Pitchfork - 1996
They Might Be Giants Retrospective
By Ryan Schreiber, Pitchfork Online, September/December 1996
Archived from: https://web.archive.org/web/19970312100505/http://www.live-wire.com/issue05/tmbg/
Part I: The Beginning
Pitchfork: How did you and John Linnell meet?
Flansburgh: John and I were friends in high school, actually. We both worked for the paper. We would spend these kind of crazy overnights every couple of weeks when the paper came out. We would spend Friday night and Saturday at this print house putting the paper together. It was just kind of that crazy, giddy teenage excitement that you get when you stay up all night. That was where we became friends.
Pitchfork: What grade was that?
Flansburgh: I guess I was in 10th grade and John was in 11th. I'd met him in junior high school, but he's a year older than me so we didn't take any classes together then. It's kind of like you know everybody in your school, so I knew who he was but because he was a year older, I didn't really become friends with him until later on.
Pitchfork: How was the musical element introduced into the relationship?
Flansburgh: A lot of it was just getting wrapped up in the events of the time. It's funny -- it makes me feel like I'm 1,000 years old even thinking back that far. The music scene wasn't that interesting for a lot of our teenage years. I mean, we were rock fans. We liked David Bowie and The Beatles and a lot of other more peripheral rock music -- Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, that sort of official fringe music of the time. It was really the whole punk rock/new wave explosion.
Pitchfork: Did you feel, at the time, like there was a shot at some sort of stardom?
Flansburgh: I'm 36, so I was 17 in 1977 and before the punk rock thing, the whole mythology around rock performance was so tense that it kind of shut you out. You were relegated to being a fan. People make a lot of this Do-It-Yourself attitude and they associate it with pressing your own records and working independently for major labels, but at that time, the Do-It-Yourself thing was more about fans starting bands to do the kind of music that they liked and not worrying about whether they'd become superstars. It was more primary than finding and grabbing the music production. It was regular people -- not just David Bowie and Rod Stuart -- starting bands.
Pitchfork: What was one of the bands that was doing that sort of different type of thing that pushed you?
Flansburgh: Well, The Ramones, in a lot of ways, were almost like a conceptual band. They all had the same last name, they dressed alike, they had the same haircut. They were like a gang. There was something very symbolic and almost theoretical about them. They were officially and unmistakably rock music, but there was this other thing that seemed much more personal. It wasn't like everybody doing the same thing. It was much more about people who were less than Hollywood good-looking reclaiming the humbler qualities of rock expression.
Pitchfork: How did bands like The Ramones contrast against bands like, say, Van Halen?
Flansburgh: There's a constant push-pull betweent the really charismatic personalities of rock like Little Richard and Adam Ant and David Lee Roth, and the dumpy outsiders like Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison and even The Beatles to a certain extent. It's like, they were packaged very successfully, but to a lot of people they kind of telegraph this sort of loser vibe. They just seemed like regular guys. They really weren't that handsome. They had obviously had common lives before they were catapulted. Maybe that's what made The Beatles so transcendent. They could actually work both sides of the stardom thing.
Pitchfork: Why did you choose the name "They Might Be Giants," aside from the fact that it was a movie title?
Flansburgh: It was just sort of an interesting name. We gave ourselves the name They Might Be Giants in 1983, at a time when like the name Duran Duran actually seemed fresh. People were kind of experimenting with different kinds of names for bands. I mean, now, the kind of ponderously long name is sort of an established style, but it seemed really interesting at the time. I think that because it's the kind of name that it is, it's maybe even a little dated now, and also that it's the name They Might Be Giants, which has been ripped on a million different ways by people writing about us, or writing about the New York Giants. It's so played, in my mind, that I wish we'd called ourselves something infinitely duller.
Pitchfork: But then, I remember the first time I ever heard the name They Might Be Giants was right before Flood came out, and it's just not a name you ever forget.
Flansburgh: Well, I guess that's a good thing. I guess I don't really give it much credit as being a good name, and in some ways it probably is a good name. But I just tend to feel like it's kind of in the way.
Pitchfork: What was the first recording you guys ever did together?
Flansburgh: We did a recording of a Yoko Ono song in my parents' house when we were teenagers called "Don't Worry Kyoko" We did a version of that and both of us were singing. There was like a Farfisa organ and a piano and all these overdubbed... We just sort of bounced the tracks back and forth, experimenting with sounds. That was the first thing we did.
Pitchfork: Who was the more musically oriented of the two?
Flansburgh: I was sort of thrashing about, trying to do something musical, but it wasn't until later on when I taught myself how to play that I really had anything to contribute. John was already well on his way to being a musician in high school whereas I was sort of on the outside looking in, though I was always really interested in sound reproduction, like tape recorders and recording things and how records were created and stuff like that. That was always a real fascination of mine.
Pitchfork: If somebody had told you then that one day, you would make a living as a recognized musician, would it have surprised you?
Flansburgh: When I think back on where I was going when I was 17 years old, it probably would surprise somebody that I would end up being a musician. You know, even though I was really a big rock fan and really interested in recording, I sort of felt like the boat had already left the dock. I mean, at 17 years old, it's a little late in the day to start playing the electric guitar. It's just kind of embarrasing. The great thing about that whole Post-Ramones era was that it was kind of like Amnesty Day for kids like me. It was like, "Hey! Go and learn how to play the guitar. It's not such a big deal."
Pitchfork: What city was that in?
Flansburgh: It was in Boston, but I learned how to play the guitar when I was living in Washington, D.C. I was working nights in a parking lot and going to college during the day and I would be in one of those little boxes -- you know, one of those miniature houses -- and I taught myself how to play in the miniature house.
Pitchfork: After high school, you and Linnell sort of went off to other places. How did you wind up together again?
Flansburgh: I basically flopped out of George Washington after one semester and then flopped into Antioch in Ohio and during those years, Linnell was in a band called The Mundanes out of Providence, Rhode Island, which were a pretty successful local band that ended up moving to New York to try to make it big. I moved to New York to transfer, yet again, into art school. I went to a pretty legitimate, kind of stuffy art school in Brooklyn. So we ended up moving into the same apartment building together in Brooklyn in 1981 and started sharing equipment.
