They Might Be Giants have spent over 20 years carving out their own place in the rock and roll world. Founded by high school friends John Flansburgh and John Linnell, the band has morphed from its early days of drum machines to their own cottage industry of TV scores and projects for children. FMQB recently spoke with John Linnell (vocals/keyboards/etc.) on the eve of the release of They Might Be Giants’ tenth full-length album, The Spine.
The Spine comes out tomorrow, and you’re also selling The Spine Surfs Alone EP online too. Why did you decide to put out the album and the EP as two separate releases?
You mean instead of putting it all on one record?
Yes.
I guess we felt like the stuff we put on The Spine was about what you’d want to listen to in one gulp. There’s a lot of material on The Spine Surfs Alone that is more for the people who already like us. This is very old fashioned I think, but we still think of the album as something that you listen to in order. It’s like a single thing. I realize that most people nowadays don’t listen to records like that, but we’re kinda stuck in the past in that way. The Spine Surfs Alone material is a little more difficult to listen to, I think. It’s stuff that we like a lot, but I don’t think we’d want to inflict it on everybody, as sort of the first wave of what they might hear by us. I love The Spine Surfs Alone, but I think a lot of that material is more challenging.
Is it only being sold online?
I’m not sure. At present you can get everything online. You can buy everything from us directly. You’ll be able to buy The Spine pretty much anywhere this week. The Spine Surfs Alone I imagine it’s gonna be marketed in the same way, but it’s an EP and it won’t be as prominently displayed as The Spine.
You guys put out a lot of EPs before, like the Why Does the Sun Shine? EP and Back To Skull, it reminded me of those, which is cool.
We always have extra material. We’re always doing a lot of work. Some of the stuff on The Spine Surfs Alone was stuff that we cooked up possibly for the album, and some of it is just material that we have in addition – not just to spill over, it’s the other thing, it’s more stuff.
That brings me to the next thing I was going to ask you about, which was the MP3s. You guys were one of the first bands that did something with MP3s on line. Way before iTunes you had the stuff on sale, like the Long Tall Weekend album.
At the time it didn’t seem that we were particularly ahead of the curve. There was already a company called eMusic. There was this thing in the air that eventually everything was going to start moving this way, so they came up with this proposal that we do an on-line MP3-only release. We had all this material that we thought would be good for this. It just felt different from something we put out as a hard CD, I don’t know why exactly. Obviously it was very undefined even then what an MP3-only release was supposed to be. One way of looking at it is it’s a more flexible medium. You can take the whole thing and then just pick out the parts you want and put those on your iPod or whatever. It’s not as of whole cloth; it’s more like a grab bag than what we think of as a CD.
Now you’re selling everything on your own site – in-house, eliminating the middle man basically?
Yes. It’s good new for us because we always say we got a bigger slice of the pie when we sell it ourselves. We’re trying to make it as efficient and pleasant a record-buying experience as you would have elsewhere. Yeah, it just seemed like an obvious thing. It’s not that complicated apparently to set it up.
As you said, people are just buying songs and buying bits and pieces and now you have basically your whole catalogue available that way. You were saying about people listening to the album straight through or not, I listen to things that way, but do you think the album is going the way of the dinosaur?
I think it is to the extent that we are. As long as we’re around thinking the way we do about stuff, we’ll probably keep promoting ideas that are maybe considered old-fashioned by younger people. We do a kind of music that’s already… I think, it already sounds like music by older people, to some extent. We’re really blessed with a young fan base. I don’t know how to account for that, because we haven’t changed what we do to try and get younger people interested. We keep getting high school and college-aged people coming to our shows. Even as we get older and older, the crowd still stays the same age – which is great and amazing. I think the older fans are still into it but they just don’t go out as much. Like I said, we established this thing that we do a long time ago, and we have kept doing it. I don’t think we were ever really in fashion in the first place, so maybe it’s not that we’re out of style now, we’re just continuing to do the thing that we’ve been doing all along. I feel like the way we think about what we’re doing is strongly rooted in the 1980’s, even as we’re perfectly happy to sell stuff on-line and do whatever it takes to keep the ball rolling on this thing. The way we think about songs is probably even more old-fashioned than that. John and I were influenced by not just The Beatles but sort of popular song before that. That probably has the biggest impact on the way we think about music, of anything. The people who think that way are mostly our age or older.
What makes you decide on when you want to actually put out a song? For example, "Thunderbird" is on here and that’s an old fan-favorite. I think I first heard it four or five years ago.
It’s one of the ones that didn’t make it onto Mink Car, but it was beloved enough that we kept it in the show and we felt that it deserved to be on a record. There’s always a song on every record, at least one, that’s from a few records back, from the era of several years earlier that hangs around. I’m very happy with the version that wound up on The Spine of "Thunderbird." It was good that it had all that time for us to think about it.
How did you guys get involved with Homestar Runner?
It was sort of this gradual thing where, at some point, somebody I knew said that he worked with somebody who was friends with those guys and had said, "Oh yeah, those guys like you; like that band that you work with." So I got wind of the idea that maybe they were already sympathetic to what we were doing. I sent them a fan letter to their regular e-mail address, and I got this very nice reply from Matt, one of the brothers, and we started talking about stuff we thought we could do together. We started with writing music for one of their Strong Bad e-mails. Then they came to New York so we spent an afternoon playing music along with the Homestar puppet. That’s where the ‘puppet jams’ came from. It was pretty much we were just making stuff up on the spot. But we also cooked up this idea that we were going to make a video with them, and that is finished.
