John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants has another career option should this whole music thing not work out: He can be the ball in a roulette wheel.
"Most of our ideas can be found at the bottom of the second cup of coffee," Flansburgh said in a call to his New York City apartment. "We're pretty big coffee drinkers. It's how we start our work sessions . . . but if you use coffee at the narcotic levels that we do, it's surprising how much you can get done."
That's true enough. For 32 years now, Flansburgh and his partner behind the Grammy-winning group, John Linnell, have been churning out music to challenge convention and the thought processes of children and adults.
Shoot, the band's newest album, Nanobots, has 25 cuts on it, almost twice the "normal" number. Maybe it's the joe, but more likely, it's a desire to be different.
"We get to do a lot of things inside this project," said Flansburgh. "There's not a lot of governors on this band."
That's clear when one song, "Call You Mom," is a guy telling his girl she reminds him so much of his mother that he wants to call her mom, and another, "Tesla," is an homage to Serbian-American engineer Nikola Tesla, whose genius led to wireless technology and brushless generators.
And their fans like TMBG's refusal to be pigeonholed, Flansburgh said.
"Fans can be conservative and reactionary," he said. "They want things to stay the same, and they're not interested in what's new.
"It's just the opposite with our audience," Flansburgh said. "If we do something that's really different, and might even seem kind of messed up, it almost seems to thrill them. It's hard to calculate how exceptional that is."
It helps that TMBG, perhaps more than any band out there, understands itself.
"I think John and I, even from the moment we started, realized we would have to be advocates for what we're doing," Flansburgh said. "It's not that natural [of] a sell. We don't have a built-in constituency for what we do. We don't fall into a musical genre.
"If you're a banjo picker, you can plug into the world of banjo pickers," he said. "Because the definition of this band is more wide open, we had to create an audience for what we're doing."
They did that through "Dial-a-song." The storied project began when the band had to a take a break from touring when Linnell broke his wrist in a cycling accident. To purge the creative juices, the duo started recording songs into an answering machine, then advertising the machine number.
"One of the things that got to us was that it would appeal to people who wouldn't even go to a nightclub in Manhattan at 1 a.m.," he said. They WOULD dial a number and listen to a song in the middle of the day. But even that had to end.
"By the time you get to the 500th song, it's pretty miserable," Flansburgh said. "But it was good training for us."
Good training for sure. In 2002, TMBG won a Grammy for "Boss of Me," which became the theme song for the TV show "Malcolm in the Middle." And in 2009, the group, which now has expanded to full-band status, won a Grammy as the best musical album for children with Here Come the 123s.
The band, which began life as El Grupo de Rock and Roll because their first gig was at a Spanish-speaking Sandinista rally in Central Park, continues to push for quality, quirky or not.
"I think we're ambitious enough to keep the standard of what we do very high," said Flansburgh. "We don't want to get bad reviews by doing second-rate work."
Not that Flansburgh is complaining.
"It's fun," he said. "It doesn't feel like work."
Credit the coffee.