly real song.
Jimi: I think the Supremes, as far as that era, their love songs were always kind of melancholy, too. They had beautiful harmonies, but...
John F: They were a little bit tinged with sadness.
Mercedes: Who writes your songs? Do you collaborate, or do you each write your own?
John F: We both write songs separately, and we tend to sing the songs that we write. But at the same time, we're writing for this project that has a style of its own. The first audience for the songs we write is the other person. We both edit and shape the other persons song, sometimes as a booster, a lot of times the songs that we write will be something very fucked up about an idea that might be hard to justify, and one of the nice things about working with somebody who says, "Hey! That really strange thing is the coolest part! You've got to keep that in the song."
It's hard to say, there are songs that we've written 50/50, there are songs that I gave the lyrics to Linnell, and he wrote the music to it. With Spider, he made these vocal samples on this Casio sampler, and just gave me the disk and I put the musical track together. We write a lot of songs, and even though we're not experimental musicians in the traditional sense, we treat songwriting as an open ended thing. In a pop song, everyone knows the form and the rules, but beyond that it's pretty wide open. It's a strange kind of freedom that you have. As long as you're working within this short form verse/chorus idea, after that, it can be anything! It can have any kind of structure, any kind of rhythm, any kind of lyric, so in some ways, I think we're really into stretching out this thing as far as we can go, but it's a really formal thing.
It's a strange paradox. I think a good song has a sense of proportion to it, a sense of balance that IS about craft, at least for us. We approach it a lot of different ways, there are a lot of different ways to start a song. Finishing a song, you always end up dealing with the same issues, but we try to think of as many different ways as possible to start them.
Mercedes: I know it just used to be the two of you, but then with John Henry, you had a full band...
John F: Getting a full band really came out of touring. All through the '80s, we pretty much were a local New York band. We started performing in the early '80s, we put out our first indie record in '87, and we played in clubs and worked at our day jobs. Basically, we rehearsed for an hour every night of the week, and then we would play Friday or Saturday night, sometimes both. Because we were a duo, and we were playing for perform ances spaces and relatively small audiences, the limitations of the format were not so evident. It was kind of like an underpinning, having a drum machine or a track of stuff that we'd put together. Actually, when we started, it was before drum machines really existed. We played the drums into a four track and constructed our own little rhythm tracks. As a duo, we hated the idea of being perceived as folkies, you know? It's like you're a duo, and all of a sudden, you're Simon and Garfunkel. We had a lot of vocal harmony, but that wasn't our thing. Not that I'm dissing the Simon and Garfunkel, it's just not where we were at at all. We were very much into pop music.
Jimi: Was it a conscious decision not to have a band back then?
John F: We couldn't afford it. We weren't making any money, and nobody would allow us to keep on doing what we were doing. That was the most important thing. We were in Brooklyn, space was very tight, we rehearsed in our apartment, so there was no way we could have a drummer. Forget it!
Mercedes: You guys lived together?
John F: We lived in the same apartment building, and then for a couple of years, right as things started to get going, we shared an apartment in this incredible house. There was this brief period where we actually had a room with drums, and we could play drums. That was amazing! We thought about getting a drummer, but it's just hard to hold onto one, even for a week. It's like, "Come back!", "No, I'm busy!" You know, drummers in New York are a very coveted commodity. If you're a decent drummer, you can get paid to play with some dentist or something. Somebody will pay you to play, you can get paid to play at rehearsals. So, attention drummers! Move to New York! It seems like every drummer is in at least a couple of bands in New York. There's a real drummer shortage. Guitarists are a dime a dozen.
Jimi: Drumming is one of those skills that not everyone seems to be able to master. It's a high commodity. Everybody can play guitar.
John F: Exactly!
Mercedes: I can't.
John F: Well, you could if you wanted to. I couldn't play drums even if I wanted to. So, anyway, we were a duo for a long time, and I have to say, it was such an interesting time, it was such a good time. We really flourished in obscurity. All through those first 5 years, before we did our first record, we checked out a lot of different ways of working. We were heavily influenced by Pere Ubu and The Residents and very artsy art rock bands. And speaking of influences, it's not always what you like the most that's what you're best at. I think that for us it actually took us a long time to figure out what we were good at. We have a lot of respect for a lot of different kinds of musicians, but it wasn't really right for us. What we do is a very direct reflection of who we are, not who we want to be or who we dig. It's totally us, and I think that's what makes it work.