Pitchfork: Had your guitar skills improved by then?
Flansburgh: By that point, I was playing the guitar pretty much all the time. So we just started making tapes together. Kind of sharing equipment and making tapes and working on each other's songs.
Pitchfork: Where did you get your first gig?
Flansburgh: A couple of years after we moved into that apartment building, a friend of ours got us a gig at this crappy showcase club called Dr. D's which was in Soho. He booked it a couple of months in advance so we had a lot of time to get the show together. We wrote a lot of material for it and really rehearsed like tons before this show. We were so over-caffeinated at that point. I imagine that we seemed like just the most hyperactive people. It's kind of taken us a while to calm down and gain some composure, but that first show was pretty interesting.
Pitchfork: How so?
Flansburgh: At that first show, we were doing a lot of stuff that I thought was kind of creepy and I thought that people would react to the material in a creepy way. And I remember being very surprised at how light everyone took everything. We weren't presenting ourselves as sort of heavy, goth people, but we were fairly influenced by The Residents and Pere Ubu and a lot of post-punk art rock bands that had kind of a legit thing about them, even though they were kind of weird. We were a little bit taken aback at how... jolly the perception in the crowd was to our like, fucked-up kind of, "My arm... I can't feel my arm!" kind of songs. The songs were far weirder than the songs we do now. There was probably a lot less to smile about than there is now. I wouldn't have been surprised if people thought we were really self-involved and maybe even self-indulgent, but I wasn't expecting people to think that it was just so much... "fun."
Pitchfork: Do any of those early tapes exist anymore?
Flansburgh: Yeah. A bunch of them do. We're releasing a record called Then next Spring that's like a retrospective of our first couple of independent albums and the EPs that were released around that time, as well as about fifteen unreleased songs that we sold on cassette through mail-order. There's a bunch of material that was cut from the first record. A lot of it is kind of in the "I Can't Feel My Arm" vein of things. Some of the songs are really fucked-up. So, we're releasing those as bonus tracks on this two-disc set that we're making for the Spring.
Pitchfork: So that specifically includes...
Flansburgh: They Might Be Giants, our first album, Lincoln, and all these b-side EPs. It's a ridiculous amount of material. It's your classic too-much-stuff kind of package. But for the hardcore fans, it definitely will offer up a whole bunch of material they've never had a chance to check out before. It's definitely not for the uninitiated.
Pitchfork: What music influenced you to have a darker -- but also more comedic -- edge in your music?
Flansburgh: It's hard to say. I remember reading an interview with Elvis Costello where they asked him why he wrote so many songs about revenge and he didn't write just regular love songs. He wrote about the darker side of romantic scenes. He said that there's not a lot to write about writing a straight love song. It's a much more interesting topic to write about anger and hate and disappointment. It's kind of a parallel thing for us. I don't know if it comes out of music that we've heard so much as it reflects the kind of music that we want to make.
Pitchfork: Right. Like love songs have just been played out now to the point where every damn song on Top 40 radio mentions "The strength to carry on."
Flansburgh: Yeah, when you're growing up, you hear a lot of romantic and sentimental music, and it has a very two-dimensional disingenuousness about it. From the beginning, we felt that, aside from romantic cliches, there were a lot of more interesting things to write about.
Pitchfork: Well, going by the traditional songwriting guidelines, it's verse, chorus, verse and then throw in some half-assed, meaningless, seventh grade poetry for lyrics, and you've got a hit song.
Flansburgh: It's strange to approach anything with a set of rules. The second you say, "We will not have guitar solos," it sort of begs the question, "Why not?" Why not just figure out how to make a good one? The standard love song is a meaty topic, but you're just going where a lot of very strong writers have gone before. The style of the music we've created is really quite personal.
Pitchfork: Your style of music is, in fact, so different, that it's hard for a listener to pick up on where you've drawn your ideas from.
Flansburgh: A lot of times, it's the way things are recorded more than the actual musical content of songs that really inspires us. For instance, Public Enemy. Those records were very influential on me and John. I mean, you'd never know that. You wouldn't think, listening to Apollo 18 that I was listening to Fear of a Black Planet like every day. Right now, Linnell is really obsessed with this new Beck record. If you're really putting yourself into it, you can be inspired by something and it's almost unrecognizable in terms of what comes out the other end.
Pitchfork: Fear of a Black Planet, I think, is probably the most influential rap record ever made. It was a record everyone liked, and I think was record that made it okay for everyone to like rap.
Flansburgh: Yeah, a lot of times, it's about production value. Most people would listen to Public Enemy and go, "Oh, their lyrics," or "Their beats," but for me, it's really all about texture and the sonic landscape of the tracks. It's really amazing. It's a totally unorthodox way of putting together a track, the way they worked.
Pitchfork: It's funny that you should bring up that record because I just bought it on cassette, used for 50 cents at a record store. I got Fear of a Black Planet, which I've been listening to a whole lot, and Apocalypse '91: The Enemy Strikes Black, which is nowhere near as good, regardless of the fact that it has the song, "I Don't Wanna Be Called Yo Nigga," one of the greatest Public Enemy songs ever.
Flansburgh: Apocalypse '91 really wasn't anywhere as good because it wasn't done by The Bomb Squad. People don't realize that that band basically broke up. Like all those guys in The Bomb Squad don't make Public Enemy records anymore, and they were the people who did it. It was their sound. Apocalypse '91 sucked, but they were a pretty righteous example for the rap community for a while there.
Part II: The Pink Album
Pitchfork: What was the first They Might Be Giants release ever?
Flansburgh: We had a flexi-disc before our first album. We did this mail-order business with cassettes that was mildly successful, you know, we sold a couple thousand. It was actually reviewed in People Magazine.
Pitchfork: Really??
