As goofy or quirky as you think They Might Be Giants are as a band, they’re actually trying to be serious.
A lot of thought goes into songs such as “Tesla,” and as TMBG’s John Flansburgh puts it, “We’re trying as hard as we can to be completely pretentious and it just won’t stick.”
With the band’s new album, Nanobots, they’re hitting the road again to play old favorites such as “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” as well as tunes from the new 25-track album that Rolling Stone said included “plenty of meaty hooks and memorable melodies.”
I called Flansburgh after the band completed a tour of Australia to talk about the new record as well as their approach to writings those songs that we love, including the quirky ones.
On Nanobots, you guys had 25 tracks, and quite a few were short.
It suggests a lot of shorter songs. There are actually a half-dozen songs that are really just blasts of sound, like micro-jingles, and the rest are really pretty much regular-length songs. We experimented with short songs from the very beginning.
“Minimum Wage” on Flood is like a minute long, or like “Chess Piece Face” on our very first album was about a minute long. We’ve done things that were sort of montage-based like “Fingertips.”
On this album, we were trying to figure out a way to avoid what the preconceived notions of a record are. It seemed like an interesting way to sequence a record and be kind of unpredictable.
It kind of goes in a wave of regular, shorter, regular.
Yeah, it kind of comes and goes off the rails there in the middle.
I liked how even the shortest things, such as the six-second “Hive Mind,” still sound like full-formed ideas.
Well, the kernel of a song can be a very slight thing. When we were writing the short songs, we were doing it in kind of an experimental way. The ones that really seemed bold were the ones that got used. One thing you do when you’re writing really short things like that is you sort of jam out a bunch and kind of harvest the most alluring ones.
They’re like sparklers. They’re just strange sort of atmospheric things.
People say they wish they could be full-length songs, but with some of them, I’m not sure if they’d actually be better full-length. It’s actually kind of nice as these enigmas.
Did any of those little things ever get explored as bigger ideas? Did they ever turn into a full song?
You know, a couple years back on the album The Else, we had a four-song kind of collage song called “With the Dark.” The opening track of that was this ballad called “With the Dark.” Basically, we sacrificed a full-length song to have a very powerful open. There are times that I think it would be nice to have another beautiful, sad song in our repertoire, and that song if it had just been presented in its original length would have been that. It’s kind of a heavy song.
But we just kind of cut it short and went with a more progressive idea. We do a lot of recording. You’ve gotta be rigorous with material. If we got too precious, it would really slow us down.
You typically write a lot and then winnow it down to an album. How do you make that decision?
For the past few albums, we’ve actually been putting out compilation albums of the extra material generated afterwards. It seems like the people in our front row that are the biggest fans of our most eccentric work actually prefer those albums because they seem looser and even crazier.
If your interest in They Might Be Giants is as a project of eccentric ideas, then those albums might have more interest.
When we’re making our release and putting an album together, we’re trying to figure out what will stand up to repeated listening and what’s the best version of this kind of song. We might end up rejecting a song that is worthwhile on its own, but there’s a slightly superior song already on the record. We certainly get a lot of guff for it. People are still mad that “James K. Polk” was a B-side (on the “Istanbul [Not Constantinople]” EP).
I think a lot of songwriters do that. Or they play songs for years before finding the right record to put them on.
There’s a lot of different things going on at the same time with songs. Sometimes there’s a gestation period for the song. ON this album, there’s a song called “Tesla.” We actually recorded a version of it five years ago with different lyrics and slightly different melody and a completely different approach. It just didn’t seem like it was ready for the world even though the original version is this incredibly bombastic rock – like very rompy rock song. It might have been much more popular with people. I don’t know. But it just didn’t seem ready for us.
It was sort of a list song. It had a lot of the inventions that he had, but it didn’t have a point of view about how he was as a person. Speaking of eccentrics, there’s something very broken and deeply strange and sad about Nikolai Tesla’s life. If he wasn’t so productive as an inventor, most people would have seen him just as a troubled soul.
He’s a guy who had visions his entire life. Most people who have visions don’t mix well.
Often people wanted to diagnose them with something.
(laughs) And often in the nineteenth century, diagnosis meant jail.
You’ve hit on a variety of subjects over the years. Do you ever feel like you’re running out of topics?
It’s funny you mention that. In one of the very short songs is kind of a reflection on that.”Nouns” kind of reflects on running out of nouns.
Occasionally, you run up against it. I remember was working on the song, “How Can I Sing Like a Girl.” The opening line is, “Birds are calling to sing along, but my window’s painted shut.”
This was only a couple of years after “Birdhouse in Your Soul” was a big song for us. I thought, “This is a really strong opening line for a song. It’s vivid and it sets up the idea of the song in a great way.” But I couldn’t help but feel a little self conscious that people would think, “Oh, they’re repeating themselves.”
It is weird, when you’ve written a lot of songs, how to manage your permissions to repeat imagery or to repeat ideas. At a certain point, you almost let it go because you realize to not give yourself permission to repeat certain things is going to lead you in a less vivid direction.
Most good songs are written in a straightforward way and have really bold ideas. If suddenly you say, “I shouldn’t write vividly any more. I shouldn’t write with straightforward ideas any more. Those are all done.” All the sudden, you’re going to have less persuasive material.
