Alternative music duo They Might be Giants might well have started out as quirky, American college favoured surrealist musicians. However, by the end of the eighties, and shortly before the grunge scene exploded internationally, they had already found a global following, touring with a backing band, and found success in early 1990, with their third studio album, Flood, that had them on a major label, being promoted on alternate radio and associated video clip shows of the day. One such station that had them on their playlist was Australia’s own triple j.
Since that time, the core duo of co-vocalist and guitarist John Flansburgh, and accordion, keyboardist and co-vocalist John Linnell, have continued on their merry way of experimenting with musical sounds, to release a staggering 23 studio albums, plus a variety of other mixed length format releases, together with explorations into soundtracks, children’s albums, and television theme music. They’ve been nominated for four Grammy Awards, claiming two, and all up have sold over four million albums.
Their planned tour had to be rescheduled following Flansburgh’s car accident but they’re now in the country, delivering two full sets, one of which includes the Flood album in its entirety, and looks to be virtually sold out at just about all venues, with additional dates added to the original postponed tour schedule. We spoke to Flansburgh recently to discuss the They Might Be Giants legacy and how they plan to tackle their vast discography in the live environment.
Latest album: Book
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You’re on your way down here after the tour was postponed, with lots of extra dates added, and almost sold out in all states.
John Flansburgh: Yeah, all the initial stuff sold out, I guess, and then they just added a bunch of shows and they sold out, and now they’re adding a bunch more. So, we’re finding out exactly how many people want to see They Might be Giants live.
Presumably it is much easier if you’re in one city and you do show after show?
JB: Oh, being able to stay in one place for two nights in a row is a beautiful load luxury with being able to wake up and not be in a moving vehicle. Being able to wake up in the same town and maybe actually see something besides a stage is a much richer experience. We just did a long tour of the Midwest, playing doubleheaders and triple headers, and it was great. It was so interesting, I actually got to go to museums, and everything about was fantastic.
Cool. I imagine the Midwest is an interesting place to be in the States at the moment.
JB: Well, I mean, the United States is filled with weirdos of all sorts of different stripes. But there’s a lot of culture out there. We were in Pittsburgh for four days, and I don’t think people would think of Pittsburgh as a lively cultural place, but hanging out in Pittsburgh reminded me of being in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early nineties. It was definitely filled with a lot of bohemians, just a really lively scene. It’s a cool town.
You may find the same thing when you’re in Adelaide and Fremantle or Perth, because there’s lots of arts there.
JB: We’ve been to Perth many times, but this will probably be the first time I’ll ever get to do anything touristy in Perth. So, it’ll be great.
Yeah, it’s a good spot. This tour, you will be playing Flood in its entirety and given those are 19 tracks that you’re familiar with, well and truly, how do you keep it interesting?
JB: Well, not to reveal too much, but we do two sets, and Flood is 40 minutes long. The show is over two hours long. So, most of the show is actually other things. Currently there’s this thing of people doing kind of a music under glass version of an album. We’ve even had people complain, “You said you advertised you were going to do it in sequence,” but we never advertise that we do it in sequence. That would be very robotic. We have been doing shows for a long time and keeping everybody interested in the show and keeping everybody on their toes musically is really key to delivering a good show. So, mixing it up and figuring out how to approach the material in a kind of a rigorous way is really important. It’s funny, we do this song from Flood, “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” [a cover of the Four Lads’ track]. and we actually have three different ways of presenting the song live now that we actually do from night to night. If you come one night, you’ll see a completely different version of it than the next. I think they’re both actually two radically different versions of it that are both really interesting, and they’re very much the opposite. I mean, we do one version of it where it’s us as a duo and it’s almost like a busking version of it with a huge hard left turn in the middle. Then we do a kind of barnstorming version of it with the full band that’s got a lot of horn improvisational stuff in it. We figured out a way to mix it up and keep it interesting for ourselves. I think the audience can tell. We’ve all seen bands that have done the same show a million times too often. They can’t hide it, and I wish they could. I wish they were better actors, that’s all I can say.
Yeah, I won’t say anything about Kiss.
JB: I’ve never seen a Kiss show. Have you seen a Kiss show?
Yeah, numerous times. It’s theatrics, basically. So, the songs are secondary as it is a case of, they’re running around to gee up the crowd, and interact. So, if they make a mistake, they don’t care because it’s all about the pyro, lights and staging effects.
JB: Is the pyro great?