Flansburgh: That was the weirdest thing of all. Our big media break was that somebody at People Magazine decided to review our cassette, which is totally insane. But it was great for us, because all of a sudden, we got written about everywhere. Like, if you have a review in People, it opens tons of doors. All of a sudden, you're a national act.
Pitchfork: That was under the name They Might Be Giants?
Flansburgh: Yeah.
Pitchfork: And it was a good review, too?
Flansburgh: Oh, it was a rave! We were doing a lot of shows in New York City, and a lot of people knew about the band. I mean, by the time '85 and '86 came around, people knew that there was this local band. It wasn't that different than today. You know, there's always a hot band working out of New York. "Oh, you gotta check 'em out." That was kind of our situation. We were playing a lot in the East Village and a lot in small clubs like every weekend. We weren't playing for our friends anymore. We'd found our audience, which was a very valuable commodity for a local band.
Pitchfork: Ever since you initially moved to New York, you've just stayed there. Is that just because you really like the city or...
Flansburgh: Yeah. There are things about it that really suck, but every place has got its drawbacks. It's really an inspiring place to work and the pace of the city is really exciting. There are always things to check out and things happening. All our friends are really actively involved in the arts and it's a very creative backdrop to live your life in. I can't imagine what it would be like to be the only guy in your town doing something. I mean, people who live outside of big cities will be "The Musician In Town." I have friends who live in small towns and it's kind of odd.
Pitchfork: Which videos did you do for the first album?
Flansburgh: "Put Your Head Inside The Puppet Head," and that one got played on MTV a bunch, and then we did "Don't Let Start," which got played on MTV a lot, and then we did one for "(She Was A) Hotel Detective" that got played just a little bit.
Pitchfork: A couple years ago, a video compilation came out and I meant to buy it, but I don't think it's available anymore.
Flansburgh: It is. You can still get it.
Pitchfork: Oh, good. How did Dial-A-Song originally happen? Did you just sit down and record something on the answering machine or...?
Flansburgh: At the time, answering machines were kind of a fad. It was very new thing. It dawned on me almost right away. I remember when I was a kid, my mother getting my brother and me on the both extensions of the phone and calling Dial-A-Prayer. And it was just so odd to hear a recording instead of a voice on the other end. It's like what I was saying before about being into recording instead of just being into music. It was always the idea of presenting the music over the phone. And when phone machines kind of came into vogue in New York City in the late 70's and early 80's, I kind of had this idea and we didn't do anything with it for a couple of years.
Pitchfork: Was there something putting you off?
Flansburgh: It seemed like we could almost get into trouble doing it because it's unclear as to whether it's like a business line or... We didn't know what would happen, but John broke his wrist in a bike accident when he was a bike messenger in 1984 and we'd had gigs lined up and we couldn't do them because of his wrist and also, my apartment had been broken into and stuff got stolen. I lost my tape recorder and tapes and my amp and my guitar, so we didn't really have the means to do stuff for a while.
Pitchfork: What was the turnout for your shows like at that point?
Flansburgh: We were just starting to get a local following, we'd been playing out for about six months, and we could just tell that there were friends of friends of friends who were coming to the shows. We thought, let's figure out how to keep their interest and find other people who are interested, so we bought a phone machine and just recorded some cassettes, you know, phone machines all ran off regular cassettes then. I put them on my home phone and put up fliers around Manhattan and it worked out pretty great.
Pitchfork: It's amazing that it's been like 12 years now and you're still doing it.
Flansburgh: There were times when we've thought about stopping, but it's not that hard to keep it going. It doesn't take that much effort, because a lot of it is just stuff that we'd be doing anyway. And we just didn't want people to think we'd quit.
Pitchfork: Did the first record or the Dial-A-Song come first?
Flansburgh: We started Dial-A-Song a couple of years before the album came out.
Pitchfork: That's pretty much got a new song every day, right?
Flansburgh: Well, officially, it's a new song every day. Sometimes we actually change it on the hour, which makes it really exciting. It's a rotation of songs that, at times, gets pretty large before we have a new record coming out. Then, when the record comes out, we pull all the songs that have been released, so basically, it's a vehicle for unreleased songs. Right now, it's kind of at a low ebb because we just took a bunch of songs off.
Pitchfork: When were the songs written for the first album?
Flansburgh: Between 1980 and 1986. It's that classic thing about how you've got a long time to make your first album. It was probably half material that was written between 1985 and 1986 and the record didn't really come out until the beginning of '87, in spite of the copyright date, and it took a long time to make. We didn't have any mwas available to us was sort of sporatic. It took a while to get it sorted out.
Pitchfork: Do you remember what the first song you wrote for that album was?
Flansburgh: There was a song on that record that I wrote years before we started They Might Be Giants. It was actually written for a group called The Turtle Necks that I was in in Ohio in '79, and we did that song. Even on the second album, Linnell wrote the song "Cowtown" when I was in a sort of pre-They Might Be Giants project with him and this other guy, who's a writer in New York. His name is Dave Lindsey. He's Arto Lindsey's cousin. Dave Lindsey played bass and I played guitar and Linnell played keyboards. We had this project that we rehearsed for like a month and had a bunch of songs including "Cowtown" and then it just didn't come together for what reason, I'm not really sure.
Pitchfork: What spawned those pre-They Might Be Giants sessions? I mean, what was the sound like?
Flansburgh: Dave and John were really intensely interested in microtonal music and I really felt like I wasn't up for that. I just didn't have enough musical experience to start fooling around with microtonality, which is a really complicated and kind of odd thing.
Pitchfork: How did you get the idea of pairing up completely depressing lyrics with this sort of ridiculously happy music?
Flansburgh: It's not like a template that we use on a regular basis. I think that a lot of times when you hear music that's highly melodic, it's very difficult to think of it as anything but upbeat. There is a very real contrast sometimes between the lyrics and the music that is purposeful, but I think just as often, that effect is achieved without being the desired effect. In general, I think we feel like you don't have to spice things up that much to make your point. Like, a little goes a long way when you're writing certain kinds of songs.
