Shows/1990-07-31/Interviews

The following is a transcription of the interview conducted by Throttle Magazine with John Flansburgh during the band's trip to the 9:30 Club on July 31st, 1990.

Key:
T = Throttle Magazine
JF = John Flansburgh

Interview

T: John, are the songs you sing and the songs John sings the songs that each of you write?

JF: Pretty much. We've collaborated on some things. We often both sing on songs.

T: The songs you sing seem to be more issue-oriented, like "Your Racist Friend," whereas John [Linnell]'s seem more nonsensical or absurdist, like "Particle Man."

JF: Well, those two examples certainly support your argument, but I think I've written some pretty nonsensical songs. John and I do have different styles. There are things we do better than the other. But I feel there's an overall style to the band that we're both working on.

T: You seem to be more outspoken than John. Does he do many interviews? He seems sort of shy and delicate.

JF: I don't know. Hey, Linnell, are you shy and delicate? John just did the last two interviews. We split them up 50/50. We're a democracy.

T: There are a lot more songs on Dial-A-Song than are ever released. How do you decide what goes on your album?

JF: We put the good ones on. I think most of the good songs that appear on Dial-A-Song will eventually appear on records.

T: Why do you fancy yourself as Brooklyn's ambassadors of love?

JF: When people think of Brooklyn, they don't really think of nice people. The slogan underscores the fact that we are from Brooklyn and are essentially nice people. And being an ambassador is like being the guy standing between the two parties shaking hands. The world needs more love, and we're here to present you with the love, direct from Brooklyn.

T: You seem like such wholesome kids — is it really all an act?

JF: If it is all an act, it's not very well planned out. We're not that wholesome. But compared to Axl Rose, we're probably downright conservative. We're private people. We present a lot of complicated stuff in our work, and we feel that's challenging enough to our audience. It's both not our personal style and not really important that we put on airs about who we are. When you say we're wholesome guys, well, we're just as embittered and angry as anybody. There are a lot of performers whose work and personas are very wrapped together, and their songs are almost a form of autobiography. But I think our songs are a little more idea-oriented. I don't think other people could write the songs we write. When I look at people like Iggy Pop or Sid Vicious, I think of how much their persona went ahead of what they actually did. I don't know how important Sid Vicious' music really is, compared to Sid Vicious as a cultural figure. We're not into being heroic. We don't want to be somebody's hero.

T: And yet somehow I think you are the hero of millions.

JF: A few thousand maybe.

T: Can you release any songs you want, or does your record company give you a hard time about what songs they want on the records?

JF: I guess we get to release whatever we want. No one's ever tried to stop us.

T: There was a Dial-A-Song version of "Your Racist Friend" where you said "bullshit," but on the record you say "madness." Was that record company pressure?

JF: Oh, no, that was personal. I'm sure the record company would be more than happy if we swore on our records, stirred up a little controversy. "Bullshit" just sort of stuck out too much. There are a lot of things about the songs that get changed as they evolve. I think part of it is that when you're writing a song, you're trying to create something that is going to hold up to repeated listenings. So there are things that might have an immediate impact, that seem kind of cool, but over the long run they seem kind of bogus. Just the notion of saying the word "bullshit" over and over again seemed inarticulate.

T: You've released two different versions of "Kiss Me, Son of God," one on the B-side to "Don't Let's Start," [sic] the other on "Lincoln."

JF: The single version is the way we've always done it live. The one on the record was an experiment. Fritz Van Orden of the Ordinaires did the arrangement of the strings and brass. It doesn't sound exactly like what we do. It has that '30s proto-swing band sound to it. I like the way it came out. The hardest part for me was that the chords and the bridge got changed, so I had to change my harmony part which was already on the Andrew Sisters side of difficulty.

T: Some of your songs sound big band-influenced, like "I'll Sink Manhattan."

JF: We have in the past few years listened to more pre-rock music. It's definitely a particular fascination of ours. We both listen to a lot of swing and vocal music from the '50s and '40s and even the '30s. We listen to a lot of Ink Spots and early Mills Brothers. There's something very appealing about it. It's got a very live quality that you don't find in a lot of contemporary music. And it takes advantage of singing more, like singing in full voice, which I think is always kind of exciting.

