I've been a fan of They Might Be Giants for years. The love affair started fifteen years ago (give or take) when a friend gave me a mix tape that included "Birdhouse in Your Soul" and "We Want a Rock" from the album Flood. I was hooked. Their irreverent blend of absurdist humor and experimental mix of any and all genres of music appealed to me. So I kept following them over the years. When I started the little project I like to call Joe-Mammy.com, one of my first goals was trying to get an interview with one or both of the Johns (Flansburgh and Linnell for the uninitiated). Well, I'm happy say that goal has finally been achieved.

John Flansburgh graciously dropped by to discuss music, the new album and 25 years of the band.

First off, you guys have a new album. It's out online and it's scheduled to be released in stores--

On July 10th.

One thing I've always liked about you guys is that you've seemed to evolve with the market. Was there a conscious decision to release it online before in stores?

There was kind of no easy path forward with how to do the download versus the physical release. We basically knew the second that we sent out review copies the album would start getting widely disseminated through file sharing sources. The problem with the review system is that it's still very much on the old schedule. People typically want review copies three months before the album is released. We just knew that would create a lapse in time that would drive some people insane.

A lot of people have problems with iTunes and that copy protection and you're kind of opening a Pandora's Box of mild public disgruntlement but I think it was the only sort of stop-gap solution that addressed all sides of the issue in some way that made some sense. Most people like iTunes. Most people like the way it works--it's a very easy interface to deal with. It's the most popular one. We did the prerelease a couple months before the physical release and ultimately I think it's allowed people to check out the album. The people who couldn't wait have been able to get it early and not get it through unauthorized means. It allows us to make a living off of what we do rather than have it pirated and discussed as a pirate experience.

There are goodies that come with the physical version that's released on the 10 th that the online version doesn't have, right?

The first edition of the CD actually has a full-length bonus disc with it--a kind of "Best of" the podcast disc. That was sort of a way to sweeten the pot for the people who decided to wait for the physical CD. To be perfectly honest there are aspects of putting albums together these days that make me feel that no matter what we do, we're going be torn in half. It's not easy. The reason I'm being so careful with my words is just that everything I say is going to be widely misunderstood or misinterpreted. It's very hard to sum up but we're really trying to do the best thing we can by our audience and ourselves.

Just to be clear, They Might Be Giants love the fans, right?

Yeah, we really appreciate the whole situation and we're not trying to figure out cutting edge ways to exploit anybody, that's for sure.

I was doing a little research and the official anniversary for They Might Be Giants is next year, but you and John [Linnell] started performing together 25 years ago this year.

I guess in the summer of '82 we did our first show together, yeah.

25 years is longer than a lot of your audience has been alive.

That is true. We've had many audiences over the years. When we started we were playing clubs in Manhattan and there was this slightly odd aspect of the shows in that the audiences tended to be a little older than us and I remember feeling kind of anxious about playing for people who were older than us. We were very new to New York City. John had grown up in New York but I'd been in New York for exactly a year. We were playing in these very "high falootin'" pretentious kind of places. There was an aspect of them that was very scabby but it was very Bohemian. There were many times I felt we were kind of in over our heads in some ways.

Is that in a good sense or in a "Holy crap, what are we doing?" kind of sense?

I didn't feel like we fully knew the terrain. There was a lot drug taking going on that we were kind of blissfully unaware of. The whole set-up of these places was just kind of mystery to us. We just kind of landed in the middle of a scene. It was a really unusual moment in New York City culture. It was just very odd.

I did an interview with John Lurie who was talking about New York during that same period and the scene wasn't so much people doing work, but partying and doing other things on the scenes.

The Lounge Lizards were an amazing band. Their scene was exactly the kind of thing that I would have found incredibly intimidating. They were really snappy dressers. They wore ties. They wore suits. I don't know, they seemed like adults.

Do you think it's fair to say that you've bucked that stigma. You're the band that doesn't quite want to grow up, or at least not in the same way as everyone else.

I don't know. We kind of think of the band as a project. We don't think of it as being about us. There's an experimental aspect of what we do that we really want to preserve.

Part of the appeal for me has always been--no one else I know of has ever done a song about Mesopotamia. The universe you guys seem to work in, it's like "Well, why the hell not do a song about Mesopotamia, it's more interesting than another break up song."