Pitchfork: Right, like in "They'll Need A Crane," where it's kind of somewhere in between. It's got both minor and major chords, and the overall sense of the music is this kind of up-tempo sort of thing, and the lyrics are horribly sad.
Flansburgh: When we take on more depressing scenes, I think we often feel like we don't have to hit people over the heads with it. I think that a lot of the most ineffective music is written by people who feel they have to complete their musical thought in such a monolithic way as to take the listener out of the picture. I think a lot of goth music fails for that reason. The genre is like, "We all know it's Halloween" and it's just kind of monochromatic in a way.
Pitchfork: But it also depends on how it's done. You can take a song like The Sisters of Mercy's "This Corrosion," this 10-minute long epic which is entirely dark but put together really effectively and contrast it with some total over-the-top Morrissey thing. It just depends on whether it's kept interesting, right?
Flansburgh: Some people can explore that stuff in an effective way and get into "How dark is dark?" You know, "How fucked up can fucked up be?" But more often than not, I feel like a lot of songwriters will push something so far in one direction that it loses its poetry. It has no sense of scale and everything is just catastrophic and there's no context for it. A group like The Smiths is more interesting, ultimately, than a group like... I'm trying to think of a good example of like a Doom 'N Gloom group...
Pitchfork: Uh... Bauhaus.
Flansburgh: Yeah, Bauhaus. Who's to say who's communicating more? By not throwing in the kitchen sink, you leave the listener some room to interpret what's going on, which gets them a little more involved. It's all a strange balancing act. Every song has a very different set of intentions behind it.
Pitchfork: What's a good example of that in a They Might Be Giants song?
Flansburgh: Well, I wrote "Lucky Ball and Chain" on Flood. The title of the song was kind of the spark behind the writing of the thing. It's just kind of a pun-happy lyric. It's suggestive to give it kind of a country treatment and in a way, it's kind of genre piece. It's a very typical country-western song and then it has this adult sadness kind of disappointed in life kind of lyric to it. It's not like a "I'm gonna kill myself" kind of lyrics, but it's like, "This really sucks."
Pitchfork: More the whole "Down at the bar, drinking myself to death" kind of thing.
Flansburgh: And I realize now that it probably falls under the category of happy music just because it is this kind of up-tempo country song, but when I was putting it together, I wasn't thinking, "Oh, this'll be a great contrast."
Pitchfork: You recorded the first record in New York in two different studios...
Flansburgh: I have no idea how many hours we worked on that record. I'm sure we could have done it in less time if the scheduled studio time hadn't been between midnight and 7 a.m. We were working regular jobs and it's hard under those conditions. We were also working in studios that were like demo studios. They weren't studios that typically made records so we spent a lot of time trying to do things that shouldn't have taken a lot of time.
Pitchfork: Obviously, it's a little different now.
Flansburgh: Yeah, we've got a lot of the tools to create music at home. We also rehearse on a regular basis. Back then, we wouldn't even have access to drum machines until we got to the studio, and we had to program everything while we were there. We were always behind. We just never had as much time or control over what we were doing. It was like, "Is that done? Good. Good enough. Let's go."
Pitchfork: What did the bill look like for the studio?
Flansburgh: The first place we worked was this place called P.A.S.S. which stands for Public Access Synthesizer Studio. A friend of ours was the engineer there and he had keys so we'd come in after hours and pay for like an hour or two of studio time, which was like $20/hour. Then we'd stay and everyone was gone except us and so no one would know when we left so we'd just stay until six or seven in the morning. I think the whole thing might have cost like $2000.
Pitchfork: Bill Krauss was your producer right up until Flood. Why did you choose him, and... Who is he?
Flansburgh: He was our sound man. He had ambitions to be in the recording business. He'd worked as an assistant at some recording studios in New York City. I'd met him in college and he was in a band with some friends of mine in Ohio. As a live group, we were the kind of group that had to have our own sound man because there were so many different elements going in and going out of the show. We were working with a pre-recorded tape, and John would be playing a few different instruments. It was just complicated. Pretty early on, we were like, "Let's find somebody who can do the sound." Bill was interested in doing it and helping us record our demos, so he was the natural choice. Pitchfork: How did you get signed for that first record?
Flansburgh: It was really Glen and Tom from Bar/None who were interested in putting out our records. Glen had a band, The Individuals, who were an early college rock favorite and they started this label from Pure Platters in Hoboken, New Jersey. It's a vinyl record store out there. They just started this label to put out Glen's record and once they'd started that, they realized they could put out other peoples' records. We had this tape that [laughing] had been reviewed in People. So they said, "We'll manufacture that tape for you and you can sell in record stores." It wasn't like, "We're gonna make you stars." It was more like, "Hey, want us to print up your record? We'll do that." It was very low-key.
Pitchfork: So there was no contract or anything?
Flansburgh: There was no talk about any kind of long-term commitment on anybody's part. It wasn't that big of a deal. What's remarkable is that they've gone on to be a very legitimate record label and we've gone on to be a pretty pdering that they had no venture capital and we had no thought-out contract with them, it all worked out really well. We're like the only band that's worked with an indie label and had the real success and got signed with a major, and didn't end up really pissed off at their label. I love those guys.
Pitchfork: What were you doing for a living then?
Flansburgh: I was working at Metro North, which is the commuter rail service of New York. I was a surveyer and I counted people on trains, which is not like being a road surveyer. You make surveys of the number of people getting on the train up and down the line. It's not a very hard job, but it was nice because I worked by myself. Linnell was working at a darkroom doing stuff for an industrial slide show company. You know, they do these very slick audio/visual presentations and he was the darkroom guy. I endes this kind of fake-health magazine. The only health magazine that has articles about getting a better tan.
Pitchfork: What's your favorite TMBG song so far?
Flansburgh: I really like the way "S-E-X-X-Y" came out on the new record. I'm really into it. I really like the song "Pet Name" that we just did. I feel like it's really different and the music idea is really complete and functions well. A lot of times I think that I'm more interested in things that don't work well. They're just more adventurous in their conception. I'm more interesting in trying to push things along than trying to write something that seems like a solid effort.