Yeah, I mean, it’s a huge production. I think the only other rock band that’s about as big as that is Iron Maiden. Once they’re gone, you’re looking at your Taylor Swift concerts for those sort of big production shows, which is just not the same thing.
JB: Well, but in a way, I mean, you’re talking about things that are just really entirely sensational. Well, Taylor Swift has got everything going on. I mean, she’s as legitimate as anybody. But I can’t imagine what it’d be like to have to deal with that level of production because it would be so much to rehearse. How to avoid getting blown up at your own show, if you don’t know where the explosions are coming from during the show.
There’s an aspect of cues from backing tapes. Not that I’m saying anything bad about that.
JB: Well, you know, funnily enough about our trajectory as a band, when we started, we were a duo with a drum machine. It’s not like my notions of what’s real and what’s fake are very… probably pretty far to the left, towards saying fake is okay, but once we got a live band, there is no necessity to work with track stuff at all. When we do festivals, I’m always surprised how many bands, and actually, what kinds of bands use track stuff. It’s very odd.
It has just become the norm. But having said that, because of the way you started out, have you embraced the digital age?
JB: Oh, well, sure, absolutely. I mean, first of all, digital stuff is amazing. It’s absolutely a Blast and is really fun to work with, as you can work really fast. It sounds really great. I mean, this is my reality here [indicates the breadth of his home studio layout behind him]. This is my world but when you’re hiring backing musicians and if you’re in an established band, like, maybe you started out with one band, then move on to another band, and you have to hire new people. Then it’s not going to be an organic thing, or, like, what happened with me and Linnell, which is like, we were a duo, and we expanded to a full live band situation to work, so you kind of have two choices. You can work with people. You can hire people who are at your middling level, because a lot of songwriters are not great musicians. I’m not, I mean, I can play the guitar, but I can barely play the guitar. When we started this band, I could not sing and play the guitar at the same time. So, everyone has their limitations. John is a very fluid musician, and he can play almost anything, and he’s an extremely talented guy. So, I don’t mean to disparage him, but he also makes natural gains like any other kind of untrained musician. But, when we made the decision to get a live band, it was clear that we had a choice where we could work with people who were kind of in the same world as us, as players, or we could work with people who are essentially ring-ins. People who are auditioning for professional bands are often music school graduates who are incredibly talented and versatile. They’re normal and humble people, but what they’re bringing to the project is a very heightened level of expertise musically. They can do whatever you ask them to do and in a very compelling way, but they can do a whole lot more. They’re just really good at their jobs, and that was the move that we made. We started working with these incredible musicians, and there was never a second where I was like, “Oh, God, we’ve got to capture the sound of a drum machine, or we’ve got to capture a sound of a sequencer.” These guys can do all that and a tonne more, you know? So, it was a very natural, easy move, and without anything being diminished. I think the bigger challenge for us was trying to figure out how to make recordings that sounded as singular as our earliest recordings. Our earliest recordings almost sounded like they almost had that fragility of demos, and that’s a hard thing to capture a lot of times. That’s the most fragile thing, but that’s cool.
It’s going back to Dial-a-Song, maybe.
JB: Exactly. Well, that was really, like, where we started.
I was going to say that for people complaining about Flood being out of sequence, you could do “Fingertips” in the correct sequence as it appears on the album. That’ll really freak them out.
JB: Oh, we do play fingertips sometimes, and we play it in sequence. That’s the whole stunt of it. It’s a real memory test. Sometimes our memories aren’t so great, but most of the time they’re pretty good.
What led you to do that track? Did you just do it for a bit of fun?
JB: Well, there’s this thing that, in the United States, it’s an interesting phenomenon where, I’m sure they had a similar thing in Australia where they would sell albums of contemporary hits or albums of oldies or these sets of songs, and they would play little blasts of songs and push them up against each other. Sometimes it would be songs that you didn’t know at all and except for the thing that they’re playing. So, you’d hear that sequence of songs, these little blasts of mini jingles. They’d be butted against each other, and it would kind of create a composition. I think that’s what Linnell was kind of drafting on when he, when he put the “Fingertips” song together. It was definitely. It was an idea that we discussed, like a lot of ideas that we have. The first thought is, “Oh, that’s going to be far too hard because it just involves so much production.” But he did a really good job putting it together. I think it’s really exciting.
It’s very funny, too. You mentioned that your guitar playing is, quite obviously, not virtuoso. I remember you did an interview with Guitar World, saying words to the effect of, “You’ll never need to play above the eighth fret.” Do you still agree with this sentiment?
