You guys are touring with Hootie & The Blowfish.
Correct.

How is that?
Well we haven't started yet, so I can't answer that.

How did it get set up? It's one of the most unusual combinations I think I've ever seen.
Well, yeah. We're going to see how it goes. Hootie & The Blowfish, who I have yet to met, have apparently invited us to come play with them on this leg of their tour. They get to choose who opens for them and they picked us. So, you know, I know very little about their music. Basically, this is not our regular audience. The reason why we're really doing this is that we're going to play to people who probably most of whom don't know about us. So it's kind of an opportunity to try and convert an enormous bucket of people or try to get them to remember us. It's kind of a shotgun effect. If we get like 3% of the people we play to to buy our record, that would be really substantial chunk of record sales.

Have you guys ever played in Nebraska before?
No, funny you should mention it. We've played in probably 45 of the 50 states and Nebraska is in that teeny percentage of states we've never played in. We won't be doing our full set. We're doing our opener set , so it'll be about an hour. It'll be our kind of most splashy stuff. But, it will be our first time in Omaha. I guess we played in the Dakotas. We did some shows across Montana and in Bismark. I realize that's not physically close to you guys, but that's the nearest we've played, I think.

You guys have got perhaps one of the most interesting select group of appearances. You've appeared on just about every talk show available, and you've appeared in a cartoon twice -- you guys were in Tiny Toons. How did you get in Tiny Toons?
It was probably the easiest gig we've ever done because they just asked us if they could use the songs. We said yes and they gave us money. We had nothing else to do with it. It was utterly effortless on our part.

The Dial-A-Song service... how long has that been in effect?
That's a very very long running program considering we've never made any money off of it. It was started in '83, fall of '83 and it's been pretty much the same exact thing since. It's always been the same phone number. It's just a phone machine you call up and get to hear song by us and they're unreleased songs or songs that haven't come out on their own yet, so that's the peg.

You're new album is "Factory Showroom" and this is your second album with a full band. Do you record just the two of you and just play with the band live or do they actually come in the studio with you?
They were with us in the studio for the last two records. This one was distinguished by the fact that we didn't really try to make it sound like a live band. We recorded the other musicians, but we recorded whichever ones we thought were appropriate. In other words, there are some tracks that don't have bass or don't have drums or don't have the whole line up. There's relatively few horns on this record. We did it bit by bit, the way we made our earliest records. We recorded the rhythm section and then we'd just add stuff on and kind of tinker around in the studio. With John Henry, we really learned twenty songs - learned how to play them in a rehearsal room - and then recorded them more or less the way we were playing them live. This is more of the typical They Might Be Giants approach.

Did you guys play without a band live then before?
Yes, for about nine years, John and I were a duo and we had tapes backing us up, but there were a whole variety of things on the tape. We often had just drum machines and bass, but in some cases we had recordings of us playing saxs or synthesizers.

Is it a lot different playing with a band?
It's really different and it changed our performance a whole lot and it's continuing to change the way we perform. One thing we've noticed is that we have these guys who are listening to what we're doing and we're listening to them. We can improvise a lot. We've got very improvisational. We tend to take a lot of space loss in a portion of the show, which we never did. John and I, we were pretty rigid when we were a duo. We'd figure out what we were going to play and we'd just play it. There wasn't really much messing around musicially and now we have the freedom to really go out on a limb. We have one song that - most of the song is sort of free improvisation. It's called "Spy" and it starts out with the song, which is maybe like a minute and half long and then the next couple minutes I'm conducting the band. They're playing more or less anything they want to play. It's sort of a conducted improvisionation. I think the thing was it took a while to kind of build up the trust and confidence that allowed us to do something like that. Because John and I are pretty controlling. We really do want to make sure people have a good time. We have a pretty specific idea of what we want to play on stage, so to get to the stage of actually doing free improvisation -- it's taken a while.

Do you guys get recognized on the streets? You're considered one of the best underground pop bands...
Well, it's nice that we're considered that.

You're kind of like this midwest band called The Samples in that a lot of people hear of you from one of their friends who then passes on to one of their friends. I know you don't get a lot of radio play, but you get a lot of attention that way.
Right.