But I don’t know. It is weird. I don’t know what people do. Our lucky break is that when we set up the band, we sort of widened the scope of the subject matter. We avoided a lot of cliches of popular songwriting and brought in a lot of outside ideas, and that has given us a lot of elbow room. That’s kind of helped us.
But I don’t know. Carol King wrote a trillion songs about being in love and I don’t think anyone thought she was running out of ideas.
It works for us to kind of look outside.
I always liked the way you had a different way of looking at things. “Your Racist Friend,” for example, is about racism, but I’ve never heard that angle before.
The song is very earthbound. It really is about dealing with a social aspect of racist behavior. It’s about that precarious place of how to live in a world where it’s just in your face. What do you do? Do you become a crazy person who starts a fight? How do you get through that?
That’s a very clear version of what a lot of our songs are driving at that makes them far less adolescent than our reputation might be. When you have a sense of humor in what you’re doing , people immediately think, “Oh, it’s all featherweight or it’s all good-time stuff.”
There’s a lot of adult anxiety in the songs that we’re doing. It’s just kinda on a different plane than your teenage rock ‘n’ roll rebellion songs.
Nanobots is all over the genre spectrum of rock, and They Might Be Giants isn’t pegged on a particular genre outside of the broad one of “alternative rock.”
We came up with alternative rock within that time. We were of the moment of college rock or whatever you want to call it. We were in a van when R.E.M. was in a van.
It’s a good question. Sometimes I think we very much are an alternative rock band. Sometimes I think we’re the very last new wave band. All the ideas of new wave were very influential on us. It took us a very long time to get out of New York City. We started the band in the early ’80s when skinny tie bands were all the rage. Those very short songs and those very concise, really melodic songs that harken back to power pop stuff — that was always very persuasive.
Do you feel freedom in that you’re not really pegged to one thing?
Let’s be honest: I don’t think any performer feels anything but victimized by whatever pigeonhole they’re in. Years ago, I was in the Elektra publicity office and I was looking at other people’s press releases. I was looking at a Metallica press release a full album before the black album, and I was looking at a press release for Motley Crüe. Both of the press releases were so defensive.
Here are bands that are wildly, wildly successful. They weren’t critically successful with the general press, but on a certain level, who cares? (would think if you were in Metallica, you’d be like , “F*** it i’m in Metallica. I don’t need a good review. I have an arena full of people chanting for an hour after I’m gone.”
The truth is that critical response does kind of affect your thinking. It affects your self image. For us, we really started doing this in a real vacuum. We were in Brooklyn when there was not much culture going on in Brooklyn outside of hip-hop. That was extremely vivid. The setup of our band with a drum machine was as influenced by that as anything else.
It wasn’t like we were listening to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. We were listening to Afrika Bambaataa. From the very beginning, we wanted to let the mystery be. Unfortunately, I think people take what we’re doing in a very immediate way. Maybe it’s better that way.
People get a lot of direct joy in a lot of what we’re doing and I think that’s always come as a surprise to us. Maybe that’s because there’s melody involved or it’s just the way we arrange our songs and sing our songs.
We’re trying as hard as we can to be completely pretentious and it just won’t stick.
People love to see you guys live, and I wanted to know: How much thought goes into the show? Obviously, things like the puppets take a lot of work, but how much is “hey, let’s try this out” and how much is meticulously planned?
A lot. When we’re on the road, it’s pretty much the topic of the day. Everyone in our crew and in our band is always thinking about how to perfect the show and how to keep the show moving forward and do things that are new and that also wow people.
It’s a really big challenge. We have been on the road for 25 years, and there are certain things that we’ve done that have almost been stunts that have dazzled crowds.
Like 15 years ago, we used to do this thing called “Spin the Dial” where we would actually have a radio onstage and we would spin the dial of the radio. As a song came in, the band would start improvising in the same groove that was being played. Sometimes it would be a familiar song or sometimes it would be like the Mexican station playing some popular Mexican song.
The band is very versatile and their level of musicality is very high, so it wasn’t that difficult. Then on top of it, we would do some open-ended improvisational thing. It didn’t work every night, but when it did, it was really, really fun for us and really interesting challenge. It would get this incredible response. Sometimes, it would be so good that people would think it was fake. You would hear back from people saying, “That was fake. That was prerecorded, right?” No, come on.
It’s hard to walk away from something like that. I feel like one of the stranger things about being in a band for this duration of time is that you start coming up against questions that people in vaudeville have. If you have something in your back pocket like that, which really makes for an amazing evening, when do you take it out of the show We figured out how to take it out of the show, and we’ll do something different.
We’re just retiring this other part of the show that’s been so great to have it but we just don’t want to do it any more. We’re coming back to places where we’ve already done it. It’s one thing to make “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” but it’s another thing to be the guy throwing up the toast at every show. We don’t want to do that.
I remember having a conversation with Susan Orlean about Pete Townshend. She was saying how amazing it must have been to see Pete Townshend smash his guitar the first time because it was this completely unbelievably transgressive thing to do.
Then if a year later and you saw him and he did it again, maybe it would seem like this super-insane ritual, but it would take on a completely different meaning. In a way, I think of the theater of this stuff as something you do want to make feel like it’s immediate. If it becomes like a ritual, then it’s time to move on.
These questions kind of fill our brains when we’re on the road, for sure.