Here's a transcript of my interview with John Flansburgh, half of the songwriting team behind veteran rock outfit They Might Be Giants, who perform Tuesday night at the Intersection. Interesting guy. I have a story about the band in Sunday's Press.
It's been a while since you've played Grand Rapids. Are you hitting a lot of unusual markets on this tour?
Not too many. We're doing a hundred shows on this run, so yeah, I guess we're getting some secondary cities that we haven't been to in a few years. I wish there were actually more places that we hadn't been to yet. But no, it's mostly familiar terrain. We were just in Athens, Ga., for the first time in a long time.
I don't know when the last time we were in Grand Rapids was. What are the sister cities in Grand Rapids?
We get a lot of bands stopping between Detroit and Chicago. There's also Lansing...
We did a college show in Grand Rapids a couple of years ago, I thought.
Calvin College?
'm not positive. I feel like I've been in Grand Rapids not that long ... I feel like I might've done some oddball convention or something. We do a lot of shows.
Well, it'll be nice to have you back. I've been listening to the new record (The Else) a lot. What made you want to work with the Dust Brothers?
I met John King, who's one of the Dust Brothers, and we just spent an afternoon hanging out talking about a lot of production stuff. It was just a very easygoing conversation, and it just seemed like it'd be fun to work with them.
Was it daunting to work with a team of producers that's so well-known?
We knew it'd be kind of a different thing than working with regular producers. They're producers in the hip-hop sense, that they kind of create tracks for the artists they're working with. We're coming from a songwriting/band background, and usually that kind of stuff is our domain.
So we knew it would be more collaborative from the beginning. We kind of approached that collaboration in a wide-open way. We got material from them in advance of the sessions we were working on with them. Then we did some stuff where they were taking recordings we had, pre-existing, and they were kind of applying their voodoo to it. It worked on a bunch of different levels.
How do you feel their work shaped the record?
In an abstract, sort of spiritual sense, the entire record was really under the influence of the collaboration just because we knew all the tracks we didn't do directly with them were going to stand alongside their tracks. So I guess we were just working on some more evolved version of ourselves. It's hard to sum up, but it was definitely something that was on our minds.
I've got a question, is this on the radio?
No. Do I have a radio voice.
Somebody told me it was a radio thing, but this phone is so static-y.
Nope, it's a newspaper, so we can stutter all we want.
'Like, you know...'
Right. Are there any themes, lyrically or otherwise, that connect the songs on The Else?
It's not like a concept album, but I don't think any more or less than a regular rock album. We're dealing with a lot of regular, old adult themes, like heartache, dictatorship.
I've got "The Mesopotamians" in my head right now. When you write a song that's conceptual like that, do you start with a concept -- in that case, a rock band composed of famous Mesopotamians -- and construct the song around it, or do you begin with the music?
The specifics of that song would be better addressed to John Linnell, but the general process is sort of a back and forth between words and music. People tend to want to declare one thing is going on and the next thing happens. But in fact it's much more ... I'm trying to think of a good parallel ... In some ways it's like fashioning a shoe, where you actually are doing structural stuff and stuff that has to be done nicely... Maybe that's too tortured a metaphor.
A lot of times you'll come up with a concept and sort of a fragment of a lyric idea that makes you feel like you've got a strong enough idea that you can drive a whole song. Then you might set out to do the music first and then finish the full lyric after the song has more form. It varies so much from song to song, there's really no way to sum it up.
Who wrote what song? Is it more or less evenly divided between the two of you?
Yeah, and there are things we work on together. The person who kind of leads the song is the primary writer usually?
Is it right to call this record an attempt to reconnect with some of your adult fans?
I think every album we do is an effort to reconnect with our adult fans except for our children's records, which are efforts to connect with our children fans. We've been extremely busy. I think this tour has really been ... I mean, we could have made this record and not toured behind it as extensively as we did, but at a certain point, with so much attention going to the kids stuff... It's not so much within our audience who I think really understand the nature of the band's approach. It seems as if our audience is entirely comfortable with two things happening at the same time.
As far as the rock press goes, they have a hard enough time with the idea of one thing happening at a time. So the idea that a band could actually have two parallel careers happening at the same time seems difficult to conceive.