Do you get recognized on the streets, then?
Well, it's not really common. Mainly we get recognized outside the gig that we're playing. I think that's when people would be actually sort of noticing that we're the guys. They don't put our faces on the record covers. We're not trying to really push ourselves as the most exciting aspect of what we're doing. John and I feel like we're not personally that interesting. We want to focus the attention on the work rather than the guys.

Where did the idea to use an accordian come from?
I'm a keyboard player. When John and I started, I played organ and clavinet.. We tried a bunch of different things and a friend ours had an accordian that she had played when she was a kid and she had sort of given up on it. She loaned it to me. We used it in a show we did on the street in Brooklyn and it just made so much sense from so many different angles. It was the right instrument for the kind of material we were doing, it was a portable instrument you could play outside and it looked cool. It just looked very fresh to me, like something that was kind of interesting to look at and it's a very dynamic keyboard instrument. It's like an organ except you really have a lot of dynamic control over it. So it just seemed like it was for me. And we started using it in the live show. I'm playing a lot of different things in the current show, mostly playing electronic keyboards, some accordian and I play the baritone sax. It's just one of things.

You guys have a lot of side projects - I hadn't realized until I got your "Facts Sheet"...
Yeah, well Flansburgh is definitely winning the race. He's got a CD club you can join where you get ten CD's a year that are by different artists that are more or less people that we know or people we've met who are signed to record companies that want to do some side things. So he's got the Hello CD of the Month Club, plus he's been putting out his own material with a group called Mono Puff that he put together and he also directs rock videos.

Yeah, I saw that he directed videos for Soul Coughing and Frank Black...
That's right.

I also saw that you played on Frank Black's debut album and you played on the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion debut album.
That's right, yeah.

Are you going to be playing with them any time soon?
We've done a bunch of tours with Frank Black, actually. He's a good friend of ours. We played in L.A. last week and I lost my voice. Actually it was two weeks ago. We'd been in Japan and I lost my voice. We played the show at the House of Blues that we'd been booked to play - we couldn't really cancel it - and I could do everything except sing, so we had Frank Black come out and sing some of my songs which he was very kind to do. He's just somebody we like.

What's it like playing overseas? I saw that you've played a lot of overseas concerts...
Yeah, well it's interesting. It's fun to be in a different place, the audiences are definitely... in some subtle way, they're very different culturally. I always like goofing around in other places. It definitely makes it interesting to tour when you're in an exotic location.

When did you guys actually meet? You started recording in 1986, the Dial-A-Song started in 1983...
John and I went to high school together in the 70's. Well, actually we attended elementary school together in Lincoln, Mass. in the mid '70s and went on to high school - that's kind of when we became friends, in the middle seventies - we both worked on the high school newspaper together and we had a bunch of friends in common. We kept in touch after that and we both ended up in New York in the early eighties and that's when we started doing this stuff.

Do you find a lot of people know stuff from Flood more any of your other albums?
Well, I think there are certain songs that everybody knows. We had some singles from our independent LPs that people seem to remember. Yeah, for some reason there's just particular songs that are the ones that people...

Do you guys each have your favorites?
I can't think of what my favorites are at the moment. I'm excited mainly about doing the new material, 'cause it's something fresh and we're still figuring out how to play some of the stuff, so I guess that's the funnest thing for me -- the stuff we're just introducing into the show. We're just about to learn how to play Metal Detector, which is... We can't really play the arrangement that's on the album because it's mostly Moog synthesizers, so we're having to figure out how to do that between the guitar and me.

How was "I Can Hear You" -- I saw it was recorded on an Edison Recorder?
That's correct, it was recorded without the use of electricity in the original method of making recordings. It was how they made records in 1895. We went and used the original equipment that was in the Edison Museum in West Orange, NJ. We performed in front of a crowd and played these songs into recorder and then about five minutes later they let the cylinder cool off and they played it in the player. That's more or less what it sounded like. The guy actually transferred it using slightly more sophisticated gear to transfer it to modern technology, but you're listening to the sound of a wax cylinder recording.