Pitchfork: How did you get Eugene Chadbourne on the phono to record the guitar part for "Absolutely Bill's Mood"?
Flansburgh: We'd done a show with him where his amp had blown up and he asked if he could borrow my amp. I was really reluctant to let him borrow my amp. I didn't know him at all. He was like, "Don't worry. It won't be bad." And then he plugs in this electric rake with like, a cheap pickup on it. So he's playing it through my amp making this completely hellish feedback sound really loud. Then he gave me back my amp and it wasn't... broken. But I think I made it clear that he owed me one. So we were figuring out the arrangement for the song, I thought, "Hey, I'll give him a call. He borrowed my amp." And that was the deal. We just called him at home.
Pitchfork: You had a woman named Margaret Seiler sing vocals on "Boat of Car," and I've noticed that you frequently have strange female vocalists guest on your songs. For instance, you've got Laura Cantrell on "The Guitar" on the song "Don't I Have The Right" on your Mono Puff disc. What's the appeal of having a complete stranger come in and sing on the record?
Flansburgh: I think you put your finger on it when you said "Female." It's kind of interesting to write a song or just part of a song for a woman to sing. Instead of speeding up our voices -- which we've also done on our Back To Skull EP on the track, "(She Was A) Hotel Detective," which is actually a different song than the one on the first album.
Pitchfork: Oh, man. The Back To Skull "Hotel Detective" song kicks ass all over the original one on the first record. So that wasn't actual falsetto, it was all sped up?
Flansburgh: Yeah, Linnell's voice was sped up on that falsetto part.
Pitchfork: Wow. I was under the impression he could just sing like that, but it sounded really weird, too, like just a little off.
Flansburgh: It's sped up. Quite a bit, actually. But I mean, "Don't I Have The Right?" is definitely meant for a woman to sing, because it would come across totally differently if it was sung by a man. There is a scope of professionalism on the women we have to sing on songs. I mean, "Fingertips," from Apollo 18 has got a pretty wide array of professional and non-professional singers on it. But we do it for character voices.
Pitchfork: So it's more about a different approach to a song. Like, recording a song is a not like a vanity thing to you, where you have to sing on it so people know you.
Flansburgh: We're really interested in putting songs out there on their own terms. It's not that important to us that people know who we are or what our personalities are. It's more interesting to have the person be a blank slate and have the songs speak for themselves. I guess that's why we feel free about employing different vocalists, because they bring a lot to the songs. It can just amplify the message of the songs. I've had discussions with our manager and the other people who are involved with the "packaging" of the band and they're always bewildered when we do something outrageous like let somebody else sing.
Pitchfork: How about "O Do Not Forsake Me" on John Henry? It's sung by the bass vocalist.
Flansburgh: Well, he can sing very, very low. For the record, I sung the demo. I can sing all those notes, too, but I thought it'd be more interesting to hear somebody with like a really profound, bassy voice sing this song with all these theatrical qualities. If we were only making one record, it's probably be more like, "What are our personal expression? What about us?" But we've made a lot of records and I think we feel like it's okay to share the limelight.
Pitchfork: Did you go out on tour in support of the first record?
Flansburgh: We did a bunch of different national tours for that record. For the first one, we just got in a van and drove straight down south. We felt like a bunch of guys from New York. Every day was a full-blown adventure. We were actually crashing on peoples' floors. Some of it was so profoundly uncomfortable that I'm amazed we even felt like it was worth doing. If it didn't mean as much to us as it did, it just would have sucked. It just would have been a shitty time.
Pitchfork: Was it just you and Linnell or did you have a backup group?
Flansburgh: We were just a duo and Bill [Krauss] was with us doing sound. He was very committed to the project as well, but imagine if you were the bass player in a band and you'd written some songs but the guitar player didn't want to play your songs and you're just stuck out on the road crashing at a stranger's house. You're getting paid like five dollars a day and your girlfriend's home mad at you. You're not making enough money to pay your rent. All that stuff just does seem like a bad deal, and it's hard to see what the good deal would be if you weren't able to make records and write songs.
Pitchfork: Having almost no one having heard of you at these shows in these extremely conservative states listening to your off-the-wall brand of music, how did they respond?
Flansburgh: That was the easiest part of it. We'd really been put through the professional wind tunnel of New York City. The audiences in New York are notoriously cold. They're a very unenthusiatic bunch. They might really like you and you'll never know. So we'd spent all these years playing for this kind of Too- Cool- For- School kind of crowd and we hadn't let that put us off too much, so going out on the road where people seem to be more exciteable, it wasn't difficult to get 'em going.
Pitchfork: I heard a lot of your early shows involved a lot of props.
Flansburgh: The first couple of tours we did, we had a pretty over-the-top, proppy show. There were some real prop-driven moments to the show. Things that I had made like these giant paper-mache hats... It was very funny and strange, and it was just a good show that was experienced in a very linear way. You didn't have to have heard the songs before to like it.
Pitchfork: That's very uncommon, too. I think that shows should be visually there, as well as musically. I mean, maybe not anything huge like, say, paper-mache hats necessarily, but something to kind of stare at. I like the idea of, well, Tori Amos on her last tour had a screen with some looped video footage on it. You know, it adds a lot.
Flansburgh: Yeah, normally, when you go to see a band, you've heard the record and you can just sort of groove to the tunes. But for us, we were playing for a lot of audiences that had never heard our records for years on end. So it had to be more immediately accessable than that. So we constructed a show that could be appreciated at face value. You didn't ask that much of the audience other than to just check it out. It came off as very unpretentious. A lot of the show was just us talking to the audience.
Pitchfork: But that can also be bad, too, when the band is like, just watching you and not hearing the music and leaving saying, "That was a great show. Who were those guys again?"