. I think we're ambitious about what the song content can be. I think with any band, with any creative enterprise there's always kind of contrary motion--there can be more than one thing going on at the same time. One of the things that has always been a constant with us that kind of informs about how we approach the writing is that the shows have always been highly celebratory. When we perform we have always been very well received. There are a lot of great bands in the world that do really interesting music that aren't that well received by the audience. They're misunderstood or they're greeted with some level of ambivalence and that's never really been our problem. Because there's always been such a joyful reaction in the audience for what we do, it's always kind of helped us to hold back a little bit when we're doing our recordings and kind of think about how to make stuff that holds up to repeated listening and do stuff that has--I think it really has empowered us to be more ambitious about the writing. On some basic level we've just been pretty confident that what we're doing was already working. I feel that we've been very lucky to have found the audience that we have.

I've always been curious--and I know it can change--but how do you usually put a song together. Do you start with a melody or an idea with lyric content?

We've done it every way imaginable. Since we're writing all the time, there are always notebooks full of words and hard drives full of tracks that are in-progress. It can be very Frankenstein-y in a very inadvertent way. I remember years ago I wrote this song called "I Palindrome I". The song was just kind of a sketch of a song. I recorded it for Dial-a-Song and it was on and off Dial-a-Song. I told John about it and he was obviously intrigued by the title and we sort of talked about the rhythm of palindromes. All palindromes kind of sound the same. They've got this very odd cadence to them. So he just wrote a really great song to the idea of "I Palindrome I".

To have Dial-a-Song back then before the internet where everything is documented and you can't do the simplest thing without it being etched in your permanent record, there was this thing about Dial-a-Song--it was a great song workshop for us. We still have every ability to get our carefree personal stuff into the word. We do this podcast which is kind of the outlet for our kind of crazytown impulses, but even that is very closely watched by some people. In some way we're just looking for excuses to get free.

Off the top of your head, do you any idea how many songs you've actually written?

That's a really good question. Speaking of being closely watched, there is this TMBG Wiki site, the TMBW.net site, that has a list of all the songs we've done and I can't quite figure out--I have to get to a faster internet connection--there's just hundreds and hundreds of them. I would settle for a quarter of them if they were just better songs. I guess writing a lot is just part of our process. I think we'd be the first to say that it's not important that a band or that songwriters write a lot. I think sometimes it's actually more important to know how to edit what you're doing. But that's not really our scene. We enjoy having the ability to just play our songs to people in a casual way and Dial-a-Song and the podcast and we have this free MP3 service and all those things are just fun outlets for us to get ourselves into the world and keep in touch with our audience.

And you also tour like madmen when you're promoting something.

Well, we haven't done as much touring in the last five years. This year is going to be a huge touring year for us. I hope we come out on the other side of it feeling good about it. In the 90's we toured so much that we kind of burned out on it a little bit. It was just too much work. It's very hard to keep your health together on the road and I don't know why that is. There are people doing other jobs that are just as physical. Maybe it's more just psychological but you find yourself aging like a president when you're on the road. It's like you're in a time warp.

There's an aspect to it that's kind of revealed by what happens to the equipment that you realize is also kind of happening to you. If you put a piece of equipment in a road case at the beginning of the tour--like the backup accordion or the backup guitar or backup amp or something--and it's just in the truck bouncing around. You might not even open that case between the beginning and the end of the tour. You get to the end of the tour and you open the case and it's in three different pieces and all the screws have fallen out of it because it's just been rattling around so much that the screws actually unravel just in the constant bouncing. You realize if it can take a machine that's screwed together and dismantling just by the bouncing, what's happening to your body? It's physically challenging.

By the way, in your transcript feel free to take out the "likes" and "ums" and repetitions and stuff. I sound like a surfer when I'm transcribed and it's always distressing to me. Somebody I know was telling me that they've actually learned how to stop saying the word "like" while they talk in public even though they say "like" a lot in private conversations. They've found a way to dismantle that preset.

I had a prof in college who managed to do that by substituting the word "duh" instead of "like". Kind of a self-humiliation thing I guess.

DUUUUH! Well I'll try that for this interview. I'm going to try to not say "like" again during this interview.

Unless you're using like a simile or something, right?

Like a simile? Sure.

(chuckling) Let's talk about the new album.

Absolutely.