I don't know if you're familiar with the expression "man bites dog," but it's shorthand for what makes news, and I think the idea that an actual legitimate rock band, maybe even a pretentious art-rock band, is boldly moving into the world of children's music is such an unusual story that it garners They Might Be Giants a lot more press than we would
In your question, you're saying 'is there a desire to reconnect with your adult audience?', and yeah, I think ultimately we wanted to make something that was noteworthy and of a certain level of quality that would get noticed. We did take more time with this record, and we're certainly promoting it more wholeheartedly than we were able to with The Spine (from 2004). So yeah, I guess the answer to the question is yes. On reflection, yes.
It seems as if you guys have an exceptionally devoted fan base, so it's probably unlikely they would have forgotten about you during the intervening years.
That's an interesting question. We exist and we have fans, some of whom are devoted, but I'm not entirely sure that that isn't ... I think culturally ... if you'll allow me to diverge, just between me as a guy in a band and you as a rock-music guy, it's very hard for people to understand bands that are kind of in the middle. There's baby bands and there's huge bands, and there are very few bands that stick around in spite of everything.
We've been very lucky in a lot of different ways, and we've stuck around and we really enjoy what we do, so it's kind of satisfying in and of itself that there's no particular reason to stop. We really love this project, and it's not that important to us that we be at the top of the charts or we be millionaires or anything. All the trappings of a larger career are not that meaningful to us. So we've persevered. But I think that a band that's in the middle must somehow be a cult band or have this secret society of people that all meet with a secret handshake, it's kind of code for why more attention shouldn't be paid to a band.
I think we're much more pre-occupied with the back row of an auditorium than the front row. We're actively trying to find new people to be interested in our project. I think in a lot of ways, the whole 'you've got some crazy fans, man', it kind of ghettoizes a band that's outside the main thread of what is supposed to be happening. I think it's a way to make it all make sense that isn't necessarily even true. A lot of our fans are just discovering us. We play shows for teenagers all the time who just found out about They Might Be Giants. They are not devoted fans, they haven't known about us forever, they just found us online three years ago. That's how they got into it. It might even be a disservice to them to pretend it's some cult.
I think we're a pretty acceptable choice for people who are just into music. If you're bored of the sort of more commercialized stuff, we're here waiting for you. It's an open door.
That's an interesting way of looking at it. I've never heard that view expressed that way.
In the world of rock criticism, there are some really basic precepts. I've been doing interviews about this band for 20 years, and there are definitely some things that writers really fixate on. They really fixate on biography, and they really fixate on trends that are greater than one band. Grunge being the perfect example. They're always super-psyched to promote what appears to be a musical movement, either out of a region, or a style. Neither of those things need be in place for somebody to have a very real point of view.
The whole biography thing is really tedious. The most interesting writers are really invested in songwriting. It's not about like working through their diary entries. They're rigorous with their materials. They actually can do more than one thing, and they're trying to write the most interesting kind of music. I'm not trying to be a scold...
No, I'm finding this interesting. You're right in the sense that the media covers things in a way that's reductive, so it makes sense as part of a trend.
Right, and to understand why a band like They Might Be Giants exists and flourishes in its own small way really runs contrary to the explanation for why anyone would want to be in a band, according to not only "American Idol," but to Rolling Stone.
The reality is, check it out. We don't care if we're super-famous. That is our official stance. We live in a culture where the main reason that a lot of people openly declare as the reason to do something like this is in order to be famous. I think to a certain extent, the entire chore of getting more famous is just a drag. People are intrigued by the way in which we present the band, because we give away so much stuff for free, and in some ways we put a lot of our stuff out there in a way that's different than a lot of other things. On the other hand, we don't even put our pictures on records. We don't want to be stopped in the street. We don't want that.
But you have had radio hits and the major-label experience. How do you contextualize that?
Yeah. I think our music is good. I think our songs are worth fighting for. We've had a lot of different experiences. We have been through the star-making machinery to a certain degree. Some of it was fun. Some of it makes you feel like you're in the Beatles. It can be thrilling. We've been on "Top of the Pops" a few times
Given how inventive you've been in distributing songs, how do you view the art of assembling an album? It seems They Might Be Giants is a lot more prolific than the typical mindset of putting out 12 songs every two or three years.
Right. We really let the songs drag us around. We do songs on a need-to-rock basis. The individual songs kind of dictate where they're gonna go. How to make an album that has any continuity when that's your general preset, it can undo the continuity that an album has. Which is why when we embarked on making this album, we knew it was going to be a longer project. We brought in a couple of engineers to work with us on the whole thing, and it was mixed by one guy. That's why this album was more cohesive. We did a record called Mink Car (2001) where some of it was made in England, some of it was made in the U.S., on the West Coast. Track-for-track, there's a lot of interesting stuff there, but it doesn't hang together, and that can be problematic.