Flansburgh: And we soon realized that props were dangerous for the future health of the band because we didn't have that many prop ideas and we didn't want to get into the thing of just repeat ourselves like Pete Townshend smashing the guitar over and over again. Oh, you know, like the Rocky Horror Picture Show where it's this insignificant act that's been ritualized. After the first six months, we dropped all the props from the show, and from that point on, the only interest as far as props on the stage has been musical instruments. I still read write-ups about the band that would make you think it would be like a Gallagher [the comedian, not the brothers] show, when that's clearly not the case. We pretty much do a purely musical presentation until two weeks ago when we just re-introduced a prop into the show.
Pitchfork: Which is what?
Flansburgh: We have these two ventriliquist dummy heads sing a song. It's a real show-stopper, but it's taken us a long time to work towards doing something like that again and it's actually very liberating.
Part III: Lincoln
Pitchfork: How long after the first record was it before you began work on Lincoln?
Linnell: I guess it was a relatively short time. We toured for about a year after the record came out, but in the midst of the tour, we were going back to the studio.
Pitchfork: How long did it take to record Lincoln?
Linnell: It was done over a long period of time, but not necessarily intensively. We did most of the work on it the summer before it came out. We were working in a really small and poorly air-conditioned studio so it was definitely the summertime. It was unbelievably hot.
Pitchfork: What kind of gear were you using at that time?
Linnell: Lincoln was the first record where we used a sequencer and we were using a Macintosh 512k to run the sequencer, which was using pretty rudimentary MIDI gear. We had a pair of Alexis drum machines and would occasionally run a Casio if we needed a bass part. The computer exploded in the middle of the session because it was so hot, which I've never seen before. The Macintosh actually had smoke pouring out of it and it was really stinky. It was a brand new, weird experience for us. There were four of us in this very small control room with the Mac so you can imagine...
Pitchfork: Wow. People don't like Macintoshes anymore, which is sad, because they're perfectly nice little units. I run Pitchfork entirely off a Macintosh Power PC. It's never blown up.
Linnell: They air-condition them a little better now. Even the next generation, the SE's and stuff have fans in them. It just took them a little while to realize that the things just couldn't handle any amount of heat.
Pitchfork: Do you still use Macintosh computers for the music?
Linnell: Yeah, I've got one right next to me now. I've got a Powerbook 145 from a few years ago and I tour around with it.
Pitchfork: That's one of the little grayscale things, right?
Linnell: Yeah. I've also got a IIci at home.
[Editor's Note: Okay. I have to admit it. I'm only a geek about it because I've got all the useless information on different model numbers and which have dual-scan and active color matrixes, and that's just because I sold used computers for a year. I'm really not a boner, I swear.]
Pitchfork: How did Lincoln get its name?
Linnell: We have more than one official story at this point. We were trying to think of a name that suggested a lot of things. We didn't want a title that was this one specific thing. For instance, it was this very iconic American president. It's hard to think of the president as a human being because he's such an icon, but there was something appealing to us about that. Plus, it was the name of this car that in some ways, had the same status.
Pitchfork: Well, yeah. Had the same status.
Linnell: Yeah, it was supposed to be this quality automobile, but it became more of an old person's vehicle in the mid-80's. Of course, now, the Lincoln Towncar is a car you wouldn't be embarrased to drive, but the old Continental was the giveaway that the person behind the wheel was old. Lincoln Logs, The Lincoln Tunnel, and our manager's middle name is Lincoln.
Pitchfork: The cover art from Lincoln is bizarre.
Linnell: I wish we could continuously crank out covers that are as artistically satisfying as that one was for us. It seemed really close to us. Our friend, Brian Dewan, built the... Shrine Object. He had a tradition of building a shrine at New Year's. I don't know how that got started, but he got more and more elaborate. He'd do these really elaborate woodworking constructions for New Year's and it would often dispense a New Year's beverage like champagne and things. They always had a clock. There are a whole bunch of them kicking around the house Brian and I share.
Pitchfork: Weird. Oh, you live with him?
Linnell: I use half the apartment where he lives as my studio. But these shrines are all over the place, clogging up the hallways. We thought it'd be nice if Brian built something like that for our record cover. We gave him these photos of our ancestors. There's a picture of my great grandfather on the left side, the guy with the beard. And it's John [Flansburgh's] grandfather on the right.
Pitchfork: Now, a traditional sort of band would have put their own pictures on the shrine.
Linnell: I just wasn't into that idea. I'm fascinated by pictures of other bands, but for some reason, I didn't like the idea of putting our own pictures up so we got these pictures of our ancestors that kind of substitute for us. Brian thought of everything else.
Pitchfork: Where was the shrine photographed?
Linnell: We photographed the shrine on the banks of the Hudson River under the George Washington Bridge in sort of a park area.
Pitchfork: How do you read into the shrine symbolism?
Linnell: It's not exactly a symbol, but it's a very open-ended metaphor. There are aspects of the cover that key into where John and I come from in New England. It's a very New England-style roof that the thing has. If you've ever been up there, the steeples and even the federal, dormered windows are really old colonial structures from New England.
Pitchfork: I was noticing that, actually. The colonial-type arcitecture.
Linnell: And there's a general Americana thing with the 13 stars in a circle on the podium, and then Brian just kind of threw in his usual styles. Like, there are Danish-Modern table legs and the electrical cord that plugs in the whole thing. There are modern kitchen drawer fixtures, so it's very contemporary and it's also like the past. It's an interesting combination of those things?
Pitchfork: On the back of the disc, it looks like there are measurements for something. What is that?
Linnell: I think it's a drawing that I made for measurements for my accordian case. If you open it up, on the actual CD, there are pictures of both the case and the accordian. I just did those on yellow legal paper to send to the guy who was building our cases for our first tour, and Flansburgh saved the drawings and we put them on the cover.
Pitchfork: What videos did you shoot for Lincoln?
Linnell: We shot three videos. "Ana Ng," "They'll Need a Crane," and "Purple Toupee." There was no single for "Purple Toupee." It was kind of at the end of our honeymoon with MTV. I think after that, they were not really giving us this incredible free ride that we'd had up until then.
Pitchfork: When did you write "Ana Ng"?
