Jonathan Feinberg
Jonathan "JD" Feinberg, nicknamed "The Doctor of Sound," was They Might Be Giants' first touring drummer.[1] A huge fan of the album Flood, he prepared for his audition by transcribing and memorizing the drum machine part for about 35 songs that were in the band's live repertoire at the time.
He spent six months of 1992 on the Don't Tread On The Cut-Up Snake World Tour in support of Apollo 18, and performed "The Statue Got Me High" with the band on The Tonight Show. He recorded one song with the band at the time, "O Tannenbaum". In 2002, he provided percussion on "Now That You're One Of Us". He's also featured on the CD The Best Of Mountain Stage Live Volume Five, drumming on "Particle Man".
Flansburgh: "We've got a guy in the band whose name is remarkably close to mine. The drummer's name is Jon Feinberg. We actually call him J.D. Feinberg, just to avoid having another John." (The Baltimore Sun, September 18, 1992)
In 2022 Feinberg described his departure from the band as an "accident", saying:
I was pretty young and inexperienced. I didn't know anything about anything, certainly nothing about the music business [...] I got a consulting job doing computer programming for HBO, and things were going very well with the band Church of Betty, and we planned a tour to Germany and Austria in the spring of '93. When I finally got a phone call from Flans, my memory is that he said "Hey, do you happen to be available on this date and this date?" And I was like, "Ah, you know, I'm just going to be getting back from a tour at that time, and I don't want to blow this other gig that I've got. So, I think no." What I didn't understand about that conversation is that what he was really saying was "Do you wish to continue to be our drummer?" and I was saying "No, I do not." [...] But it was probably the right thing to do considering the growth and experiences I've had since then.[2]
Feinberg worked as a programmer for Google for 13 years. Previously, while working for IBM Research, he developed Wordle, a tool that generates graphical "word clouds" (not to be confused with the 2021 word game).
