2001-03-23 Florida Times-Union
They Might Be Giants still close to the cutting edge
By Nick Marino, Florida Times-Union, March 23, 2001
In the spring of 1999, after almost 20 years making music together in relative obscurity, John Flansburgh and John Linnell got a call from Fox, requesting a 30-second theme song for a new program called Malcolm in the Middle. They delivered the song, both show and song became huge hits, and suddenly the childhood friends in They Might Be Giants lived up to their name.
As Flansburgh told Rolling Stone, "My parents finally know what I do for a living." Before the Malcolm gig, Flansburgh and Linnell had spent most of their adult lives playing offbeat pop ditties like Youth Culture Killed My Dog, Doctor Worm and Birdhouse in Your Soul--the latter of which may or may not be told from the perspective of a nightlight--to cult audiences of college kids in horn-rimmed glasses. They've spent the early part of this year in the studio, recording an album that's due this fall. Although they released their last album, Long Tall Weekend, exclusively as an Internet download, the forthcoming record will have a traditional in-store release. Taking a break from recording the new album, the 41-year-old Linnell chatted about MP3s, the avant garde and the tour, which stops Tuesday at Edge 2000.
What did releasing your last album ("Long Tall Weekend") online teach you about digital music?
You know, it's funny, so far I haven't learned that much from the experience.
For us, the part that was interesting came before we put it out, which was just the idea that we could cook up an album's worth of stuff and sell it to somebody for this totally unheard-of medium. At that point, we really had no idea who was out there. I'm still a little unclear about it.
How do you feel about what's happening to Napster?
I'm a little bit sick of the rhetoric. To me it all sounds very empty when people go on and on about how downloading music makes them want to go out and buy CDs. It sounds very convenient.
On the other hand, it's obviously not really hurt us. We're in a situation where we probably have more to gain from people ripping us off at this point.
Do you feel at all ripped off?
I feel totally used. No, no, it's a great way to find out about stuff. I think that there's some point where so many people are getting the stuff for free, so few people are paying for it, that it's no longer making it affordable for the person making it. But we're not anywhere near that point yet.
Tell me about this tour.
Well, we have a lot of new songs. And we don't want to torment the people who are coming to hear the old songs, but we haven't put out a regular album in quite a while, so we have a ton of new material that we'll probably try to play as much as we can get away with on this tour...
A long time ago, we played in Jacksonville Beach at this little place called Einstein's-A-Go-Go. It's for some reason the only thing I can remember about Jacksonville.
It's not a bad thing to remember.
It's funny 'cause I think at that time I thought that's what all gigs were going to be like. It was a way more personal place than everywhere that we've been since then. We got the big platter of shrimp in the dressing room, the dressing room, which was basically--I mean the whole place was just barely even a structure.
Do you have any idea when that was?
That was probably '87, something like that. It was one of our first tours.
The line between legitimately alternative music--stuff that seems to have some semblance of avant garde in it--and the mainstream seems to have bounced around all over the place since then.
It's really a state of mind, isn't it? I mean what people consider to be selling out.
We just did this project for McSweeney's, [Dave Eggers'] literary magazine.... That was really fun, and obviously part of the trip is that it's an example of a fairly well-marketed, widely distributed thing that's considered to be kind of cutting edge.
In some ways, to me it's kind of appealing 'cause it's this sort of old-fashioned kind of cutting edge. It reminds me of the fiction of the '60s, like Donald Bartheleme and stuff like that. That kind of idea of freedom like, "Hey, you can make a whole story that's just periods." And you would want to! So it's a very fun-loving type of avant garde in a way, like the stuff that we kind of grew up with.
Old-fashioned cutting edge--that's what you guys are, too, isn't it?
I don't know if I want to say that in a newspaper, but maybe that's kind of it in a way. Again, this is an example of my completely out-of-it-ness that I'm not even sure if people even think in terms of avant garde any more. That seems like an old-fashioned concept to me. Not that I'm not interested in it, but I'm an old guy.
Is it odd to have fans all over the country and all over the world singing your songs and having no idea what they mean?
Well, I don't think that they don't know what they mean. I wish I could somehow put this information into the song, but I really feel like a lot of the times people get everything about it. And the things that they think they don't get, don't exist. You know what I mean? There's nothing missing in their understanding of Particle Man or whatever. That really is the whole song, and there's no hidden part of it. There's no hidden meaning.
What's still deep in the vaults? Is there one killer song that you've kept to yourself?
No, man. We're trying to get over. We've given away our best stuff. Well, actually, I wrote a song around the time we were recording Flood that we're just now recording. So maybe that would be considered that kind of material.
What's it about?
It's called Hovering Sombrero.