Everyone with access to electricity knows a They Might Be Giants song. They might not know that they know it, but believe me, they do. Their biggest hits, "Ana Ng", "Istanbul", and "Birdhouse In Your Soul" aside, the band has been responsible for everything from the themes to TV's "Malcolm In the Middle" and "The Oblongs", to recent ads for Dr. Pepper. These unusual ways of sneaking into the popular consciousness have defined their strangely subversive legacy as one of the quintessential bands in indie nerd-rock history.
John Linnell and John Flansburgh, A.K.A. They Might Be Giants, are the subject of a new documentary called "Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)", chronicling their twenty year career, have released a compilation of their pioneering videos, "Direct From Brooklyn", and their first album "for the whole family", No!. Not to mention their new best-of disc, Dial-A-Song, and a collection of rarities, They Got Lost. Amazingly, one of the Johns found time to speak with me, though we had a hard time staying on subject:
Keith Daniels: OK, the new release is Dial-A-Song. You've also released "Direct from Brooklyn" and They Got Lost. "Gigantic" is out. Are you sortof looking back on your career?
John Linnell: I think putting out boxes has that effect. It looks like we're taking stock, or we're climbing into our coffin -- but we're not really focused on trying to sum it up. I think it's just that we got an offer to do a box, and we liked the package that Rhino had put out. We're continuing, we have a lot of projects going on at the moment that are all involving new material.
KD: I didn't mean to imply that your career was over.
JL: [laughs] Well, it's a good question. Something about this movie, too, I think that it's tempting for people to... It's something that I remember about The Band in "The Last Waltz". It was really like they'd just decided that they were gonna hang it up, and it had this sentimental quality that was interesting because they're sortof taking stock and looking back - but in a way also slightly sickening in that these guys were young guys. We're way older than they were when they made that movie.
KD: Yeah, it always struck me how old, I think it was Rick, looked singing "Stage Fright".
JL: [laughs] He was really coked out. That particular scene, where's he singing "Stage Fright", he's really fucked up. He's really coked out, and he's really skinny. He gained like a hundred pounds in the next period of his life with The Band, and he looks really messed up. It's actually kindof appropriate to that song.
KD: So if They Might Be Giants had a final concert, who do you think you could get to show up to bid you farewell?
JL: Oh, you know, our parents. [laughs]
KD: No Neil Young and Bob Dylan?
JL: Yeah, that's another thing, not to keep focusing on this not drastically relevant thing, but apparently... I read the drummer, Levon Helm's, biography, and I guess that he was really annoyed with the whole thing of getting all these celebrities in, because they weren't actually close friends with most of them. I think he was particularly weirded out that they got Neil Diamond to be in the movie, because it was obviously a move to get the movie a bigger audience. People who were fans of these other artists would be interested in this movie. They didn't care about The Band. I think Robbie Robertson was more pragmatic as far as getting all these other people, but you could tell even in the movie that Levon Helm was bumming out that it's not really a movie about The Band. It's a like a celebrity gala type thing, involving people whose careers did not really intersect with The Band.
KD: If you've been around for twenty years, you're going to be eligible for the [Rock'n'Roll] Hall of Fame soon.
JL: Yeah, I guess. I've never been in there. That's another one of those things that people gripe about, the idea of the hall of fame in rock music. It seems kindof antithetical to stuff that it's meant to honor, you know what I mean? There's something very weird about a rock hall of fame.
KD: Now, No! is your latest release of original material. Do you guys have kids? Are you both married?
JL: Yeah. We're both married, and I have a son.
KD: But I've read that this CD was not inspired by the birth of your son.
JL: Not really. We've been asked that directly, like "Is this CD directly to do with having kids?" and I think in defense of my partner, John, who doesn't have kids, I think we both were trying to cook something up that was not really based on firsthand experience. My wife was pregnant when we started the project, so I didn't know anything about having kids at that point. One thing about this record, No!, is that we had it in the can for about a year and a half. We actually made another album and released it in the time we were waiting for No! to get released. So, it's been in the wings for a long time. We started working on Mink Car, and it was released like a year before No! came out. I think we'd already recorded, either demoed or finished recording, most of the songs on the record before my son was able to talk or comprehend music in a way that I could connect with.
KD: How old is he now?
JL: He's now four. Now he's really steeped in that stuff, and he really loves No!. He really loves the interactive thing about it. In some ways he's like a captive audience, I guess, [laughs] but I think he genuinely likes it. I think he probably has a natural affinity to it because he's grown up in this household where that's what was going on, so he's had an earful of it.
