It's a 'Flood' nostalgia tour, but They Might Be Giants promises to mix it up at College Street

Hartford Courant, January 27, 2020
by Chrstopher Arnott

They Might Be Giants are revisiting their illustrious, precocious past on their latest tour, which stops at College Street Music Hall in New Haven on Feb. 6.

The tour is billed as the 30th anniversary of TMBG’s landmark album Flood. But because they are TMBG, they are also bringing new songs, improvisations and other surprises to this ostensible nostalgia fest.

That said, founding member John Flansburgh says he has no firm idea of how the College Street concert will play out.

"We just did two shows that were very different from each other, so I can’t tell you."

But it’s a pretty sure bet that the album’s songs won’t be played in order.

"It becomes rock under glass,” Flansburgh says. "Those songs are impossibly popular. Doing them in order robs the evening of a fair amount of spontaneity.”

He describes it as "an evening with show, where we do two long sets. We’re moving to a Springsteen-length type of show.” There is no opening act on the tour.

Naturally, songs from Flood have always been part of the TMBG concert experience.

"We would be the stingiest band in the world not to do songs off our most popular album."

But the album "is only about a third of the show. In New Haven, we may be performing three songs that we’ve only performed once before, and one or two that we’ve never performed before.” Tracks from the album will be intermingled with other TMBG material old and new, he says.

Flood brought TMBG’s quirky pop style to the masses. The album included their best-known song "Birdhouse in Your Soul,” which became a hit in Europe and scored high on the modern rock charts in the U.S.

Among the other delights on the band’s third album: "Your Racist Friend," "Particle Man,” "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair,” a cover of the 1950s novelty tune "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” and the whip-cracking 47-second "Minimum Wage.”

Flood also contains two theme songs: "Theme from Flood” and a song named for the band. The album sounds as fresh, distinctive and disarming as it did in 1990.

TMBG, started by John Flansburgh and John Linnell in 1982, has become the stuff of alt-rock legend. The pair, who’d met in high school and formed the band while at separate colleges, moved to Brooklyn before it was a cliche for musicians to do so, issuing new songs daily on their answering machine. Following their pop successes, they crashed the worlds of children’s music and TV soundtracks while keeping their distinctive sound intact. They’ve released 22 studio albums and numerous live records and compilations. But Flood remains special.

Flansburgh recalls the Flood period not as a turning point in the band’s career but as part of an upward trajectory that was already happening.

Flood was TMBG’s major label debut, but "we got signed because we were selling records. Things had already started changing for us, but Flood was like having a booster rocket on what we were already doing.

"When we first started touring, it was the beginning of what is now a well established circuit of alt-rock clubs. Even a few years before us, that circuit didn’t exist. Alternative clubs, along with college radio, were the beginning of the national music culture. You found mom and pop joints you could headline at. We have a song called ‘We’re the Replacements,’ about coming into each venue one day after another band that’s on the same circuit. Before that, you had to be the opening act at a hockey rink, crawl your way up.”

TMBG has played Connecticut, and particularly New Haven, for decades. Notable shows include a Toad’s Place gig where the lights went out mid-show and the band (which were plugged into a different circuit than the lights) kept playing despite being unable to read their set list or music charts.

Before another Toad’s show, a local paper printed a set list from earlier in the tour, so the band played the set list in reverse order to keep things fresh. For the 2009 International Festival of Arts & Ideas, TMBG played a special set of just their music for children, on New Haven Green for an estimated crowd of 25,000 people.

"We’ve done one-off performances of Flood before, like when we play more than one night in a city. We did it in Australia and the word got out." A live recording of the Australian Flood show was released in 2015.

The Flood songs are still obviously fun for them to perform, but TMBG are not stuck on past glories. This tour came about, Flansburgh says, because "we haven’t finished what will be our next album. If we’d done our homework, we would have our new album out. Then there was some interest in doing some live shows.”

The other members of TMBG were not involved when the "Flood" album was made in 1990. Then, Flansburgh and Linnell worked as a duo.

"Flood" was made "mostly with drum machines,” Flansburgh says. "These are the new guys, and they’ve only been with us 20 years.

"There are not a lot of reasons for being in a band for 38 years. Being able to mix it up is important to what we do.”

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