For 25 years, They Might Be Giants have been staunch supporters of doing things their own way. Their music has, on occasion, crossed over into the mainstream, via minor radio hits like "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" and "Birdhouse in Your Soul," as well as the theme songs to TV programs such as Malcolm in the Middle, but the they've largely been content to amass one of the largest cult fanbases in all of contemporary music.
Like their music, which oft sees more mainstream critics bandying about catchalls like "quirky," the band has a long, storied history of embracing technologies both in their distribution and recording processes, long before they've the chance to become ubiquitous parts of the industry.
In the early 80s, They Might Be Giants launched Dial-a-Song, a service that allowed their fans and more casually interested parties to listen to tracks via phone, thanks to an answering machine set up in co-frontman, John Flansburgh's Brooklyn apartment. Dial-a-Song, which boasted the slogans "25 hours a day, 6 days a week," "free when you call from work," and "always busy, often broken," survived through two decades and various technological incarnations (some decidedly more outdated than others), finally retiring recently, in favor of dialasong.com.
In 1999, They Might Be Giants became the first well-established band to release an mp3-only record, with the eMusic-distributed Long Tall Weekend. The band's latest record, The Else, saw them seeking yet another alternative method of distribution, releasing the album via iTunes a month before hard copies were available for purchase. The record has also seen the release of several music videos, distributed via YouTube.
We sat down with Flansburgh yesterday, to talk about TMBG's tech obsessions, from Edison Wax Cylinders to the iPhone.
You guys have a long history of embracing technology, sometimes high-tech, sometimes antiquated.
Well, you know, two things can be happening at the same time in the world, and that doesn't mean that they are in opposition to each other. We are very interested in technology. We're very interested in experimenting with music, and one of the most exciting places to experiment with music is electronic music. But I think there's kind of, even in the world of musical exploration, there can be a lot of orthodox thinking. It's like your experiment has to be purely experimental--if you're interested in pursuing electronic music, it should be purely electronic. An I guess we're just...I'm loath to use the expression, but I think in some sense we are extremely post-modern in that case. We very freely mix up elements and don't worry about it too much. [Co-frontman, John Linell] was born in '59 and I was born in '60, and we grew up with the Beatles, which was rock music in its very sort of potent stage. When we were teenagers, there were a lot of bands that would incorporate synthesizers in the band, and it seemed like a natural addition. But a lot of music with electronic elements seems to be sort of conspicuous, like with a scientist in a rocket lab.
Yeah, you have George Harrison doing that album [Electronic Sound] that was all on the Moog.
Oh yeah, there was a lot of activity and a lot of interest in it, but I guess the thing is how to use it as a creative tool, and not just be this sort of novelty.
Like, say, Peter Frampton.
Yeah, I guess we're interested in things that are emerging, but when we're making recordings, we're very aware that it's something that has to hold up to repeated listens, and probably something that will be around for a long time. So we're just trying to figure out the way to use those instruments and still have it be valid.
The focus when somebody listens to the song being not the technology, but rather the song itself.
Yeah. I think, as far as the strategy goes, it's really important when you're making a recording to remember that it's something that's going to be listened to again and again. I think that getting the balance right in a recording is really key. That's always the question, whether it's how you integrate a startling new sound or how you integrate the humor in your personality, or how loud you make the snare drum. Those are really topics that are at the forefront of how to make a good recording. It's always a balancing act.
But there's the song that you recorded on the Edison Cylinder ["I Can Hear You"]. The recording device plays a large role in the them of the song, itself.
Yeah. That was a song that was site specific and it was written specifically for the thing we were doing. I think we're home recording enthusiasts. We started out making tapes together on amateur recording machines, and we're really fascinated with tape recording, or sound recording. It's a part of making music, but it's also its own thing, its own challenge. And things that work in recordings don't necessarily work in live performance and vice versa."
When you first started out, were you worried about making something too slick, and losing something in the music to the production?
The means to do anything in a slick way were so unavailable to us that it never really was an issue. We had very crude tools, for a very long time. We started out as a duo and used a drum machine. And something that I think we only became aware of, after we graduated to bigger studios and started working with live musicians, was how the sort of automatic, mad flava of the drum machines made our recordings exceptional-sounding.
Working with a drum machine, things come out sounding different, and less-familiar. Even when you're just programming a simple drum pattern that's familiar to everyone, there was this interval of time when it was the strangest way to do the simplest thing. And when we were working with drum machines, we thought is just sounded very immediate and normal. But listening to those recordings now, I realize that it's sort of a more awkward sound than we fully understood.
You know, you only have so much self-awareness. When we started as a duo, we really didn't feel like there was anything wrong in trying to be a rock band. It wasn't like we were trying to dismantle the idea of being a rock band. We were just trying to be a rock band in New York City that couldn't afford a rehearsal hall, and didn't have a fast-track enough career to convince a drummer to work with us. There was a practical side of it. It was like, we wanted to be in a band, and this was the way we could do it. So the drum machine was just extremely handy. I mean, it was interesting, and it was cool to us, but it was also extremely handy. I don't think we had any idea at the time how challenging the setup of what we were doing was to the audience. There were definitely people in the back row of many of our shows who were shaking their heads, going, "what these guys are doing is not musically complete. That's why its not satisfying. No matter how good their ideas might be, it's not enough of a performance to be interesting for me."