KD: What other music does he seem to enjoy?
JL: We made a lot of tapes for him when he first started listening to music. We've made a lot of car trip CDs and stuff like that, so I think the original batch includes stuff like "Pink Elephant's On Parade" and "Teddy Bear Picnic". Now he's gravitating more towards, as he says himself, he likes things that have action. So he likes the theme music to things like "Mighty-Morphin' Power Rangers" and "Thunderbirds".
KD: I'll probably make you feel a little old here, but I remember growing up watching "Tiny Toons", and "Istanbul" was on there. Do you ever get tired of playing songs from back in the day like that one and "Birdhouse In Your Soul"?
JL: Well, I think that some of them become very routine. We feel like we know exactly how to play them, but I guess when we're performing live - it isn't all about how fascinated we are by our own material. I think there's a lot to do with performing that's right in the moment. I think that the fact that there's an audience there, and we're mostly reacting to the audience response when we're playing stuff that we know that well. It makes it different every time, and we do play a lot of... we change the material in the show pretty frequently. Flansburgh is the one who cooks up the set lists, and he changes it up night after night, and we introduce a lot of stuff that we haven't played in a long time. We've got a lot of new material in the show, so it's pretty dynamic. Sometimes it's sortof relaxing to play something that we are actually playing from the, what is that part of the... what is it, the brain stem? That part where all the information is stored. The tops of our spines know how to play "Birdhouse". [laughs] You could chop off our brains and we'd probably still know how to do it.
KD: What do you admire about the way that children relate to music?
JL: That's a great question. I've given that some thought, because it's a weird challenge, doing shows for kids. It's so different than playing for adults, but one thing that was very liberating about making No! is that we realized that this was, in a way, the audience that we had wanted all along. People who don't have a lot of preconceptions about music. Younger kids don't think in terms of the formal necessities of song-writing. Their ears don't expect to hear one thing more than another, and they're just very open to stuff. It's not that they get stuff, but they're not as hung up. I think a lot of things that irritate me about listening to music is when it fails to do the thing that I'm expecting, and then instead is unfamiliar in a way that doesn't seem right. Often, it turns out, if I listen to a few times I see the logic behind it, or I realize that it's a crappy piece of music. One or the other, but I think with kids they're just way more open-minded about stuff, and that's always what we wanted in our crowd. The element that's missing with kids is that they don't get musical references, which I think we inevitably are leaning on when we're doing stuff. John and I grew up listening to the Beatles, and as we got older we listened to stuff that was older than that, as well as more recent stuff - stuff that was contemporary in the 70s and the 80s, and the 90s of course. So, we can't get away from those influences. If something reminds us of something specific, there's no getting around it, but with a kid they're just listening to everything fresh, especially with younger kids.
KD: The Beatles were another band that even little kids can relate to.
JL: Yeah, I don't know why that is. I think it has something to do with the fact that people consider it ok to play The Beatles for their kids, because I knew young kids who immediately had an affinity for stuff that a lot of parents would not consider appropriate. Like our bass player, Danny, has a son who's also four, and he really likes very fast and very loud music - and he's liked it right from the beginning. I don't think he had any idea of what the cultural context was for the Ramones, for example, but he often gets annoyed when his parents listen to stuff that's too folky. He's so hooked on punk rock. Which is hilarious. My son is not like that at all, he is actually turned off by stuff that's a little bit too loud.
KD: Making children's music is kindof a venerable tradition, going even back to Woody Guthrie. Did you reference children's music of the past when you were making this record?
JL: The funny thing is that we've included references to children's music in our adult music for years. We did "Sun Is A Mass of Incandescent Gas". Also, I don't know if this is children's music, but it seems like children's music... the music that Walt Kelly wrote based on the songs in the Pogo comic strip. We had this record when I was growing up called "Songs of the Pogo". It's a really wonderful, strange record that we really liked when we were young, so John and I used to play a song from that record.
KD: Now, being in a rock band starting out, you were probably reacting against your parents. Has it surprised you at all, the instincts coming out, now that you have a child?
JL: I think that some of it is instinct, and some of it is... I'm probably of a similar school of thought to my parents, in certain ways to do with child-rearing. I know that my parents were very consciously into letting all their kids learn how to think for themselves, and think in a creative way rather than by rote. That's basically my perspective on child-rearing, too. I think that they were right, in other words, and I think at least in my case it worked well that they had that perspective. I think that it's a way more challenging thing for a kid to be told that "Not only are you going to learn how to do stuff, but you have to learn how to solve problems, and how to cook up solutions of your own.", but I think it's really important and valuable. This is a big problem in New York right now. There's this enormous push to make education uniform, and to get kids to basically increase their test scores. What that means is that kids have to do a lot of rote learning. That's obviously become the big priority now, so my wife and I are kindof bummed out about it. I think most people we know think there should be room for more learning by doing, and learning how to learn.