How did you guys come up with the idea to recording on a wax...
It wasn't our idea. They invited us, so we didn't really know what... John and I have heard of Edison cylinders before, we didn't really know what it involved. I guess they've been getting other artists to come and perform in front of the tour that goes through the Edison Museum. So we showed up and on the stage where we were going to perform, they had this recorder, which is a pretty small little thing. It's about a foot long and it just looks like this little tool kit or something, but coming out of it are these cones, one of which is twelve feet long and at the front end it's about two feet wide and then there's a smaller one that you sing into. The band gathers around the big one and we're all playing as hard as we can, and the vibrations from us playing is what's digging the groove into the cylinder. It's all done strictly without microphones and that's what you hear on the record. (long pause) I know, it's crazy.

Yeah...it's just a really weird way of recording.
Well that was what they did before they invented microphones and stuff like that.

I notice that every once in a while you guys bring up an obscure song and revive it. Like "Istanbul" and "Why Does The Sun Shine?"
Uh-huh.

You guys planning on doing any more of those?
Well, we don't have any plans. We've got a cover on our record which is a not particularly obscure song - well, I don't know whether it's obscure or not - it's a song by a group called the Cubs called "New York City" and they're from Vancouver. John heard it on the radio and it just spoke to him.

I hadn't heard of it before. Maybe it's just big in New York City.
No, it's not big in New York City. The Cubs are definitely a band people have heard of, because we've met people who were aware of... The Cubs have a new album, I guess. Or maybe they're called Cub, actually...

I think it's Cub.
Cub, right. There you go.

And you guys played on the XTC tribute album?
Yes, we did! We were asked to contribute an XTC song, our version. We checked out some of the earlier New-Wavey songs and we started trying to work up an arrangement on one of them... it just wasn't, I don't know... it just wasn't coming together. So, we decided we were going to break the rules they had already set for us and record the Dukes of Stratosphere song - which is the band that XTC transformed themselves into in order to play sort of psychedelic songs - and we recorded a song called "Twenty-Five O'Clock." Our version was sort of -- it's a little more like a 70s, early 70's kind of approach than the psychedelic version that the Dukes of Stratosphere did.

Did it get included on the compilation?
Yep.

Even though you broke the rules?
Even though we broke the rules, they put it on there. Yeah.

I also see just looking at the Random Facts that "Birdhouse in Your Soul" was a Top Ten Hit in the U.K.?
That's correct.

Was it different playing shows over in Britain when that happened?
It was, yeah. We actually had a much more expensive tour after we charted and we lost a ton of money... (laughs) which shows how success can kill you. We rented like buses and had a caterer and the fancy tour... I think the thing is, sure a lot of people had heard of us that month. We really did manage to make a big stink in the U.K. on that occassion. But in some way, the concerts we were doing were more or less to the same kinds of people that we'd been playing to all along. What we were doing was spending a lot more money and playing the same kinds of places. I guess we still have a higher profile in the U.K. than we do anywhere else, but... I don't think that having a hit record was a central fact in our lives. We have a much more reliable fanbase that's people who listen to the albums.

What age group does your audience usually turn out to be at concerts?
It's very broad. I think normally bands play to kids who are between 18 and 25 and we certainly have that predominantly, but we have a lot of really young fans and a lot of people our age. In other words - old.

(laugh)
And even older than us. So among bands, I think we have one of the widest range of bands.

So how long will you be on tour for?
We'll probably be supporting this record into next spring, but it sorta depends on how well the record does. We might, you know, go mental if we have a hit...

Have you guys done a video for MTV?
Not yet. We're gearing up to make a video for "S-E-X-X-Y."

Is Flansburgh directing himself?
We haven't figured it out yet. What we'll probably do is cook up the video ourselves and then either John will direct it or we'll get somebody else to do it.

I appreciate you talking to me. I'll be sure to see you guys when I'm out at the concert.
Well, say hey to everybody out there. This is our first ever show in Nebraska, to reiterate, so we're happy to be finally showing up. I flew over Omaha once, and I knew that because I was looking at a map and I looked down and the city on the ground looked exactly like... you know, it's on this curving river and it's very obviously Omaha, exactly like the map of Omaha, so I have seen Omaha, but I've never been to Omaha.

I'm sure Omaha will be very welcome to see you.