Think of the long-running pop-rock duo They Might Be Giants and the first word that comes to mind might be “fun.” Naturally, their new album is called I Like Fun, and fun is what a sold-out crowd heading to see the band Friday at Higher Ground expects to have.
Much of I Like Fun is light, as on the buoyant and illuminating track “Lake Monsters,” which feels like a long-lost B-52s’ B-side. (“Lake monsters of the USA/Just looking for a polling station/If it takes the cloak of darkness/Their voices will be counted”).
They Might Be Giants isn’t easy to pigeonhole, though; leading men John Flansburgh and John Linnell can get downright heavy. The closing tune on I Like Fun, “Last Wave,” is about dying alone and afraid, giving the album a feeling that you’re swallowing nutritional life lessons in an otherwise sweet dessert.
The Burlington Free Press spoke with Flansburgh by phone recently during a tour stop in Portland, Oregon. He talked about the band’s enduring popularity, a memorable Burlington show from the 1980s (two words: stage collapse) and his band’s similarities to the theatrical and confrontational music of “Threepenny Opera” creators Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. (Flansburgh said of a song that narrowly missed making it onto the new album that “If we were writing ‘Fourpenny Opera’ it would be the opening track.”)
Your show here sold out in a jiffy. Not a lot of bands maintain that level of popularity more than 30 years later.
At the risk of sounding, like, super-arrogant, we make a really big effort to do a really good show. That’s a tangible, real thing. I’ve seen a lot of rock shows in my life. I feel like the commitment that most performers have in music to the quality of their show is extraordinarily low. They’re not rigorous with the material, they’re not very tough on themselves. I know this sounds like a motivational talk but we really try to think about what is going to be interesting for people and what is going to be a dynamic performance and we build in enough opportunities for spontaneous stuff that is going to be a fun challenge for ourselves. At the bottom of it I just think we’re like Avis, we just sort of work a little bit harder at it.
The tunes, topics and attitude have kept a remarkable consistency over the years, short and sharp and witty. When you play the older material juxtaposed with the new songs, what kind of evolution do you hear?
From the jump, we were sort of thinking that we needed to think of it as a musical universe and that there’s this kind of wide-open set of possibilities within whatever musical limitations that we have or just conceptual limitations we have. It’s still a pretty rangy set of rhythms. I agree with you that there is something fundamentally cohesive with what we’re doing over the years, but because we started as a duo we weren’t linked to any kind of rhythm, even in a Simon and Garfunkel kind of way; we could arrange the songs as big or small as we wanted. We weren’t beholden to a band lineup. As songwriters that just gives you a completely different way of approaching what you’re doing. It’s a much more plastic sort of possibilities.
Ten years into doing what we’re doing we started working with live musicians and assembled this killer live band that has all the qualities of a cohesive, like-minded unit. Between the legacy of what we’re doing and the actual personnel we’re working with, we kind of have the best of all possible worlds.
I hear a Brecht/Weill influence in your songs more on this album than others.
That’s important music for people who are in the deep end of the pool in terms of songwriting. It does a lot of the things that I think we aspire to do. It’s such successful music. The amazing thing about the Kurt Weill stuff is they’re really memorable songs and they have a very smart sense of humor to them in the lyrics and yet they’re completely adult. It holds up to repeated listening. There’s lots of surprising things about it. I’ve probably listened to the (“Threepenny Opera”) song “Pirate Jenny” 100 times in the last year. It’s such a smart and crazy song. It’s like a play in a song.
You’ve played Vermont a few times. What memories do you have of your visits here?
One of our very first times performing outside of New York City was in Burlington. It was a very, very odd show. It was organized by the people who ran Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine with the idea that there was this thing called performance art coming out of the East Village. We performed this show on a multi-act bill, I forget the name of the venue, it was in Burlington in 1985. We played the Iron Horse in Northampton (Massachusetts) and then we played in Burlington. It was a black-box art-theater kind of place, we were set up on these high chorus risers like if you were in a high-school chorus going to all-state, four or five feet high, and in the middle of our show we were really into jumping around and in the middle of the show one of the chorus risers’ legs in the middle bent out and the whole middle of the stage folded in on itself. It was a very early experience with a stage collapse.
Is the song “Lake Monsters” inspired at all by Champ, the Lake Champlain monster, or the Vermont Lake Monsters minor-league baseball team?
There is a wonderful book put out by Atlas Obscura, a big book of fun stuff, and there’s a three-page entry about America’s fixation with lake monsters. It has a map of the United States with all of the established lake monsters in it.
“Established” lake monsters…
I’m sure their numbers are growing all the time. There’s sort of like a delightful summer camp, urban-legend quality to the idea, that some kid can make (expletive) up because it’s fun.
You can say “Hi” to Champ while you’re here.
We’ll have a big chest bump with Champ.