KD: In 1998 or 99, you got voted by People Magazine one of the Ten Most Beautiful People in their online poll. Has that happened since then?
JL: Right, I know why you're asking that. "Was it a fluke?" That's a good question. The answer is, "Yes, that was a fluke." That was completely weird. I think that was one of those things about the internet, that people can go ballistic. I think part of it is that, y'know, it was online thing where you vote, and there's certain people that can rig their own computers to vote like a machine gun over-and-over again. So it may not have been a lot of people who were actually doing the voting, but I don't know for sure.
KD: You just have one solo CD, State Songs. Is that something that you might be interested in doing again in the future?
JL: Yeah, absolutely. It was really fun. It was a lot of work. I had to do all the stuff that I usually do plus all the stuff that Flansburgh usually does. I kindof appreciate how much work he does when I have to do it myself, because I think I'm the lazy guy in the band. John does a lot of the legwork. Booking studios, stuff like that, normally that's John's domain. So, I found it exhausting, plus I made it really hard on myself by recording all these band organs, which was a crazy and expensive task. They're these carousel organs that I used on the record, and I had to drive down to these places, these parks, where they had the carousel organs arranged to record them.
KD: Now, how long have you been married?
JL: We just had our sixth anniversary. John's been married another year, seven years.
KD: But you've been playing with John for twenty years. Does that feel, in a way, like a marriage?
JL: I think it is. There's a lot that's in common with a marriage, except for the sex part. [laughs] Other than that, y'know, we have to be really respectful of each other even now because our relationship is important. We know when to avoid stepping on each other's toes, and as much as our egos are deeply invested in this project, we have to always be aware of the other person's involvement.
KD: I assume that in the early days of the band you were probably the most important person in each other's live. Since you've been married, has that changed the dynamic at all?
JL: Are you speaking of the Yoko factor? [laughs] I think so, but the dynamic has been changing all along anyway. I think that we've had other things in our lives that were probably an outgrowth of the band. When we started out we had other jobs for many years while we were doing this, and then we quit our jobs and became a touring band. I think now we're in this phase, the most thing, where we're not touring as much, and we're doing more commercial work. So we're spending a lot more time at home. John and I both have houses up in the Catskills.
KD: That's a beautiful part of the country.
JL: Yeah, it's great. It's difficult in the winter, but it's actually getting bearable to be up there. We've been snowed in all winter, drastically. It's been the worst winter in anyone's memory.
KD: I actually spent some time [ed - a very short time] in a monastery in Livingston Manor.
JL: Oh yeah, that's not far from where I am.
KD: I remember they had to put pepper on the tires of cars because beavers would chew on them.
JL: Oh really? Now I know where there's a convent... maybe I'm thinking of near Robert Livingston's house, but that's not Livingston Manor.
KD: This was a Zen monastery.
JL: Yeah, yeah. I know there's at least one other Zen monastery somewhere next to Redhook. There's quite a lot of stuff up there that you don't see when you're driving around. Also around there is where, do you know who Morris Levy is? He's the guy who John Lennon sued for putting out that Rock'n'roll record.
KD: The guy he wrote "Steel and Glass" about?
JL: Yeah, exactly. He has this enormous plantation somewhere up in Columbia county here.
KD: You grew up in New York City, right?
JL: Well, I lived here till I was about seven, and then I moved out to eastern Massachusetts. That's where I met Flansburgh when we were teenagers.
KD: Do you enjoy living in the country now?
JL: Well, we lived most of the time in Brooklyn, but we went up [to the country] on most weekends.
KD: They Got Lost is a rarities collection. Do you ever have fans remember songs that you don't even remember?
JL: Once in a while. There's a lot of songs that we remember the names of, and we can sort of remember the first few bars of, but then we don't remember all the words -- so there's no way the band could actually play it unless we got in and rehearsed for a while. We just don't keep a lot of it in the current repertoire, and there's often this thing when we're re-introducing old material that we haven't played in a while -- where John and I are like fumbling over the words and we're looking out at the audience, and there's people who are exactly lip-synching. They know the words way better than we do, which is deeply embarrassing. We're in the spot-light not knowing the songs that they know.