Mercedes: Your band now isn't just a touring band, though, right? You do work with them more?
John F: Yeah! We started this band and did it for ten years before we started working with a side band, and now we work with incredible musicians. Almost categorically, everybody we play with are better musicians than we are. It would be really weird to hire somebody who was as technically bad as we are. Right now, the basic core band is Dan Hickey on the drums. He toured with the B-52s for years, and has worked with Cindi Lauper and a couple of other rock stars. Danny Weinkauf is the bass player, and Dan Miller, they were both in local bands in New York. They were in this band Lincoln that opened for us last year, and when that band broke up, we took them on. Graham Maby had been playing bass with us for a number of years earlier, and he got scooped away by Natalie Merchant's band. He started with Joe Jackson.
Mercedes: Did the band Lincoln name themselves after your album?
John F: No, they didn't. I think that was one thing they really loathed about touring with us. It was really strange, because for us it was like Rush, with special guest 2112. It was like, "What is that? Some kind of tribute band?" They were their own thing. It was just a strange unfortunate coincidence. Unfortunate for them... unfortunate for us, too, I think there were a percentage of people who would think we were playing the album.
A couple of years ago, we released "Then, The Earlier Years", which was all our '80s stuff, which was all the duo stuff, and we did a couple of special shows where we did our duo show, we basically opened for ourselves. In retrospect, I had no idea, I spent a lot of my adult life doing this thing, and it must have been really strange for a lot of people. We did festivals for 15,000 people and we're up there with a drum machine, a guitar, and an accordion, and we were just thinking, "We're the fucking Rolling Stones! We are a rock band!" There was never a doubt in our minds, and that's probably what got us through, that we never questioned it for a second. Yeah, sure, we had fake drums, but get over it. And now, having enjoyed five years of touring with a big band and a horn section and having all the musicality of that experience, the fullness of the sound on stage, and the musicianship... it makes it exciting, it's a very live, visceral show. In many ways, it's the appropriate final destination for the kind of manic energy that we're into on stage. I just wonder now if we were wrong. It's a weird thing to think we should have had a band this whole time. We were probably just wrong! When we started, I'm really glad that we didn't have to deal with, "...this is what the drummer wants to do." or that kind of... there's something very dumb about the Music By Committee aspect of a band.
Mercedes: That's what I wanted to know, are you and Linnell still the principal songwriters for the band?
John F: Yeah, we're the songwriters and the bandleaders. It's our band. We don't take on people going, "We're going to take care of you for the rest of your lives." We just hire people for shows.
Mercedes: You have like 19 people on your live album.
John F: Well, working with horn players in New York, there's no way they're going to be around. We work with sort of a revolving crew of people. It hasn't changed that much, but the guys we work with, they've got to work! We don't tour fifty weeks of the year, and they work 50 weeks of the year.
Mercedes: How often do you tour?
John F: We do a couple national tours a year. Six months out of the year. We were in Europe last year, and earlier this year we did a couple of shows in England, and a bunch of TV stuff. Right now, we're between national deals, we did this MP3 thing, but that's just the United States, really.
Mercedes: Are you going to release the MP3 in a traditional format?
John F: No, we're actually working on our next album that will have a couple of the songs, it will have "Older" and "She Thinks She's Edith Head", but the rest will be totally new. We're actually pretty well through that. We've been working with this guy Joe Niccolo, who's one half of the Butcher Brothers. They did that the Urge Overkill album, and they discovered the Fugees. They own Roughhouse Records, which put out Cypress Hill. They're incredible talent scouts, they can recognize amazingly people who will become incredibly successful. And they're long, long, long term They Might Be Giants fans. It was really interesting working with people with such a different background. They totally come from a hip hop background, and yet they totally liked us. It wasn't a stretch for them, they're really into us. So we've got a bunch of material we've been doing with them, and a bunch we did on our own this year. We're getting the lawyers together.
Mercedes: Is the MP3 version of Edith Head the first you have recorded?
John F: Yeah, we just wrote it like six months ago.
Mercedes: Oh? Because when I saw it, I was like, "Oh! I know I know that song!" You didn't tour with it before or anything?
John F: No, no...don't tell me somebody else wrote a song called Edith Head, I'll fucking kill myself!
At this point, John Flansburgh was apologetically drug off by the tour manager for pressing business. Later, after dinner and some wandering around checking out the scary Market Street crazies, we were treated to a fine TMBG show at the Warfield.