JB: Oh, that’s an old, old musician’s joke, and I think the joke is there’s no money above the eighth fret, actually, which is to say that whatever you’re doing up there, you’re just doing for yourself, which is kind of true, but maybe not that true. I think it’s a joke that is to remind guitarists that, you can make music that will be interesting to people who aren’t musicians, and then you can make music that’ll be of interest to just maybe people who are musicians. There’s a lot of good musician jokes like that. Guitar players spend half their life tuning and the other half playing out of tune. I can relate to that joke.
You’re both multi-instrumentalists, so what do you predominantly write on, keyboard or guitar?
JB: Well, I actually use my computer setup as a sketch pad. I spent a lot of time arranging songs and making pretty complete demos. A lot of times, songs will just start with a vocal line or a melodic line or a chord progression, you know, whilst working with a computer. It’s really a trampoline that you can jump on from any direction. You can start with a beat, and obviously, a lot of people these days are making music starting with beats. They might programme the beats themselves or you might hear a beat. I’ve never used GarageBand, which I guess makes me, like, the last person on Earth to not use GarageBand, because even people who aren’t songwriters or musicians use GarageBand. But around 2000, we started doing a lot of work in advertising and a lot of work in incidental music on television. We did a bunch of different things. We did all the incidental music for The Daily Show, and all the incidental music for Malcolm in the Middle for a bunch of years. For those are jobs where you have to work really, really fast, I just found working on the computer worked. I could just pour out a really strong cup of coffee and crank on that stuff all day long, and it was really a gas, you know, it’s really a strange, fun, kind of manic way of working.
Presumably when you get a Grammy for it, that reinforces the methodology, doesn’t it?
JB: Well, it certainly helps you get paid more. That was, that, probably, and not to sound crass, but spent a lot of my adult life, being kind of broke, and, and some of my adult life, being very broke. So, I’m kind of relieved to not be broke, to be perfectly honest.
Oh, look, I totally agree. I think it’s fantastic. You’ve also done a number of covers, and particularly what I’m thinking of is the Devo one. How do you approach a song like “Through Being Cool”?
JB: I recall there’s sort of an odd story behind it. The Devo one is an interesting example of sort of the opposite of what I would describe as doing your covers with no reference. I would say typically, we feel like if we could do it, we’re bringing something else to it besides just doing a reverent or respectful version of the same kind of arrangement. That would be our goal, usually. A song like “Istanbul (not Constantinople)” which a lot of people think we wrote, was actually a song that was written in the fifties. We didn’t even really have a recorded reference for that song when we did our recording of it, because it was pre-Internet and it was just a song that we knew, so we didn’t actually listen to the original version. We just knew how it went, which was very liberating in a way. What’s funny is, like, the actual original version of the song is really, really slow, which I don’t think we even were aware of when we turned it into a real thing when we covered it. But for that Devo song, Disney was doing this Devo project which was a soundtrack for something that had a budget, and they were getting all these different acts to do Devo covers, and they approached us about doing it, and it seemed like an interesting challenge. I actually put together a completely alternate approach to that song which was very electronic and kind of aggro, and it almost sounded like it had this sort of relentless, Nine Inch Nails quality to it. I submitted the demo to the guy we were working with at Disney, and we had a really good working relationship, but a very creative, flexible, open ended kind of relationship with him. He was really smart guy, named David Agnew [President at Disney Music Group]. He said to us, “No, you’ve totally missed the point.” Not only did he not like the version, but he also told us, “They’ve already edited the sequence in the movie to the original,” which was a completely different bpm and, had just a different feel. So, I didn’t really understand what the assignment was initially, so then John put together the more kind of traditional version of it. So, there’s different ways of having at it. But we did a version of a great song by Jonathan Richman called “I was Dancing at the Lesbian Bar” a few years ago, and that song is just his version of it. His song is just one of the greatest things of all time, and the version that we did to it with it was much more picking up on the idea of a dance floor type thing, because what’s the actual music at the lesbian bar? It’s not going to be like, you know, Jonathan Richman style music. So, I don’t know, it was just a different take.
I wonder what the Stones, thought of Devo’s cover of “Satisfaction”?
JB: Well, what a cool song. I mean, that Devo version of “Satisfaction” is the coolest thing Devo ever did. I mean, it’s like, it’s in 5/4 or 7/8, or it feels that way. I mean, it’s a wild, fantastic drum part in that song. What’s interesting to me about Devo is how, in a weird way, they went through this whole musical transformation that nobody ever really, like, picked up on. I mean, they started out as a total rock band. You know, it was, drums and guitars with a lot of kind of filtering, but they were essentially just a pretty head on band. The drummer [the late Alan Myers] was great, that drum break in “Satisfaction” is just so, so cool.