KD: You should bring them up on stage and let 'em sing. [laughs]
JL: [laughs] Glenn Tilbrook did that, I guess he had a whole tour where he had a microphone next to him, and he would get people to come up and sing the harmonies. He knew that there were a lot of people everywhere he went that knew all his songs really intimately. It was just this great thing, to have unpaid fans, to come up and be in his duos show.
KD: Now, you said you've also been doing commercial music. What sort of things have you done?
JL: Well, what's currently on TV is a bunch of ads for Dr. Pepper. I don't think you would recognize us listening to the Dr. Pepper stuff. It's very made-to-order. One is like a parody of "Y.M.C.A" that they did like at a retirement home. In fact, it's called "The Retirement Village People". It's elderly people singing "Y.M.C.A" with different words, and that's all me and John singing. We've also done this ad for a product that Play-Do has introduced called "Do-Do Island". I don't even know what it is exactly, but my son saw the ad on TV - I don't think he even knew it was Flansburgh singing, but he immediately wanted it.
KD: You also did "Malcolm In the Middle"...
JL: Yeah, we're doing a lot of TV show music as well. Currently we're doing all this incidental music, plus the theme song, for this medical documentary show for The Learning Channel. It's an interesting, weird show because it's like, really lurid, gruesome, behind-the-scenes of the emergency room stuff, in the style of E.R., but it's a documentary.
KD: And they say, "We need They Might Be Giants for this."
JL: It's funny that they chose us because a lot of the music that they want is basically, what happens when the families in the waiting room are waiting to find out that the person died or something. It's like unbearably sad, and they're also into techno/electronic stuff, which, of course, you would call us for that. [laughs] But it turns out that we can do that stuff in our projects, it's fun, and it's interesting, and it's not that hard. The money's good. That's the kind of work-for-hire that we do.
KD: Anything where you're in competition with Mark Mothersbaugh is a good thing.
JL: Yeah, we are [laughs] following down the Devo trail.
KD: What are you listening to now?
JL: My wife is really interested in contemporary music. She was when she was young, but she's sortof got this rekindled interest in stuff every since she got her iPod. She pays a lot of attention to all the Swedish that are coming our way, and she will occasionally drag me to concerts. I saw The Hives show in New York.
KD: What did you think of that?
JL: I thought it was great. They were really funny, and it was a really energetic, great show. The thing that I liked best about it was that it was like a thirty-five minute show, which for me is pure enjoyment, and it didn't last too long. I have less endurance for rock shows than I used to have.
KD: Got to get home by bedtime?
JL: Exactly. [laughs]
KD: Anything else?
JL: Well, like I said I have one ear cocked to the stuff that she has been checking out. I don't like everything she likes, but some of the stuff she plays... I haven't heard the new White Stripes record, but everyone else is going mental, even the people who would be too cool to say it. Like, people who liked them before and now would say "Oh it's over" are actually saying this new record's really great.
KD: What's next for They Might Be Giants?
JL: Well, we have a bunch of songs. At the moment we're doing a lot of stuff, so we have to keep pushing back our recording schedule, but we'll probably be recording something this summer. I'm imagining that's when it'll happen. We had a really nice experience with Adam Schlessinger when we were working on Mink Car...
KD: From Fountains of Wayne?
JL: Yeah, and I think we felt like he was really a good influence on us because he kept challenging us to cook up radically different arrangements.
KD: He's a fantastic pop song writer.
JL: Yeah, he's great, and he's really easy to work with. He's fun to be around. So we'll probably do some more stuff with him, and I imagine that we'll try and get something out by the end of the year - but now it's sortof getting pushed back.
KD: Looking back over the last twenty years, what stands out in your mind the most about working in They Might Be Giants?
JL: Well, one thing I was impressed when I saw this documentary ["Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns"] is that it really focuses on the idea of what we're doing, which is about doing it yourself. It's not about the celebrity/glamour element, which for us is pretty much nonexistent. Especially at this point. We're not very excited by the idea of the "rock star" scene, and we really have got more and more focused on doing interesting stuff that we like - and figuring out a way to do it in the ever-changing machinery of the music industry. Things like college radio and MTV were all evolving as we were coming up, and I feel like we slipped through the cracks... I guess that's the wrong expression...
KD: Snuck in the backdoor.
JL: "Snuck in the backdoor" is probably the best way to say it. We just kindof made up our own way of doing stuff, and were just extremely lucky that we were in the right place at the right time. We were able to do this makey-upy thing, and we managed to find an audience. I think that's the great thing about this movie, that it focuses on that. I hope that it's inspiring for other people, that you can write your own ticket. You can start in your garage, and in our case, at least mentally, we're still in the garage... It's just a bigger garage.