Linnell: I wrote "Ana Ng" and "We're The Replacements" while crashing at a friend's apartment, Jonathon Gregg, in Manhattan. He's been on the scene forever. He's a great musician and was the guitarist for my first band, The Mundanes. I think I was collecting possible song ideas and, for some reason, I ended up looking in the phone book, and there were about four pages of this name that contains no vowels, Ng. I was fascinated because it's a name I didn't know about before, and it was filling up a large chunk of the Manhattan white pages. I called up some of the numbers kind of experimentally to find out how it was pronounced, and I got the phone machine of a Dr. Ng and I was kind of relieved. The message said, "Dr. Ng is not in," and I had my material.
Pitchfork: Wow. What I like about that song is the "other side of the world" references, how like, water spirals the wrong way out the sink and stuff. I mean, it's taking plain knowledge of weird things and giving them some ultimately more powerful meaning. I like that it's about the girl on the other side of the world you'll never know and just barely missing her at the World's Fair and stuff. It's really one of the greatest love songs ever written.
Linnell: Well, that "other side of the world" thing is that the other inspiration for that song was a Poco comic strip and some of the characters are digging a hole. They decide they're going to dig to China, but one of the smarter characters pulls this huge revolver out of a drawer and shoots a hole "in the desktop globe." Then they look at the other side and the hole is in the Indian Ocean.
Pitchfork: Now, I was always a little fuzzy on whether "We're The Replacements" was just a cover of an obscure Replacements song that I'd never heard, and you just covered it because it's so personalized or what. I didn't really know.
Linnell: I'm glad to hear you thought that, because it was supposed to be this sort of light-hearted, "Hey, Hey, We're The Monkees" type of thing. I was listening to his records and looking at his stuff -- and he had a copy of Let It Be by The Replacements, which is what kind of got me going on that song.
Pitchfork: So you stayed in this guy's apartment and then you moved...
Linnell: I live in Brooklyn now, and I wrote the remainder of Lincoln in this new apartment. I wrote the bridge for "They'll Need A Crane," just kind of finishing everything up. I had a little more privacy so I was able to get a little more work done.
Part IV: Flood
Pitchfork: How did the transition from Bar/None Records to Elektra Records go?
Linnell: We had a bunch of songs already on the cue for Flood while we were finishing up Lincoln. I don't think we toured for very long in support of Lincoln and Bar/None was disappointed that very soon after we cut our deal with Elektra, we were already in the studio, and they wanted us to tour in support of Lincoln longer than we did. This was our last record for them so they wanted to get their money's worth and there we were working for the man. It was a little awkward there.
Pitchfork: How did you really become part of Elektra's roster?
Linnell: Well, it's funny, because we sent them a tape in like, 1986 or something when we were gonna make our first record and they rejected us. They were not into it. [Bitterly:] They didn't think we were prepared to make records. This is not to say anything bad about the A&R; people who were at Elektra at that time, but Lincoln was the biggest selling independent record of that year in America, or for part of that year, I can't really remember. Anyway, it was clear that we were able to sell a lot of records.
Pitchfork: How many copies of Lincoln had you sold at that point?
Linnell: We'd sold a few hundred thousand, and as far as Elektra was concerned, we were not an enormous risk, as a result. Without even having a major label to push us, we were doing that well. I think they felt some confidence that they could put out our next record and things would go well. They wanted us to be ourselves and we wanted to sell a lot of records.
Pitchfork: What was one of the first songs you did for Flood?
Linnell: We had demos for "Birdhouse In Your Soul" very early on that we played for Clive [Langer] and Alan [Winstanley], who produced Flood. Pitchfork: Flood turned out, in my opinion, more on the wacky side. I found the lyrics to be a little less depressing than on your previous records.
Linnell: That's interesting that you think that. I can accept that. I've heard a lot of people say various opposing things about it. Some people thought that because it was our Elektra debut, they had the view that it sounded more corporate or something. A lot of people said it was "softer sounding," which maybe is true. There's something a little hard-edged about the first two records because of the way they were recorded. We were also a few years older.
Pitchfork: A lot of your records have backwards messages...
Linnell: Well, a lot of them sound like they have backwards messages. A lot of them have backwards recordings. On "Hide Away, Folk Family," for example, it's just me and John [Flansburgh] singing forward. We're just going "nyahp, nyah, nyip, nyahp," that's all it is. One of the instruments or something is actually backwards on that song, though.
Pitchfork: Your videos have been so weird. Around this time, I saw the "Birdhouse In Your Soul" and "Istanbul" videos, and there's such an incredible onslaught of bizarre imagery going on that I had to wonder whether it's all nonsense or if it has some higher meaning.
Linnell: There's a reason for everything in those videos. The way we made the first eight videos with Adam Bernstein was that the three of us would sit down and just make up stuff. We'd try and kind of engage each other like, "Well, what if this happened?" So we'd make a list. Adam was really good at drawing this stuff out. He would say something and see how John and I reacted and then we'd come up with stuff. It was just very fun, open-ended, creative work.
Pitchfork: What do you think the music video stemmed from?
Linnell: Music videos have a much shorter history than pop songs do. Basically, you have A Hard Day's Night and things that are descendent from that. A Hard Day's Night and The Monkees kind of defined what goes on a screen while you're hearing music for most of the genre. We took that as a cue, like sort of, anything is acceptable as long as engaging and interesting.
Pitchfork: Your videos are able to reflect how your music sounds without the video overwhelming the songs themselves. Like, everytime I hear Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing," I think about these cheap, four-color animated figures carrying boxes of microwaves, and your videos are made in such a way that you aren't made to think of the imagery in the video everytime you hear the songs.
Linnell: One thing we always tried to avoid doing was telling the same story the lyrics of the song are telling. We thought that was the least interesting. I know there are bands that have much bigger props than we ever did, but you get these images stuck in your head and whenever you hear the song, you think of the video for it. That's a very dangerous thing for bands who are trying to say something open-ended and suggestive. You can't just nail it down.