It’s for "Experimental Film," right?
Yeah, and it’s done. We haven’t figured out we’re going to… basically we have the Flash version which we can put up on-line, and we also have a video of it which, I suppose, we’re going to be using to promote the album. The Flash version in some ways is cooler because it’s got their usual Easter eggs inside. The visual part of the video is done. I’m not sure if they’ve finished the other parts, the Easter eggy stuff. That may be why that’s not done. They’ve already sent us the DV of the video which we’re sending to promote the thing in Britain.
So hopefully it’ll be on MTV Europe?
We’ll see, I don’t know. I’m not even sure if that’s the proper place for it, but we’ll see how it gets used. We’ll see what’s appropriate.
Is it done in their style?
It is 100-percent their style. It stars Strong Sad. He’s the main character in the video. It’s kinda like he’s the guy making the film and then The Cheat comes in and he’s making his film. It’s a little bit abstract but that’s the basic idea.
Can you tell me about the Move On CD? I know Flansburgh is the mastermind behind it.
He’s the one who was corralling everybody originally. Part of the thing that was weird for us was that it sort of blew up. There was a point where it seemed like it started being taken out of John’s hands. Other people who were sort of had like more clout in the music industry and wanted to take it away and make it something else. But, I think it’s still essentially John’s project. It’s just one of those things where a lot of big, big players started pig-piling on the thing and then it starts to become this out-of-control thing. There was a point where a lot of bands very late in the game started saying they wanted to be part of it, and it was pretty much already like a full CD.
The track listing has about half my favorite bands on it. I know friends of yours are involved… Mike Doughty and Fountains of Wayne...
Yeah, it’s a really good thing. Everybody felt good about doing it. It just seems like a really good cause and it’s good for right now. There’s a general sentiment amongst musicians we know that it’s time for a regime change. I think that was a way to express that.
I think that a lot of people feel frustrated that there isn’t an easy way to… there is something irritating about artists and performers who stand on a soapbox and start yelling about how things are supposed to be. The nice thing about the Move On thing is that was a little simpler than that, it’s like supporting an organization that has a more general attitude that’s not very strident or shrill. They have this sort of simple agenda. That appealed to everybody because it wasn’t like some…I think people are put off by this extreme, us versus them, attitude. Things are extremely polarized now. We’re in a situation where everybody feels very, very strongly about the way… one way or the other about the way the government… the way politics are going in the country. I’m sort of feeling like now, what’s going to happen if Kerry wins? Where will the dust settle after that? I’m keenly interested in Bush leaving office but, on the other hand, I don’t know whether all our problems are going to be solved if and when that happens.
Speaking of politics, how do you feel about the Democrats having a John & John ticket this year? They’re stealing your gimmick!
We’ve been trying to get somebody to exploit that, and so far we haven’t thought of a single thing. Can’t figure it out.
Tell me about the song you put on the CD. It’s an 1800’s campaign song?
Yes. It’s a very early campaign song that was written to support the candidacy of William Henry Harrison who was running against Martin Van Buren. It’s a really funny song because, apparently, this is what I’ve read about that time… is that William Henry Harrison was one of these early people who was trying to present himself as a man of the people. Part of the idea was he was supposedly a frontiersman and he was an Indian fighter, and people liked that kind of stuff back then. What they were not obviously tuned into was the fact that he came from this really wealthy family, and he was just as much of a political insider as Van Buren, if not more so. In fact, I think Van Buren came from a more humble background, but they sort of painted Van Buren as the easterner with the connections, etc. It was all just a big lie, basically.
Sounds a little like this year.
The truth is, if you look at the last bunch of elections we’ve had, pretty much everybody who runs for president, except for Ralph Nader, is born rich. That’s who you get basically. Or has a lot of money… not born rich.
Any other cool multi-media stuff in the pipeline?
Yes, thank you for asking. On The Spine Surfs Alone EP, and I don’t think this has been advertised very widely, there’s a Flash video that I made in my spare time. I taught myself Flash last year and it’s really humble. It’s like my very, very humble crude drawing style applied to Flash video for one of the songs that’s on the EP. And, I’m just finishing up another one while we’re on the road, and we’re going to put that one up on the site. They’re funny and kind of sweet but, from a technical standpoint, there’s a reason why I play in a band. It’s a fun thing for me to do because I can do it my laptop while I’m on the road. Flash is really easy, in case anybody doesn’t already know that. It’s real easy to make funny little cartoons with Flash, and make a video for your song using Flash. That’s basically what I’ve been doing.
Any other TV work or stuff for kids?
We are doing this one other thing which will be out, I think, in the beginning of next year. It’s actually a fairly major thing which is a Disney project that will teach kids, or theoretically will teach kids, about the alphabet. It’s a bunch of songs about the alphabet with videos. It’s a DVD and it has cartoons and live video puppets, things like that that goes along with these many, many songs that John and I have written about the alphabet. I can’t believe how many songs we could actually bring ourselves to write about the alphabet, but it’s a lot. That’ll be a good thing. It’s almost an hour’s worth of programming on a DVD. If you have a four-year-old or if you just want a refresher course on the alphabet, it’s one to pick up.