They Might Be Giants--who have experienced a new spurt of popularity thanks to "Boss of Me," the theme song to the sit-com Malcolm in the Middle--open a tour in March to help promote the show's soundtrack album.
The group has also recorded a theme song for the upcoming WB animated series "The Oblongs," and is putting together a new studio album with producers Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne, the Verve Pipe) and Clive Langer, who worked on the group's 1990 major-label debut Flood.
Keyboardist John Linnell and guitarist John Flansburgh, who co-founded the group in 1983, have also been forward-thinkers with regards to online music distribution. Besides releasing their last album, Long Tall Weekend, exclusively on the Internet through Emusic.com, their latest digital offerings constitute "TMBG Unlimited," a subscription service from Emusic that will release five new TMBG tracks, along with special video and animation segments from the band, each month throughout the year.
LiveDaily correspondent Don Zulaica spoke with Linnell about choosing piano over guitar, online marketing, and a range of other topics.
When did you get started with piano?
John Linnell: I had a piano in my house when I was growing up. My brother played guitar, and I knew a lot of guitar players, so I kind of felt like it was taken. Even though it was the number-one rock instrument, I don't know, something just made me interested in the keyboards. Then I kind of later regretted that.
Were you into mostly guitar-based rock at the time?
I was into the Beatles as a kid. But even after John [Flansburgh] and I started this project, we didn't have any clear idea what our exact audience was going to be, or how to get people interested. We stumbled into the solution. We found out there was something called college radio after we started making records.
Did you have keyboard influences, or mainly songwriting influences?
I think mainly songwriting influences. I'm still not really a great instrumentalist--I mean, I can play well enough to make up songs. I didn't like the idea of just becoming technical for its own sake. I never really liked that kind of playing.
How did you get hooked up with Malcolm in the Middle?
My partner got a call from Lynwood Boomer, who created the show. He was just really enthusiastic about getting us involved. We had no idea who he was or what he was wanting to do, but he asked us to cook up a theme song. John already sort of had the song kicking around. It was very short, because it wasn't finished, but it turned out to be plenty.
And besides the theme, you do all of the score for the show. How did you get into doing that sort of thing?
I think, we maybe didn't think of how huge a job it was going to be in terms of time. But we kind of thought it was a way to get our foot in the door, of doing this kind of work that would allow us to not be on the road so much. We wanted to do the kind of one-off thing, a theme song or movie score, where you do all the work and you're done and you bask in the glory. But with "Malcolm," it's more like, every single week we have this tidal wave of work to do.
But it's a really interesting job because it's always new. And what's funny about this job is, we're not actually doing the stuff that we are particularly noted for doing. So we wind up playing all this techno and hip-hop and reggae and all this music that, as far as we're concerned, it's not officially part of our vocabulary. But we're having to do it because that's the kind of range that they want. So it's led us into a really different direction.
What's this other show you've written for, "The Oblongs?"
We just wrote the theme. It's a WB show that will start in a month, an animated cartoon about this family of people who live near a toxic waste dump, and as a result they have extra heads and stuff like that. But it's animated, so it's considered to be wholesome. [laughs] What they asked us to do was kind of a pre-war sounding jazz arrangement, and when we finished it they said they wanted lyrics. So it ended up being this '30s jazz kind of thing.
And you're working on a new studio album?
Yeah, we haven't made a studio album in so long. We have a huge backlog, but we've got a lot of stuff we're still cooking up. We could probably make a pretty good double record, but I think we might settle for the extremely-strong single disc. It'll be out on Restless sometime this year, I guess the fall.
You were among the first bands to put an MP3 album on Emusic--Long Tall Weekend.
I think mainly we've been agreeable about it. We didn't know anything about that stuff when Emusic approached us, except that everybody was saying, "This is the way it's going to go." So a couple of years ago, we started cooking up different ways to promote ourselves on the Internet, and now we have this subscription service where every month you get a little batch of MP3s through Emusic. That's worked out really well. It was very easy for us to get into it.
How well has the subscription service done?
It's still growing, but the record that we put out was Emusic's biggest download of the year when it came out. So it's going great. We really have a perfect overlap between our fan base and the people who are interested in downloading stuff. I'm sure that it's going to be driven by the same kinds of bands that are popular in other ways, ultimately. We're clearly not the top-selling band of all time. The thing to bear in mind right now is that most people download stuff for free--very few people are paying.
And yet you guys were still among the first to distribute online through subscription and selling.
Well, I have a son. [laughs] But we give away a lot of stuff through Emusic too. I think we're cognizant of how important it is to get the word out before you start assuming that people are ready to dig into their pockets. So we do tons of giveaways. As far as the Napster stuff is concerned, I really think it's more beneficial than harmful, even to a band like us.
I mean, I'm on the side of copyright laws. I believe in the concept of intellectual property. I'm not into this rhetoric about how ultimately everything is owned by everybody. I think this is the whole thing for anyone who wants to do creative work: if people are interested in good quality stuff being available, they have to recognize that unless they pay for it, they get the kind of crap you usually get for free over the Internet.
I've said this to crowds of ours, that they're welcome to, you know, rip us off. But unless somebody is paying for it, there won't be any more They Might Be Giants. So anyway, that's me getting off my soapbox.