Shows/1992-06-12

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They Might Be Giants
NPR in Washington, DC
June 12, 1992 at 4:00 PM

John Flansburgh and John Linnell were interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered about their recently released album, Apollo 18.

Transcript:

ROBERT SIEGEL, host: The very off-beat and very clever rock duo called They Might Be Giants has a new album out. It's called "Apollo 18" and half the tracks on it are roughly this length. 

[EXCERPT FROM "FINGERTIPS"]

SIEGEL: Now according to the liner notes, these micro-minimalist song fragments are best appreciated on a compact disc player that has a shuffle or random mode. Since this is how we're advised to sample the music of They Might Be Giants, it must be an appropriate way to hear who they are and what they're about.

JOHN LINNELL: John Linnell, born New York City, plays accordion, 33 years old.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: John Flansburgh, Taurus, distorted guitar, grumpy, lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 32 years old.

LINNELL: John and I met in high school.

FLANSBURGH: We've actually been performing as They Might Be Giants for nine years and we're actually coming up on our 10th anniversary.

SIEGEL: I'd like to ask you about the format of this compact disc, "Apollo 18".

FLANSBURGH: It seemed like it was just sort of a good opportunity to do something different with CDs. Essentially, what shuffle mode is, you know, it's just a button on fancier, or current CD players now, and it just randomly selects different songs. So it kind of makes an instant collage of whatever record you're listening to. There's a song called "Fingertips" on the record that's actually composed of 10-second refrains and we index them all separately, so between full-length songs, you can hear just a single selection of kind of a blast from "Fingertips".

LINNELL: It's kind of modeled after one of those ads that you see on TV where they're selling a compilation of, you know, hits from some particular period. And in ads, generally, they just cut up all the choruses and splice them together. So, you know, you'll see the titles scrolling up the screen, you hear these little bits of songs. And there's, you know, a yule log.

[EXCERPT FROM "FINGERTIPS"]

SIEGEL: You can also get the hit "Mysterious Whisper" and, of course, who could forget Connie Francis singing.

LINNELL: That was us talking over it, actually. 

SIEGEL: We should explain that that's not on the CD itself, but at that very moment, after you had said that, on would come the next band and it would be this. You know, I've listened to that now several times over the past two days and I'm sure that I've heard a song almost exactly like that but I can't figure out... what time, what kind of artist...

FLANSBURGH: It was late at night, you've come home from a party.

LINNELL: That's right.

SIEGEL: ... when I must have heard a song like that.

FLANSBURGH: Yeah. I mean, one of the things about "Fingertips" that is kind of satisfying, you know — I hope it's satisfying for other people — is it does have this mysterious element of being incomplete. I mean, most rock songs are sort of way too complete, so it's nice to have something that just kind of...

LINNELL: Yeah. In a way it's kind of the logical extension of what we've been doing all along because we've always had really short pop songs that don't contain, you know, extra sections. We always trim off all the fat in our songs and so this is kind of like, you know, just taking it a step further.

FLANSBURGH: We've cut off the body and just left the brain in a jar.

LINNELL: That's right.

SIEGEL: Tell me a little bit about the song "Dinner Bell" and which of you, if either of you, or both of you, wrote it.

LINNELL: Okay, well, that was my song. We used to have a dinner bell in our house which was kind of a gag. It was just the standard use of a dinner bell but also like this Pavlov's dog kind of effect that you'd get. I think part of the problem with John and I is that we come up with this stuff and we don't really explain it to one another. We tend to work in this way where we have an idea that just sounds good to us and we don't think about what we're going to have to say to the NPR guy, you know?

SIEGEL: John Linnell and John Flansburgh, They Might Be Giants. The album is "Apollo 18." Are there some things that you really cannot imagine making a song about at all?

FLANSBURGH: No.

LINNELL: I think we'd really have a hard time doing a song that went "tonight, tonight, yeah, all right."