They Might Be Giants but they're definitely coming to Madison

After 20 albums and 36 years together, it can safely be said: they are indeed giants.

Or at least They Might Be Giants are titans of a certain cross-section of musical spheres that includes New Wave power pop, college radio quirky-rock, and unlikely children’s music superstardom. The core duo of John Linnell and John Flansburgh have been making music since 1982 (this is the 30th anniversary of their breakthrough album “Lincoln”), expanded to a full band in the mid-1990s, and have remained remarkably consistent, with catchy earworm melodies conveying often dark and surreal stories.

The new album “I Like Fun” is just as weird and wonderful as the rest, and brings the band back to Madison for a show next Tuesday, Oct. 23, at the Barrymore Theatre. The afternoon before the band played Manchester, England, Flansburgh talked to the Cap Times about their long career, their preoccupation with death, and why they’re probably done with making music for kids:

I think a career in music is by definition a very weird roller coaster. They keep on coming up with new parts of the ride. It’s being assembled while you’re on it. Last night we played a sold-out show at the Barbican, a very prestigious place (in London). I was very nervous about that show getting booked at all, because if it didn’t work, it would all backfire. It was glorious.

A lot of bands who have been around for 30 years get referred to as legacy bands —

I prefer legacy bands to “oldies act!” But yeah, we just made our 20th album. It seems kind of insane to me. It is very odd that we’ve been kind of monolithically working this strange musical mine for so long. When we started, I think we felt like we hit on something really interesting, working with memory and ultra-vivid imagery, and not worrying about being taking too seriously or being thought of us too strange.

Our heads were very turned around by the punk rock/New Wave moment of 1977. John had been in a power-pop band. The idea of a short and powerful pop song had tremendous currency when we started. Television had great songs, and Blondie had great songs. We were still really responding to that. We started in 1982, so it wasn’t that long after that explosion. People describe us as this weird, out-of-left-field thing, but I feel like we’re the last New Wave band to make it.

When you see one of your shows, you could play anything off those 20 albums, and it’s all cohesive. That’s not true of a lot of bands who have been creatively active for that long.

I guess that’s true. I hadn’t thought about that. We surf very freely. We have two songs in the show right now that are less than a month old. And we play songs that we made for an EP in 1987. And the new stuff gets a shockingly big response. This new song we have, “The Communists Have The Music,” people really dig it.

It doesn’t just make it fun to us. There are people who are just finding out about They Might Be Giants right now, which is fascinating to me.

Speaking of the passage of time, I noticed a preoccupation with death on the new album. Is that an accurate thing, or is it because I’m older I’m the one who’s more preoccupied with it?

I think if you just scan over the lyrics it’s kind of hard to avoid. As young people, we were already preoccupied with death, and we would also at times try to make songs be more thrilling by having extreme things happen in them, just to kind of shock the song and shock the listener and shock ourselves. We would play very casually with death imagery.

And then we proceeded to get old. And when you get old, your whole world is surrounded by death — sometimes tragic death, sometimes run of the mill that’s all you get death. It’s very hard to process. Nobody knows really what to do with that information.

You had a run of great children’s music in the last decade. Have you put an end to that, and how did it affect the trajectory of the band?

It probably made things more difficult for Pitchfork writers to process our musical output. The nice thing about doing any project for kids is that once it’s in the world, its utility isn’t diminished by time. There are still new kids being born, so there are all sorts of kids being raised on They Might Be Giants right now.

We did five children’s projects. The first one was this kind of revelation because it was so liberating. It was the end of our run on Elektra Records, and we were a little tired of being in that world. Doing the kids’ thing just seemed like this great open-ended invitation to just do anything. We’ve never been obscene, so we didn’t have to push anything down — oh, except for the death imagery.