Check out TMBG.comfor MP3s and links to all sorts of fun.
John Linnell and John Flansburgh, A.K.A. They Might Be Giants, are the subject of a new documentary called "Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)", chronicling their twenty year career, have released a compilation of their pioneering videos, "Direct From Brooklyn", and their first album "for the whole family", No!. Not to mention their new best-of disc, Dial-A-Song, and a collection of rarities, They Got Lost. Amazingly, one of the Johns found time to speak with me, though we had a hard time staying on subject:
Keith Daniels: OK, the new release is Dial-A-Song. You've also released "Direct from Brooklyn" and They Got Lost. "Gigantic" is out. Are you sortof looking back on your career?
John Linnell: I think putting out boxes has that effect. It looks like we're taking stock, or we're climbing into our coffin -- but we're not really focused on trying to sum it up. I think it's just that we got an offer to do a box, and we liked the package that Rhino had put out. We're continuing, we have a lot of projects going on at the moment that are all involving new material.
KD: I didn't mean to imply that your career was over.
JL: [laughs] Well, it's a good question. Something about this movie, too, I think that it's tempting for people to... It's something that I remember about The Band in "The Last Waltz". It was really like they'd just decided that they were gonna hang it up, and it had this sentimental quality that was interesting because they're sortof taking stock and looking back - but in a way also slightly sickening in that these guys were young guys. We're way older than they were when they made that movie.
KD: Yeah, it always struck me how old, I think it was Rick, looked singing "Stage Fright".
JL: [laughs] He was really coked out. That particular scene, where's he singing "Stage Fright", he's really fucked up. He's really coked out, and he's really skinny. He gained like a hundred pounds in the next period of his life with The Band, and he looks really messed up. It's actually kindof appropriate to that song.
KD: So if They Might Be Giants had a final concert, who do you think you could get to show up to bid you farewell?
JL: Oh, you know, our parents. [laughs]
KD: No Neil Young and Bob Dylan?
JL: Yeah, that's another thing, not to keep focusing on this not drastically relevant thing, but apparently... I read the drummer, Levon Helm's, biography, and I guess that he was really annoyed with the whole thing of getting all these celebrities in, because they weren't actually close friends with most of them. I think he was particularly weirded out that they got Neil Diamond to be in the movie, because it was obviously a move to get the movie a bigger audience. People who were fans of these other artists would be interested in this movie. They didn't care about The Band. I think Robbie Robertson was more pragmatic as far as getting all these other people, but you could tell even in the movie that Levon Helm was bumming out that it's not really a movie about The Band. It's a like a celebrity gala type thing, involving people whose careers did not really intersect with The Band.
KD: If you've been around for twenty years, you're going to be eligible for the [Rock'n'Roll] Hall of Fame soon.
JL: Yeah, I guess. I've never been in there. That's another one of those things that people gripe about, the idea of the hall of fame in rock music. It seems kindof antithetical to stuff that it's meant to honor, you know what I mean? There's something very weird about a rock hall of fame.
KD: Now, No! is your latest release of original material. Do you guys have kids? Are you both married?
JL: Yeah. We're both married, and I have a son.
KD: But I've read that this CD was not inspired by the birth of your son.
JL: Not really. We've been asked that directly, like "Is this CD directly to do with having kids?" and I think in defense of my partner, John, who doesn't have kids, I think we both were trying to cook something up that was not really based on firsthand experience. My wife was pregnant when we started the project, so I didn't know anything about having kids at that point. One thing about this record, No!, is that we had it in the can for about a year and a half. We actually made another album and released it in the time we were waiting for No! to get released. So, it's been in the wings for a long time. We started working on Mink Car, and it was released like a year before No! came out. I think we'd already recorded, either demoed or finished recording, most of the songs on the record before my son was able to talk or comprehend music in a way that I could connect with.
KD: How old is he now?
JL: He's now four. Now he's really steeped in that stuff, and he really loves No!. He really loves the interactive thing about it. In some ways he's like a captive audience, I guess, [laughs] but I think he genuinely likes it. I think he probably has a natural affinity to it because he's grown up in this household where that's what was going on, so he's had an earful of it.
KD: What other music does he seem to enjoy?
JL: We made a lot of tapes for him when he first started listening to music. We've made a lot of car trip CDs and stuff like that, so I think the original batch includes stuff like "Pink Elephant's On Parade" and "Teddy Bear Picnic". Now he's gravitating more towards, as he says himself, he likes things that have action. So he likes the theme music to things like "Mighty-Morphin' Power Rangers" and "Thunderbirds".