But you know, even the notion of an album is kind of a generational thing. Personally, I like albums. But in this day and age, I'm not sure if that isn't just kind of old-fashioned to me.
There's no right or wrong. How people enjoy their music is entirely personal. I guess what I like about making albums is it kind of gives you a little more rope. It'd be kind of like an all-protein diet if everything was oriented toward singles. Although maybe it would be a different way to run your career: Only singles! Only hits! That could be kind of fun.
How do you put together a set list with such a huge catalog to go through?
It's funny, there's a fan-based wiki ( tmbw.net) where all these different TMBG fans post different information about the band, including all the set lists. It's a huge database, and it includes all the set lists for TMBG. I often refer to that site in order to check in to see what kind of show we played the last time we were there. I kind of go out my way to play as few songs as we did at the previous show.
We perform between 27 and 30 songs in a show. Probably seven or eight of them are from the new album. Three of them, we kind of can't do a show without playing. People would think we were jerks. Just the other day we did a show in Atlanta where the only overlap between the show we did last year and the show we did this year was those three songs.
I think that's kind of exciting, to be able to just bring an entirely new show. It's exciting to see a band a year later, and it's totally different. It should be that way.
How would you describe the band's relationship to technology? You've sort of pioneered a lot of creative means of distribution.
As a general rule, we're open to it. We're not necessarily that invested in it. Years ago, I don't know if you'd even remember this phenomenon, but there was this whole CD-ROM moment, and we were getting totally filibustered, lobbied to do this CD-ROM project while we were on Elektra. The whole thing was so expensive, so stupid. It just seemed like it was about designing the dullest advent calendar electronically that you could imagine. It was like clicking the mouse for the sake of clicking the mouse. There was nothing creative about it. That was something that was easy to resist.
We started with this Dial-a-song service, and it created kind of an environment that we really enjoyed -- people would hear songs without any context. A lot of people's first impressions of TMBG was this disembodied band, a band that they had no idea how many people were in it or what it was; it was just a phone machine. It was anonymous. The mystery of that experience was really attractive to us.
We have this free mp3 service that's been going for a number of years, and it kind of feels like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. You don't really know where it's going to go, and you kind of hope that it means something. It's satisfying as a songwriter to just know your stuff is getting heard. It's not so important that it's bought. For us, with the podcasts and the mp3 thing, those are very satisfying enterprises for us. The fact that it doesn't really generate income is really secondary.
Going back to what you said about biography and context, it seems hard to believe nowadays that you could really experience a band blindly anymore, considering that everyone has a Myspace page or a blog or whatever else.
Yeah. In a weird way, it kind of annihilates the meaning. It's not exactly a gesture now, it's just the economy.
You mentioned getting your music out in whatever way you can. I think the episode of "Pushing Daisies" was the most recent example of a TMBG song in a TV show.
That was odd. We didn't know what that was going to be. We didn't know it was going to be a "Magnolia" feel-good sing-off.
So you have a pretty open attitude toward licensing?
Well, that's a real mixed bag. I don't think we're particularly into having our songs recontextualized, but I think as songwriters we're about as open to writing for an outside project as you can find. Frankly, writing songs is fun for us. It's something we like to do. We do it compulsively, and we're not so hung up on our street cred that we wouldn't write a piece of music for a television show or whatever.
But that said, we've been approached about doing endorsements over the years and have never felt comfortable with that idea. There's kind of a Tin Pan Alley side to us that's kind of attracted to doing what people might call work for hire. Writing an exciting theme song is a creative challenge. Even writing a jingle that works and really clicks is a songwriterly achievement.
But attaching our pre-existing songs to things is a little bit stranger. To be perfectly honest with you, I thought they were going to use the recording of "Birdhouse in Your Soul." I didn't realize it was going to be a singalong thing. But it's no big deal. In some ways, it just sort of reflects where the song has landed in the culture. That's something that's king of bigger than any songwriter.
So where does that compulsion come from, as far as the why of it?
It's kind of low-level mental illness.
Low-level?
Insofar as you can hide it from your friends. Part of it is I do feel like we're getting better at it. We might even be wrong. But we feel like we've got some stuff left to prove as writers and performers, so I think it's pretty natural.
In spite of the fact that we've been doing this for 20 years, it's gone by in a flash. I feel like I'm just getting used to some of this stuff.