Produced by the Dust Brothers and, I'm going to mispronounce this--

Pat Dillett was the engineer. Pat Dillett was really a key player in putting this album together. He engineered all the Dust Brothers, or most of the Dust Brothers sessions and he mixed the entire album. Ultimately he's kind of the key man because half the songs were Dust Brothers productions and half of them are They Might Be Giants productions but the real continuity comes from Pat.

As you mentioned earlier a lot of times you have material ranging back in time. For this album what was the range for the principal assembling/songwriting period?

This album came together over a pretty long period of time. In the middle of the project the Dust Brothers had to work on a couple of other things so there was a big break in the middle where we kind of working on our own. It took about a year and a half from beginning to end to record the whole album. I'm trying to think of the actual songwriting, what the earliest song was. I guess "Shadow Government" was probably written in 2005 and "In the Dark" was probably the last track created for the record and that all came together at the beginning of this year. So there was a full year and a half span if not longer putting the whole album together.

Are there any tracks that have a special place in your heart so far?

Well, I really like the balance of the record. I think it has the scope of songs that I find satisfying on the album. Right now I'm kind of enamored with the whole package. I like the way some of the songs emerged over the course of the process. Some of the songs started out sounding kind of like regular songs and then got some extra topspin added to them in the production. There's a whole set of keyboard sounds that we applied to "Careful What You Pack" after the song was officially finished. To me when you hear the whole introduction to that song it's very atmospheric and unusual. It's really like a dream. That really helped put the song over for me as a recording. I think it's a very strong song--the bones of it are solid. It's a fun song to play and I like the structure of it. The extra production that came in at the end actually gets the idea of the song across and makes it a successful recording. It's a real balancing act making an album that is as rangy as the albums we make--it's not just one song and it's not just one approach.

I've always liked your approach that way. To me it's like the guy who decided peanut butter and banana would taste good together.

Yeah, I know what you mean. That's why I think really finding a through line that makes an album succeed is so hit and miss for us. I think we've made albums where there are some spectacular songs on them but the way the songs are set against each other and the way things are framed the album doesn't really work. It's not the song's fault; it's just the way the cumulative effect works.

I was actually listening to tracks from John Henry this album we made in the mid-90's. John Henry was also a long process, putting the record together. We definitely felt like we had an artistic challenge ahead of us making that record. I realized listening to it that it's just too long. It was that moment when people were making CD's that you could put 60 minutes of music on a CD but as an experience the album just kind of goes up and down and up and down and up and down and by the end of it it's just too much stuff. I think people would have noticed--if we just taken out half a dozen of any of the songs they would have noticed any of the songs more.

That was the first album you did with the full band, right?

Yeah. That was definitely more of a struggle for us than we thought it would be. The whole live band transition was paradoxical because going to a full band was an immediate hit live. All of a sudden the live show was that much more exciting and we could spontaneous things we couldn't really do as a duo. It was sonically very powerful and raucous. It was that much louder and that much more energized. There was no problem with that transition, people just liked it more.

With the recording process I don't think we realized how much working with drum machines and electronics had contoured the recordings to sound so unusual. We would do a simple drum beat on a drum machine and it would have a completely different quality as than the same drum beat on a drum kit and it wouldn't sound that familiar. It would sound maybe even a little startling but it just wasn't that comfortable, obvious thing you know when you hear a live drum. So going to make recordings with live musicians, not only did we not have a big set of skills about how to get the best sounds out of the live instruments, but we didn't know how much rearranging we were going to have to do to make the music sound really intense.

Consequently I think John Henry sounds kind of polite. It's a little bit within the parameters of good taste. It's not that important in music in general to be within the parameters in good taste but for us it's definitely not a good strategy.

Well, do you have any advice for the kids at home?

Um, open your mind to the psychedelic experience? No. You know, the older I get the less I feel like I can give anybody advice, to be perfectly honest. What is your advice for the kids at home?

Um, floss daily. Good teeth are hard to come by.

Yeah, that's sage advice for sure.

They Might Be Giants new album The Else is schedule for release in stores July 10th but if you're really impatient you can grab a copy of it from iTunes this very second! Look for John and John to be visiting your town (or a lovely town near yours) in the near future. And, if you're so inclined, drop by the Joe-Mammy.com Shop for some TMBG goodness or at their own website, theymightbegiants.com.

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