KD: I'll probably make you feel a little old here, but I remember growing up watching "Tiny Toons", and "Istanbul" was on there. Do you ever get tired of playing songs from back in the day like that one and "Birdhouse In Your Soul"?
JL: Well, I think that some of them become very routine. We feel like we know exactly how to play them, but I guess when we're performing live - it isn't all about how fascinated we are by our own material. I think there's a lot to do with performing that's right in the moment. I think that the fact that there's an audience there, and we're mostly reacting to the audience response when we're playing stuff that we know that well. It makes it different every time, and we do play a lot of... we change the material in the show pretty frequently. Flansburgh is the one who cooks up the set lists, and he changes it up night after night, and we introduce a lot of stuff that we haven't played in a long time. We've got a lot of new material in the show, so it's pretty dynamic. Sometimes it's sortof relaxing to play something that we are actually playing from the, what is that part of the... what is it, the brain stem? That part where all the information is stored. The tops of our spines know how to play "Birdhouse". [laughs] You could chop off our brains and we'd probably still know how to do it.
KD: What do you admire about the way that children relate to music?
JL: That's a great question. I've given that some thought, because it's a weird challenge, doing shows for kids. It's so different than playing for adults, but one thing that was very liberating about making No! is that we realized that this was, in a way, the audience that we had wanted all along. People who don't have a lot of preconceptions about music. Younger kids don't think in terms of the formal necessities of song-writing. Their ears don't expect to hear one thing more than another, and they're just very open to stuff. It's not that they get stuff, but they're not as hung up. I think a lot of things that irritate me about listening to music is when it fails to do the thing that I'm expecting, and then instead is unfamiliar in a way that doesn't seem right. Often, it turns out, if I listen to a few times I see the logic behind it, or I realize that it's a crappy piece of music. One or the other, but I think with kids they're just way more open-minded about stuff, and that's always what we wanted in our crowd. The element that's missing with kids is that they don't get musical references, which I think we inevitably are leaning on when we're doing stuff. John and I grew up listening to the Beatles, and as we got older we listened to stuff that was older than that, as well as more recent stuff - stuff that was contemporary in the 70s and the 80s, and the 90s of course. So, we can't get away from those influences. If something reminds us of something specific, there's no getting around it, but with a kid they're just listening to everything fresh, especially with younger kids.
KD: The Beatles were another band that even little kids can relate to.
JL: Yeah, I don't know why that is. I think it has something to do with the fact that people consider it ok to play The Beatles for their kids, because I knew young kids who immediately had an affinity for stuff that a lot of parents would not consider appropriate. Like our bass player, Danny, has a son who's also four, and he really likes very fast and very loud music - and he's liked it right from the beginning. I don't think he had any idea of what the cultural context was for the Ramones, for example, but he often gets annoyed when his parents listen to stuff that's too folky. He's so hooked on punk rock. Which is hilarious. My son is not like that at all, he is actually turned off by stuff that's a little bit too loud.
KD: Making children's music is kindof a venerable tradition, going even back to Woody Guthrie. Did you reference children's music of the past when you were making this record?
JL: The funny thing is that we've included references to children's music in our adult music for years. We did "Sun Is A Mass of Incandescent Gas". Also, I don't know if this is children's music, but it seems like children's music... the music that Walt Kelly wrote based on the songs in the Pogo comic strip. We had this record when I was growing up called "Songs of the Pogo". It's a really wonderful, strange record that we really liked when we were young, so John and I used to play a song from that record.
KD: Now, being in a rock band starting out, you were probably reacting against your parents. Has it surprised you at all, the instincts coming out, now that you have a child?
JL: I think that some of it is instinct, and some of it is... I'm probably of a similar school of thought to my parents, in certain ways to do with child-rearing. I know that my parents were very consciously into letting all their kids learn how to think for themselves, and think in a creative way rather than by rote. That's basically my perspective on child-rearing, too. I think that they were right, in other words, and I think at least in my case it worked well that they had that perspective. I think that it's a way more challenging thing for a kid to be told that "Not only are you going to learn how to do stuff, but you have to learn how to solve problems, and how to cook up solutions of your own.", but I think it's really important and valuable. This is a big problem in New York right now. There's this enormous push to make education uniform, and to get kids to basically increase their test scores. What that means is that kids have to do a lot of rote learning. That's obviously become the big priority now, so my wife and I are kindof bummed out about it. I think most people we know think there should be room for more learning by doing, and learning how to learn.