And you understand that complaint now?
I sort of do. I think in the fullness of time, but when we were in the middle of it, I think we thought we were AC/DC. We thought we were just rockin'. "Turn it up." And our show was incredibly loud. I think it's something techno DJs realize: if you're there in the room, you do have volume on your side. On paper, it does seem completely incomplete. But there was an aspect to it that you couldn't avoid.
When you did that song, "Man, it's So Loud in Here," [something of a spoof on house music] was that sort of your response to those early days?
I think that's more about the world of discotheques, and that there's all sorts of rooms with over-amplified music. It wasn't really self-referential.
Are you a fan of electronic music at all?
I am fascinated by all recorded music. I'm probably a bigger fan of hip-hop music than I am of electronica. A lot electronic music you hear in an incidental fashion is kind of, I mean, maybe it's just the context, but it's like the least interesting way to hear it. I've lived in the same place for 25 years, but it's gone from being an abandoned neighborhood to being an extremely trendy neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Which neighborhood?
I live in Willamsburg, so basically the sort of ambient soundtrack to every coffee shop and lunch counter you enter is some version of electronica. And a lot of times I wonder if it takes more time to listen to than it did to make. There's a lot of presets getting triggered in my neighborhood.
It's such a casual listening experience, though. If you're in a coffee shop you're not actively listening to music, for the most part.
I'm not sure I believe in the passive music-listening experience. I like the silent restaurant. I like the silent bar. I put on music in the background in my day-to-day life, but that's a choice. You know, when you're choosing what you're listening to, you're touching on things you're familiar with, and sort of checking in with them. But background music just for a lifestyle's sake just sort of bums me out.
What about the radio though? Where you've made the decision to put on the radio, but you're not deciding what comes on next.
Getting back to the idea of being obsessed with recorded music, I find driving to be incredibly exciting, just as a listen. I can kind of drive forever, just because I find listening to music in that setting to be so exciting. But in a weird way, your car is just a really great listening room. That's not background music, because that's part of what's going on. It's one of my all-time favorite things.
Getting back to that original idea of technological contradictions, it's interesting that you're the first band to release an MP3-only record, but you're still using Dial-a-Song.
You've got to understand, we've been around for a long time. Dial-a-Song started as a piece of emerging technology. Dial-a-Song, when it started, was as odd as--maybe even more odd--than anything of the electronic gizmos that are coming out now. In the 70s, the only place where you encountered a tape recorder used with a telephone was with theaters, which had these devices that would give you the time of movies. There weren't any places where you'd get a recording instead of busy signal. People didn't have message machines of any kind on their phones. If they left the phone, it would just ring. The phone machine was really a late-70s/early-80s invention. The consumer phone machine was introduced then, and it was not very much after its introduction that we started Dial-a-Song. I think to a lot of people, it was as new-wave an idea as an asymmetrical haircut. It was definitely taking advantage of the emerging technology and using it for kind of a cross-purpose.
As a band that exists outside the mainstream, it was the first time in our career that we actually got to grab a little bit of glory, because we were the first ones there. Having enough songs in rotation that it appeared to change ever day was a bit of a challenge. But we were a brand-new band, and it was fun, and people hadn't heard our music before.
It was a great way for people to hear our music, because it had no context, even though we were playing in a lot of unusual clubs in New York and were part of this East Village scene that was very creative, and in some ways very pretentious. I think when people talk about scenes, they're talking about this kind of rhythm or style--with the East Village scene, it was this very experimental, wide-open scene, but it was still a club scene, and was very much about late nights and drugs and all of the things attached to nightlife. The thing that was interesting doing Dial-a-Song was that we could find an audience in the daytime. They could experience our music at their jobs, on the phone.
It was a very entry-level way to get turned onto a band. Imagine all the things that people say MySpace can do for a band, but that only one band in the world has MySpace. That was very lucky for us. I'm kind of proud of the way we did it. People can't hear Dial-a-Song, because it got retired a few years ago. We didn't even have an announcement for the first five years. You would just hear a song, so people really knew nothing of the band, other than maybe the name and this abstract experience of hearing this single song. It's a very singular way to experience a piece of music, and everything was really designed to be heard that way. It was a writing challenge, but it was interesting.
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When you released the MP3-only record, Long Tall Weekend, was it that same desire to be the first band to embrace a technology?
That was more an opportunity that arose because of the dot-com boom. The people at eMusic approached us to do it, and the band was in a huge period of transition at that point, professionally. We were out of our contract with Elektra, and were just entering a contract with Restless. [Electra] had distributed our first album, so we had been working with them for, maybe 15 years, at that point. What we didn't know is that, when the whole dot-com explosion happened, and 9/11, that the whole record company would be wiped out.
