2002-03-20 STLtoday
Q & A: They Might Be Giants
By Thomas Crone, STLtoday, March 20, 2002
Archived from: https://web.archive.org/web/20031013012357/http://www.tmbg.net/articles/STLtoday2002.html
This evening, They Might Be Giants will be appearing in St. Louis, with a show at the Pageant, preceded by a shorter, 6 p.m. acoustic gig at the University City Streetside Records.
Along with John Linnell, John Flansburgh has been a part of TMBG since the beginning, a pairing that's logged almost two decades of writing and recording together. Last week, Flansburgh gave us a call and after some wrangling about a tape deck, we chatted. Sadly, a lengthy, rather hilarious anecdote about German TV had to be dropped for space.
But all the essentials are here. Exactly the way John Flansburgh said them.
STLtoday.com: I wanted to start by asking how many fans dated back to the "Ana Ng" period, or other specific songs of that period.
Flansburgh: At this point, in terms of our disc-buying audience, it's a decent percentage. But of our live show audience, it's non-existent. They're all 30 years old, and too old to go to shows. When you've been in a band for 20 years, it's not just about your first audiences. When we first starting playing, we were playing to audiences older than us. Now, we play for audiences much younger than us. You know, audiences change.
STLtoday.com: Can you discuss your video work, after such early success with them? Were there times things were possible financially, but not at another?
Flansburgh: Well, we've always made relatively inexpensive videos. It's not hard to think of smart ways to make good-looking videos on budget. I think the thing that's changed is that there's very little place on MTV for music. It's more of a lifestyles network. The reality is that music isn't as key a part of youth culture as it was even 10 years ago. Grunge, in some ways, seemed like the last hurrah of the true believers. For us, it's always been making videos and fun visual stuff online, artwork that's a natural extension of the band. It's a natural way to show the energy of the band.
STLtoday.com: Can you talk about St. Louis and the city's relationship to the band? There's always been a reputation of this being a stronghold.
Flansburgh: We have a lot of great fans in St. Louis. The Point supported us in a very big way early on. It turned us on to a lot of people in St. Louis and we did a lot of festivals that were very successful. It's sort of hard to say why it worked out so well. It just clicked. For us, we don't get a chance to do that many festivals. In general, I think people think we're much stranger than we are. And festivals are kind of designed for mainstream entertainment. When we actually have the opportunities to play in front of large audience, promoters are surprised at how solid our set is and how we can hold our own. We're drawing on a lot of material and when you distill it down to a 40-minute show, you would hope after this many years it would be a good show.
STLtoday.com: What's the set list comprised of these days?
Flansburgh: At a festival it's different, but at a regular show about 50% of it comes from songs that work so well and are so much fun to play that we tend to lean on them on a regular basis. It's not even our best-known songs so much as songs that work. Most of the songs that are known... "Birdhouse" will certainly get played. Even some unreleased ones. It's a real variety pack. It's important to keep it ever-moving. We have a lot of people coming back to shows and it's obvious they want to see something new every time.
STLtoday.com: The Point's gone to more of a hard-rock play list. Do you find that happening around the country?
Flansburgh: I don't pay any attention to radio. It's not a big part of what we do. We certainly benefit when radio's open to us. It's not something we rely on. The key to our survival has been trimming our sails in such a way that we don't need MTV and we don't need radio. We appeal to an independent-minded audience. It's largely self-selected. They find out about us through the Internet, they find out about us through this article. They explore the band online and get farther into. We don't assume that we'll be played on radio and have seldom been on the radio. It's not like we had some steady run and it's gone. The little bit we've gotten has been so fluky.
STLtoday.com: Your website is so comprehensive and fun. Do you two spend a lot of hands-on time with that?
Flansburgh: We actually have three official websites and are about to launch a fourth, the new site at theymightbegiants.com that's all news. TMBG.com is a big archival site with lots of streaming video, MP3s, fun stuff about the band. Letters. Things like that. DialaSong.com is the online, analog equivalent of our Dial-a-Song service on the phone. That's a simple one. And we're about to launch an animated site at giantkid.net, that's going to be just for kids. We have a children's album coming out in a few months and it has an enhanced CD. Enhanced animation to all the songs. It's really cool and has a lot of original songs on it. It's been a neat project. All the animation was created on Flash, so it was very easy to go with online. We're going to preview the whole thing online.
STLtoday.com: You seem to keep things interesting by working on these projects. It's not like a band that puts out a record, then tours, etc. Is it ever hard to carve out time for touring? Is it still something you enjoy doing?
Flansburgh: It's something we enjoy more because we get to do it less. I really love performing, I love playing for people, I love playing the guitar really loud. It's not a hard job at the core of it. Compared to a lot of other jobs, it's not that hard. And the tension that's there tends to get released on a pretty regular basis. So, unlike doing studio work, which is really artistically, and creatively rewarding, you have a finish line. After you get off stage from a show, it's Miller Time, everything's cool. Working in the studio, it's a non-stop tension train, in some ways. Keeping it changing is the key. Distance makes the heart grow fonder. That's certainly true in music. I haven't been on the road in a while and I'm really looking forward to it. It's all about balance.
STLtoday.com: Have you done a lot in Japan?
Flansburgh: We have worked a lot in Japan. We've toured there four times. They're very organized in Japan.
STLtoday.com: There's a ska band in St. Louis that has a big place in Korea. Are there pockets like that for you?
Flansburgh: We've always done well in Australia. We've done well in England. To be perfectly honest, we're surprised at how well we do in the United States. We're solid everywhere in the US, which is a tremendous help when touring. We can play everywhere and do well. We're lucky. We've done a lot of touring, a lot of work. The residual good luck is that it's works all over.
STLtoday.com: Are there any projects that have been on the docket for a while, that you haven't yet been able to pull off yet?
Flansburgh: We've got a couple ideas in the hopper. One is a fake soundtrack album where every song would be essentially by a different band, even though every one would be written by us. That's a crazed, crackpot idea that I'm sure we'll realize one of these days. Yeah, we enjoy doing different stuff and keeping it interesting.