Pitchfork: You were making music videos near the beginning of MTV, which is when that whole video rebellion thing started. A lot of bands were against it, I think, because it's really just a sales tool, like a commercial for the song.
Linnell: Right, you ended up with The Replacements making videos that just showed a speaker. There was this kind of resentment about the way a video imposed itself on the music. Our response to that was just to have a lot of images, have it look interesting, reflect what we like, and not worry about it being a representation of the song. That's how we end up with all this stuff. There were two setups for "Birdhouse." One was inside this courthouse next to City Hall that's called The Surrogate Court Building, a very beautiful old building.
Pitchfork: That's the part with the platform and the people riding bikes around it with the enlarged, Xeroxed eye-masks, right?
Linnell: Yeah, we had this living room setup on a platform where John and I sat and did stuff, and John had a welder's mask... And then around that, we had these bicycles riding around it in a circle. Or the other thing was we had them wearing placards that said "Stop music video." We had dances, which was a big thing for me and John back then. Really retarded dance moves that were the simplest possible movements. John and I are not dancers. It was the first time we really had this huge crowd of extras that Adam had hired, so we just taught them all the same stuff that we were doing. It took everyone about two seconds to learn it and it required no skill whatsoever, so we had these Crowd Dance Things. It was along the lines of a Janet Jackson video, except obviously, there's a different level of technique.
Pitchfork: Shortly after that record came out, Steven Speilberg's Tiny Toons used your songs in their cartoons. Did you have much of say in that?
Linnell: No, no. We had absolutely nothing to do with it. We got money. Somebody said, "Steven Speilberg's starting this cartoon that's like his version of Warner Bros. cartoons. They want to take two of your songs and make music videos out of them, using these characters." We thought, "That sounds good. That's okay."
Pitchfork: Right, like, "Oh, it might be interesting or something."
Linnell: We didn't know whether it would be interesting or not. I kind of like what they did. It really isn't us; it's somebody else's idea. I think there's something a little bit too cute about the characters on that show that doesn't really respect the Warner Bros. legacy, but the videos were okay. They had a lot of ideas. The fact that they wanted to use our songs was flattering. And it's crazy, but it brought in huge numbers of fans for us who were seven years old in 1990, and now are old enough to go to concerts and still remember the Tiny Toons thing.
Pitchfork: Flansburgh's been directing videos lately, hasn't he? He did some Frank Black videos...
Linnell: The first thing he directed was our video for our song, "The Guitar," from Apollo 18. After that, Frank Black, who's a friend of ours, decided that John would be a good person to do his videos for "Los Angeles" and "Hang On To Your Ego." John got a lot of experience doing that, and since then he's been doing some pretty major stuff. He dir ected Edwyn Collins' video for "A Girl Like You." He's getting lots of offers, but he doesn't have time to do everything. He's done a Soul Coughing video for their latest record. He's kind of gotten his foot in the Video Directing Door.
Pitchfork: You covered "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" on Flood, which is now one of the quinessential They Might Be Giants songs. Had you known that song your whole life?
Linnell: John remembers it from long ago. I didn't know anything about that song until one day in the early 80's. In the late 70's and early 80's, there was this relentless 50's revival going on. Sort of like the 70's revival of today. This show came on TV called, "The 50's." That's how the show started and it turned out to be a live performance of all this music which was not rock and roll. There was no rock and roll at all. The artists they had on this thing were like Patti Page, and... who else?
Pitchfork: Like one of the PBS specials?
Linnell: Yeah, they had this incredible collection of people who were all still alive, and probably still are, and one of them was The Four Lads. They came out wearing tuxedos, four of them in a row, and they just came out on stage and sang "Istanbul." I think my jaw made a dent in the floor. I just thought, "This is entertainment." I went out and got like a Four Lads Greatest Hits and it had that song and a whole bunch of other songs. I brought it to John and said, "Let's do this one." We'd been doing it live as a duo with just a guitar and accordian and John came up with a whole rhythm track for it.
Pitchfork: Your first major world tour came with the release of Flood. Where did you go that you'd never been before?
Linnell: We got to go to Japan and parts of Europe that we'd never been to. We'd done world tours before, but just in a smaller chunk of the world. We toured in Europe a lot after the release of Lincoln. We went to places like Scotland and Italy. I always liked travelling around to exotic new places and the real Blockbuster Of Them All was going to Japan, as far as we were concerned. We just totally opened up our heads. I think we were really supercharged by seeing Japanese culture in action and thinking about how it connected to what we were doing. We felt like it was a place we could do some work.
Pitchfork: Of all the places in the world you've been to, where would you want to retire?
Linnell: I'd suspect I'll probably live in the New York Area forever, at this point. I've been living in and around New York for three quarters of my life, and I'm just too deeply attached to New York to move somewhere else permanently. I love Japan, and my girlfriend and I both like Spain a lot. I think if we had the freedom to do that, we'd consider moving there for some time. You don't really get to make these choices freely. You have to really want to do something badly to actually get up and move somewhere. I could live in Japan, personally, but I don't think my girlfriend would be happy living there.
Pitchfork: There's all sorts of flood destruction going on in the cover art and jacket of Flood. Are those pictures from an actual disaster?
Linnell: It's a still from a movie which is called "Deluge," which Flans found. Flans spent a while poking around in the Time-Life archive, looking specifically for a picture that we'd both thought of in our heads. We wanted to see a house with water halfway up, with the mailbox sticking out. We thought that would be a really cool record jacket. We thought that there had to be a photograph like that if we just look hard enough, and John looked and didn't find anything.
Pitchfork: Did you have the name Flood before the picture?
Linnell: Yeah. That was the initial idea. I'm sure there are photos like that, but what we ended up with is this beautiful Margaret Bourke-White picture, which was apparently on a roll of film that there are other famous photographs from. There's a picture of a relief floodline that became a famous picture of the Depression that Margaret Bourke-White took for Time in the 30's, but this particular picture had never been printed or published before, which is amazing because it's a great picture. This is the guys who have built boats out of washtubs and they're looking cheerful for some reason, even though there's this extraordinary disaster taking place.