They Might Be Giants’ new album, “Nanobots,” has a lot of songs on it. The 45-minute album contains 25 songs. That’s not unusual for the band; its 1992 album “Apollo 18” featured 38 tracks. Of course, a good number of those songs are less than 10 seconds long.
“If we were really disciplined and wanted to invest the time, we could flesh those out to full length,” band member John Flansburgh said during a phone call from Australia, where TMBG was on tour. “But sometimes it’s fun to do something intense and crazy as its own self-defined thing. For a lot of them, the demo was the final version of the song. It’s a more carefree way of work; we think it’s important to remember that albums don’t have to be a prescribed form or shape.”
They Might Be Giants has been playing with the form and shape of things for 30 years. Even if you aren’t familiar with their music, you’ve heard the songs of Flansburgh and his partner, John Linnell. It’s them performing Bob Mould’s “Dog on Fire” that serves as the theme to “The Daily Show” each night. They also performed the theme to the sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle,” and had several songs animated on “Tiny Toon Adventures.” Your nerdiest friend has probably sang “Birdhouse in Your Soul” at karaoke.
Over the last decade the band made several albums aimed at children, covering numbers, letters and science. The kids who grew up listening to those albums are getting to the age where they can attend TMBG shows in clubs, but Flansburgh said that was not necessarily the outcome they were aiming for at the time.
“When we started making music for kids, we weren’t thinking long term. We just thought it would be an interesting writing project,” Flansburgh said. “Now a lot of those kids are teenagers and are going out to shows. It’s strange to me, because when I think of the things that interested me as a child they seemed so far from the rock culture I grew into. It’s worked out great for us, but I can assure you it’s a most uncalculated side effect of our career choices.”
It’s also an interesting inverse of how the band’s career started. When They Might Be Giants started, Flansburgh and Linnell were playing for fans who were normally older than they were. They were college students at the time, but college kids couldn’t afford to go to nightclubs in New York City. So Flansburgh and Linnell have watched their crowds age like Benjamin Button as they get older.
Those early New York City shows were also often only about 2 minutes long, but once the band hit the road they found they were contractually required to play for an hour or two. That meant the band needed to bulk up its setlist. TMBG isn’t known for doing a lot of covers, but one of their most famous hits is a cover of the 1950s swing song “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” The song worked its way into They Might Be Giants’ repertoire because they needed to fill some time.
“Two of those most popular covers we’ve done, ‘Istanbul’ and ‘Why Does the Sun Shine?’ were learned so we could pad our show,” Flansburgh said. “ ‘Istanbul’ is two chords. If you know F minor and C, you can play it. That’s the main reason we learned it. It’s just impossibly easy to play.”