I suspect that Devo would have share a similar musical mindset to yourself. If you look at Flood, there’s a lot of experimentation going on.
JB: Yeah, there were things about Devo that were so radical. I mean, I remembered when I first heard about Devo, they seem so otherworldly. I mean, they’re a really interesting band in a lot of different ways. To be perfectly honest, I was not a fan very soon after, when “Whip It” came along, when they had much larger success, when it became a national act. I was just too much of a snotty teenager to really be able to hang, you know? I don’t know, culturally if this tendency still even exists. I mean, maybe there are hundreds of thousands of, like pop artsists… I’m trying to insert the most contemporary artists possible, like Charli XCX [English singer / songwriter]. That there are hundreds of thousands of people who will say, “Charli XCX sold out,” but which bands or artists still ‘sell out’ now?
Yeah, that’s an interesting question.
JB: I mean, I’ll tell you, as a teenager, as an 18-year-old, or 19-year-old music snob who just lived for new wave music and alternative music of the late seventies, and early eighties, I thought very sincerely that The Clash were sellouts. I thought XTC were sellouts for a period there, which is really funny, because the more you know about XTC, the more you know how much they struggled professionally just to get through their careers. But, as a 19-year-old, I was thinking, “Those guys, they’ve changed. They’re different now,” and I feel terrible to have thought that now. I really kind of emotionally cut myself off from all the music they were making, really, at the peak of their moment. I never listened to that album Skylarking. I never even got to it. I never heard it. I never listened to it because I was like, “Those guys, they changed.”
I recall one truthful comment from Gene Simmons was that the minute you sell a t-shirt, you’re in the merchandising game. So, a lot of these guys, when they say, “Oh, they’ve sold out,” are seemingly not aware that artists are trying to make a living.
JB: As I said, I’m all for not being broke. I think it’s great to make a living. But this is such a big topic. Sammy Davis Junior did not think of himself as a sellout. Nobody thinks of themselves as a sellout, I think, by any standard, Sammy Davis Junior was a fantastic talent, and I have a huge collection of his records. But, at the end of the day, he is a people pleaser of epic proportions. You know, it’s fun and ultimately, the truth is, it’s like performance. You know, is performing selling out? I mean, getting on a stage, that’s a pretty weird move. You know, that’s not an artistic… there’s a difference between performing and, I guess, if you had no interest in performing, then you can sort of say that there’s no compromise. But I think that even just trying to figure out how to fashion a demo is kind of a compromise. But the music in your head, that’s uncompromised.
I suspect if you love music, then you don’t think the way of sellout, it’s not how it goes.
JB: Well, it changes. When I was a teenager, and even as a young man, I had a very hard attitude towards people’s professional careers. It was a very different. But it was a very idealistic time, like punk rock. I’m sure there’s a whole generation of people who grew up with grunge who have the same kind of hard and fast, no exceptions and no compromise are a really important thing, and I get that, I get that.
Just quickly about some of your key guitars, I know that you’ve got a left-handed Fender Telecaster, and a left-handed Gibson Gold Top as well, quite a rare guitar.
JB: I had a Gibson Les Paul Gold Top for a long time. It was one of their custom shop things. For a long time, I just had two guitars, and that was all. So, if I was going to change things up, I would just sell one of the guitars, and I kept on improving. But now, you know, I play a Gibson ES-335 a lot in the studio, and that’s kind of a better setup than the Les Paul. But, yeah, you know, I’m all lefty, all the time, that’s my jam.
It is good to see you’ve successfully branched out with children’s albums because as a parent, I did get a laugh out of the titles, such as No! and Why?
JB: Yeah, No! is the real deal. I love that album. The spirit of that album is really vivid for me because that was when it was really the high-water mark of our work for hire stuff. Speaking of making a living, when we were doing incidental music, we were working on Malcolm in the Middle, all week long for a couple of years, and that album was made sort of after hours, as soon as we were done with, the stuff that we had to do on deadline for the TV show. If we had any spare studio time, we would do a song for the kids’ album and it was totally for fun, and I feel like that spirit is really woven into that record. I really. I love that record.
Well, even the song titles on Why? reflect exactly what kids are like.
JB: Oh, yeah.
We will see you on tour very soon, so thank you for chatting.
JB: Oh, hey, it was my pleasure.