KD: In 1998 or 99, you got voted by People Magazine one of the Ten Most Beautiful People in their online poll. Has that happened since then?
JL: Right, I know why you're asking that. "Was it a fluke?" That's a good question. The answer is, "Yes, that was a fluke." That was completely weird. I think that was one of those things about the internet, that people can go ballistic. I think part of it is that, y'know, it was online thing where you vote, and there's certain people that can rig their own computers to vote like a machine gun over-and-over again. So it may not have been a lot of people who were actually doing the voting, but I don't know for sure.
KD: You just have one solo CD, State Songs. Is that something that you might be interested in doing again in the future?
JL: Yeah, absolutely. It was really fun. It was a lot of work. I had to do all the stuff that I usually do plus all the stuff that Flansburgh usually does. I kindof appreciate how much work he does when I have to do it myself, because I think I'm the lazy guy in the band. John does a lot of the legwork. Booking studios, stuff like that, normally that's John's domain. So, I found it exhausting, plus I made it really hard on myself by recording all these band organs, which was a crazy and expensive task. They're these carousel organs that I used on the record, and I had to drive down to these places, these parks, where they had the carousel organs arranged to record them.
KD: Now, how long have you been married?
JL: We just had our sixth anniversary. John's been married another year, seven years.
KD: But you've been playing with John for twenty years. Does that feel, in a way, like a marriage?
JL: I think it is. There's a lot that's in common with a marriage, except for the sex part. [laughs] Other than that, y'know, we have to be really respectful of each other even now because our relationship is important. We know when to avoid stepping on each other's toes, and as much as our egos are deeply invested in this project, we have to always be aware of the other person's involvement.
KD: I assume that in the early days of the band you were probably the most important person in each other's live. Since you've been married, has that changed the dynamic at all?
JL: Are you speaking of the Yoko factor? [laughs] I think so, but the dynamic has been changing all along anyway. I think that we've had other things in our lives that were probably an outgrowth of the band. When we started out we had other jobs for many years while we were doing this, and then we quit our jobs and became a touring band. I think now we're in this phase, the most thing, where we're not touring as much, and we're doing more commercial work. So we're spending a lot more time at home. John and I both have houses up in the Catskills.
KD: That's a beautiful part of the country.
JL: Yeah, it's great. It's difficult in the winter, but it's actually getting bearable to be up there. We've been snowed in all winter, drastically. It's been the worst winter in anyone's memory.
KD: I actually spent some time [ed - a very short time] in a monastery in Livingston Manor.
JL: Oh yeah, that's not far from where I am.
KD: I remember they had to put pepper on the tires of cars because beavers would chew on them.
JL: Oh really? Now I know where there's a convent... maybe I'm thinking of near Robert Livingston's house, but that's not Livingston Manor.
KD: This was a Zen monastery.
JL: Yeah, yeah. I know there's at least one other Zen monastery somewhere next to Redhook. There's quite a lot of stuff up there that you don't see when you're driving around. Also around there is where, do you know who Morris Levy is? He's the guy who John Lennon sued for putting out that Rock'n'roll record.
KD: The guy he wrote "Steel and Glass" about?
JL: Yeah, exactly. He has this enormous plantation somewhere up in Columbia county here.
KD: You grew up in New York City, right?
JL: Well, I lived here till I was about seven, and then I moved out to eastern Massachusetts. That's where I met Flansburgh when we were teenagers.
KD: Do you enjoy living in the country now?
JL: Well, we lived most of the time in Brooklyn, but we went up [to the country] on most weekends.
KD: They Got Lost is a rarities collection. Do you ever have fans remember songs that you don't even remember?
JL: Once in a while. There's a lot of songs that we remember the names of, and we can sort of remember the first few bars of, but then we don't remember all the words -- so there's no way the band could actually play it unless we got in and rehearsed for a while. We just don't keep a lot of it in the current repertoire, and there's often this thing when we're re-introducing old material that we haven't played in a while -- where John and I are like fumbling over the words and we're looking out at the audience, and there's people who are exactly lip-synching. They know the words way better than we do, which is deeply embarrassing. We're in the spot-light not knowing the songs that they know.
KD: You should bring them up on stage and let 'em sing. [laughs]
JL: [laughs] Glenn Tilbrook did that, I guess he had a whole tour where he had a microphone next to him, and he would get people to come up and sing the harmonies. He knew that there were a lot of people everywhere he went that knew all his songs really intimately. It was just this great thing, to have unpaid fans, to come up and be in his duos show.