T: How old are you guys?

JF: I'm 30. John is 31. We're officially old by rock standards now.

T: How long have you been playing together?

JF: Since 1983.

T: And your album came out in...

JF: 1986.

T: So what were you doing in those three years?

JF: We were basking in total obscurity. We were writing a lot of songs. We were doing a lot of shows in Manhattan, being a local band, paying our dues. It was a very fun time. In fact, 1985 was a tremendously exciting year because everything was very, very new. I have strong memories of doing our first interview and being completely nervous.

T: How many songs have you guys written and demoed, like what we hear on Dial-A-Song, that have never made it on record?

JF: Probably over a hundred. We've released about 80 songs on record. There's still a healthy number of unhealthy songs left. From this point on, most of the songs that are going to appear on our records will be new songs. We have had pretty much luck writing new songs. Our success rate is much higher now. And we've pretty much taken all the good songs from the back catalog and used them. Like "Letterbox" was a really old song, and for it to show up on the third album, you know, we're definitely doing some mining.

T: So where's the Dial-A-Song machine?

JF: It's in my house. In fact, I just left it today, and for the first time ever, Dial-A-Song is going on vacation for two weeks. It's just going to play one song for two weeks because my landlady is out of town and I'm out of town and it's too hard to organize someone to come into the building and change it every day. There's no brand new songs on it anyway. All the very best songs have all been eaten by the machine because they've been played a little too much. I just put one song on and the schedule of the tour and said "Call back in two weeks." It's kind of depressing in a way. It's an all-time low for Dial-A-Song. We've been doing it for five years and we've been pretty conscientious about it. Unfortunately, this year of touring has kind of overwhelmed us.

T: I know this is the third time you've been to Washington since January.

JF: I guess so. That's pretty fucking ridiculous. I mean, it's virtually the same show. It's kind of hard to think what we can do to spice it up. We'd better do something.

T: At the show at Georgetown University in May, you seemed to be doing a lot more songs acoustically, without your backing tapes.

JF: I think that's been the trend over the past couple of years. We've moved more toward exploiting what we can do as a duo. I think we've realized that that can be a real show-stopping moment. A lot of times when people hear the drum machine and hear how complete it sounds, they don't realize how much of the sound is being generated by us. It's actually very lucky that John plays the accordion and I play the guitar because they can both function as rhythm instruments and lead instruments. So you can do a lot of arranging within a song with just those two instruments and still have a very full sound. If I was playing the pennywhistle and John was playing the recorder, I don't think it would be as full-bodied a sound.

T: Where do you get the samples you use, like the conversation in "Snowball in Hell"?

JF: That's from a cassette that our sound man [Bill Krauss] bought at a flea market for 25 cents. It's a How-to-Organize-Yourself, self-help cassette, and it's pretty odd. That whole thing is part of a "How to Get Your Shit Together" skit. It's a really silly tape. It really has no useful tips as to how to be more organized.

T: You probably didn't need permission to use that, did you?

JF: Well, we probably did need to get permission, but we didn't. We've been very bad about getting permission on sampled things. I hope we don't get sued.

T: What does "Ana Ng" mean?

JF: Ng is a Vietnamese name. The song is about someone who's thinking about a person on the exact opposite side of the world. John looked at a globe and figured out that if Ana Ng is in Vietnam and the person is on the other side of the world, then it must be written by someone in Peru.

T: What about the song "They Might Be Giants"?

JF: That, again, is a really, really old song. We actually recorded that in 1985, originally. We thought about doing it for the second album as well. Basically, we didn't want to put it on the first album because it seemed too weird. It just seemed perfect to have our theme song on our third album. It's a very complicated song, actually. When we did it originally, we recorded it on a four-track and we just did millions and millions of overdubs and created this very tracked-out, complicated arrangement. And since we started working on an eight-track, we tended to strip things down a little bit more. So when we came back to "They Might Be Giants," we found ourselves trying to recreate something we did pretty effortlessly on a four-track, but when we were actually trying to use big, studio recording techniques, it became an incredibly complicated piece to put back together again. There's a ton of vocals on it, two guitars, two trumpets.

T: It's a lovely piece of work.

JF: Thank you.