We controlled the digital rights to our songs, because of Restless. [Long Tall Weekend] was something that we were free to do. We had a bunch of songs that we wanted to get out into the world. It would have been some strange compilation album of stuff, otherwise. And to be perfectly honest, it just seemed like a humble way to put the songs into the world. When you're a songwriter, it's important to find an outlet for your lesser work. It seemed like the right scale. What's funny is that it got all this attention, just because it was so early in the game.
I would assume that a large portion of your fan base is technologically savvy.
Well, a percentage of them are technologically savvy. We have this podcast, which is extremely successful--it's probably the most successful thing we're involved in, simply because it's free. We're also managing this MySpace page.
What's interesting about those things is how many people are doing it for the first time. A big problem we have with the podcast is that people don't know how to do it. They don't know the most essential parts of it. We're introducing people to the applications that they need to do it, or simply to the idea that it's not something that exists only if you have an iPod. Before you've done it, you don't know anything about it, and that's exactly where so many of these people are at.
The MySpace thing is interesting because of how many people are involved in that world but are completely outside of technology. They're there for completely social reasons. It's a brand new way to be social in the world, and their motivations for being there are entirely traditional. It gets back to what we were talking about before: You can use emerging technology, and it doesn't have to be an expression of technology. In a way, that's the best thing you can do with it: Fnd out how it's good for you. Nobody knows what this stuff is good for until you actually use it.
You're releasing a video on YouTube for every song on The Else.
Well, we're doing a lot of videos. I don't know if we can afford to do a video for every song, but we've got five videos in the works right now. We're doing a video for every song on the next children's project. Those all come out as DVDs as well as CDs, because the kids like the pictures.
Is this something that you've wanted to do all along, and finally have the technological means with which to do it?
That's an interesting question... I'm trying to back up far enough to answer that question. People always look at a band's trajectory as whether or not you have a song on the radio, or if you were on MTV, or if you got signed to a label. There are all of these milestones that people use to gauge your success. A lot of times those things are actually very uneventful in your life.
For us, signing to a major label didn't make us wealthier. What really changed our lives was when we stopped having day jobs, because we were touring so much. What happened is, we ended up having to rely on the band to make a living. We really wanted to make this band work on an artistic level and a professional level--we wanted people to be into the band, and we wanted to have fun.
We were a local band for five years. All through that time, we worked at jobs and could basically do any gig we wanted to do--or not. As soon as we stopped having jobs, we still had to pay our rent, and that meant that the gigs had to make some kind of sense on a money level. We couldn't just do things because they were fun. We had to figure out how we were going to make enough money to pay our ridiculous New York City rent. It wasn't like we were selling out--we were just trying to accommodate a really big life challenge. That was a huge change and chore. Maybe it seems kind of subtle, but it took a lot to accommodate that.
Getting back to your question, being in a band like this, you get to do a lot. Is it interesting making videos? Yeah. But like with this upcoming children's project, there are 20 animated videos on it, and over the course of four months, I'm basically the art director of 20 videos. I'm working with 20 different animation videos and 20 different animators.
Is it you and John [Linnell], or are you flying solo on this?
Well, I worked as a graphic designer, and I have a background in that, so I've always wrangled the band's visual side. That stuff falls to me. When we started, I made the props, and when we started working with Adam Bernstein on rock videos, I started doing the storyboards with him, and I would find the illustrators for the album covers. I've always tried to employ different artists and illustrators for all the visuals. A lot of times when there's a visual artist in the band, it becomes this all-over design for the band. I wanted to break out of having every album look the same. I kind of function more as the curator/product manager guy on the visual side of things.
Getting back to, "Did you always want to make videos": Yeah, it's totally interesting and fun--it's a great project, but sometimes it feels like you're at the 'all you can rock video buffet.' It's just a lot to manage. I mean, I'm happy to have such problems, but doing it well--it's a lot. There were a couple of days weeks ago where I was getting 100 e-mails a day, from the people who were involved on the visual side of the things. I have enough trouble with ten.
You're well known for embracing technology as a band--are you an early adopter in your personal life? Are you the kind of person who runs out and buys an iPhone?
I must confess, I have an iPhone. I bought it impulsively, and I have to say, I have no problems with it. I'm really enjoying it, actually. Personally, I'm an optimist, and I find a lot of things about the world of computing to be just magnificent. There are things that I miss--as a graphic designer I started working with stat machines. If you're not a graphic designer, you probably don't know what that is. There's probably a Wikipedia entry you can point people toward [indeed there is]. It was like an optical printing device, not that different from a photograph enlarger, but it worked with printing material. It was capable of doing really interesting things that are hard to do with a computer. With any change, some things are gained, and some things are lost.
All the song writing we do, we'll be working with a computer, just as a recording device, and maybe we'll be working with a program as a music-generating device. That's just the sound-making devices that are there. A lot of times it's good enough, but when you hear it played on a real instrument, it's much more persuasive and exciting. Or conversely, you've have some lumpy, homemade loop that has oodles of charm that you forget to leave on the final version of the song, because it seemed amateurish. Finding the balance is really the key for us. I'm very excited by the time we live in, but I feel like any time in the post-mechanical era would be good for me.