KD: Now, you said you've also been doing commercial music. What sort of things have you done?
JL: Well, what's currently on TV is a bunch of ads for Dr. Pepper. I don't think you would recognize us listening to the Dr. Pepper stuff. It's very made-to-order. One is like a parody of "Y.M.C.A" that they did like at a retirement home. In fact, it's called "The Retirement Village People". It's elderly people singing "Y.M.C.A" with different words, and that's all me and John singing. We've also done this ad for a product that Play-Do has introduced called "Do-Do Island". I don't even know what it is exactly, but my son saw the ad on TV - I don't think he even knew it was Flansburgh singing, but he immediately wanted it.
KD: You also did "Malcolm In the Middle"...
JL: Yeah, we're doing a lot of TV show music as well. Currently we're doing all this incidental music, plus the theme song, for this medical documentary show for The Learning Channel. It's an interesting, weird show because it's like, really lurid, gruesome, behind-the-scenes of the emergency room stuff, in the style of E.R., but it's a documentary.
KD: And they say, "We need They Might Be Giants for this."
JL: It's funny that they chose us because a lot of the music that they want is basically, what happens when the families in the waiting room are waiting to find out that the person died or something. It's like unbearably sad, and they're also into techno/electronic stuff, which, of course, you would call us for that. [laughs] But it turns out that we can do that stuff in our projects, it's fun, and it's interesting, and it's not that hard. The money's good. That's the kind of work-for-hire that we do.
KD: Anything where you're in competition with Mark Mothersbaugh is a good thing.
JL: Yeah, we are [laughs] following down the Devo trail.
KD: What are you listening to now?
JL: My wife is really interested in contemporary music. She was when she was young, but she's sortof got this rekindled interest in stuff every since she got her iPod. She pays a lot of attention to all the Swedish that are coming our way, and she will occasionally drag me to concerts. I saw The Hives show in New York.
KD: What did you think of that?
JL: I thought it was great. They were really funny, and it was a really energetic, great show. The thing that I liked best about it was that it was like a thirty-five minute show, which for me is pure enjoyment, and it didn't last too long. I have less endurance for rock shows than I used to have.
KD: Got to get home by bedtime?
JL: Exactly. [laughs]
KD: Anything else?
JL: Well, like I said I have one ear cocked to the stuff that she has been checking out. I don't like everything she likes, but some of the stuff she plays... I haven't heard the new White Stripes record, but everyone else is going mental, even the people who would be too cool to say it. Like, people who liked them before and now would say "Oh it's over" are actually saying this new record's really great.
KD: What's next for They Might Be Giants?
JL: Well, we have a bunch of songs. At the moment we're doing a lot of stuff, so we have to keep pushing back our recording schedule, but we'll probably be recording something this summer. I'm imagining that's when it'll happen. We had a really nice experience with Adam Schlessinger when we were working on Mink Car...
KD: From Fountains of Wayne?
JL: Yeah, and I think we felt like he was really a good influence on us because he kept challenging us to cook up radically different arrangements.
KD: He's a fantastic pop song writer.
JL: Yeah, he's great, and he's really easy to work with. He's fun to be around. So we'll probably do some more stuff with him, and I imagine that we'll try and get something out by the end of the year - but now it's sortof getting pushed back.
KD: Looking back over the last twenty years, what stands out in your mind the most about working in They Might Be Giants?
JL: Well, one thing I was impressed when I saw this documentary ["Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns"] is that it really focuses on the idea of what we're doing, which is about doing it yourself. It's not about the celebrity/glamour element, which for us is pretty much nonexistent. Especially at this point. We're not very excited by the idea of the "rock star" scene, and we really have got more and more focused on doing interesting stuff that we like - and figuring out a way to do it in the ever-changing machinery of the music industry. Things like college radio and MTV were all evolving as we were coming up, and I feel like we slipped through the cracks... I guess that's the wrong expression...
KD: Snuck in the backdoor.
JL: "Snuck in the backdoor" is probably the best way to say it. We just kindof made up our own way of doing stuff, and were just extremely lucky that we were in the right place at the right time. We were able to do this makey-upy thing, and we managed to find an audience. I think that's the great thing about this movie, that it focuses on that. I hope that it's inspiring for other people, that you can write your own ticket. You can start in your garage, and in our case, at least mentally, we're still in the garage... It's just a bigger garage.
Check out TMBG.comfor MP3s and links to all sorts of fun.
VIEW 18 of 18 COMMENTS
tmbg are one of the best things ever.