You can count on your prosthetic forehead the number of pop bands that could have made "The Mesopotamians," a sugary pop song about Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal and Gilgamesh traveling around as a touring band in an Econoline van.
They Might Be Giants find inspiration where other pop/rock acts fail to look. The rock staples of cars and girls and love are often replaced by geography, history or something like a nightlight. Though sometimes geography, history and nightlights are just a canvas for a love song. John Flansburgh (singer-guitarist) and John Linnell (accordion, keys, saxophone, etc.) -- who started TMBG in Brooklyn, N.Y., more than 25 years ago -- are aware that unique can lead to novelty. They know where the borderline is for precious, and they choose not to cross it.
Instead of novelty, these Giants have been savvy self-marketers, and technological progressives, which has endeared them to a very dedicated audience. But the Johns have also been smart songwriters; smart beyond being heady. A quarter century in, the Giants are still turning out arena-ready melodies, seemingly with no effort. The two Johns didn't reinvent the wheel so much as find a new vehicle for the wheel to transport. So you get a bad love song with a nerdy little twist, such as "Contrecoup," which like "The Mesopotamians" is on their latest album, The Else. Other times they'll serve up musical biographies of presidents or artists. Rarely do they appear on police blotters. Their punk-rock roots inform their songs, not their doings.
The band is still plugging The Else, though this month the Giants also released their third kids album, Here Come the 123s. John Linnell talks about the adult fare, kids fare, misinformation and misinterpretations that They Might Be Giants create, spread and inspire.
There were a ton of dates on this tour. Has touring changed since the good old days?
It's very similar to the way it was in the beginning. But we've changed a little bit. It's pretty much about whether you can put up with living on a bus. I have my own ways of making productive use of lot of otherwise useless time.
The thing that's odd about being in this band, it is hard work, but the work part of being in a touring band is only a few hours in the day. There's a lot of time traveling and a lot of time waiting around. So I have a lot of hobbies to take up my time. I have a wife and kid at home, so I really prefer to be home. But I still like traveling. I still like performing. And I think our show is as interesting or more so now than in the not-very-long-ago. We like doing the shows; I just wish there was a way to teleport to them.
Does it hurt more to tour in your 40s than it did in your 20s?
Oh yeah. When you pass 40 it's definitely harder. (Laughs.) I take a lot of naps. I'm a very big booster for taking naps. Especially for people my age. It makes the waking part of the day more productive.
Are you guys supposed to be ospreys on the cover of The Else? The osprey is my favorite bird.
Really? Hmm. Well, I should clear up two things. One, that's not us. It's a couple of attractive young men who were friends of ours and of the photographer's. They were our models. And I guess you'd have to speak with Marcel Dzama, who did the costumes and the photography, about what they are. My sense is they're sort of snowmen. The main thing is, in keeping with an album called The Else, there needs to be something mysterious about the whole thing.
I was just about to say, it always seemed there was some dark stuff amid the buoyant melodies in Giants songs. That title, The Else, kind of scares me.
I'm sorry to hear that.
Well, it doesn't keep me awake at night. But you don't think it has an ominous tone?
Oh sure, just those two words together are a little strange. (Laughs.) Well, you know, there is something a little nightmarish about the cover and all that. I find it interesting and pleasing. I guess it is pretty creepy. I like mystery and, like you said, there are always some dark elements in what we do.
I heard it described as a straightforward album, but it strikes me as a little more aggressive than previous Giants albums.
Yeah, I don't know whether straightforwardness is a quality that we ever exactly cultivated. I do hope what we do is comprehensible. The simplest way of putting it is what you see is what you get. There's never been some hidden meaning to it. I don't feel our music requires decoding. So, in that sense, it's straightforward. But I do think this one's creepier. What's the word you said? Aggressive. John called it our least cuddly record. Maybe that's a response to having done two records at once. We also recorded another kids album. Maybe we siphoned the friendlier music to the kids album, and the adult stuff is unalloyed adult material. (Pause.) I don't mean that in the pornographic sense. But in the They Might Be Giants sense.
Are you guys reliable narrators? Should fans trust all the scientific and historical stuff on a Giants album?
It depends. (Laughs.) We try to make it clear when it's reliable. Sometimes, even at the kids shows, we'll indicate that everything is made up and kids should not trust it. For example, the song about James Ensor is a personal biography that John wrote about the artist. It's all real, this really was a guy, and all these things happened to him. It's told from a subjective viewpoint, but it's all factual. Then there are songs like "Purple Toupee," which are deliberately nonsensical takes on history, which I hope is clear. So, yeah, obviously there are instances with unreliable narrators who aren't us. People wouldn't confuse a character in a novel with an author, but I think people have a harder time with that in songs.
Songwriters want to tell a story, but they like that device of saying, "It's not me." Even Sheryl Crow, I think I heard her say something like, "This isn't me singing 'All I want to do is have some fun.' "
I like the way you guys sound with the Dust Brothers. Were you happy with the collaboration?
I think the result is good; we're happy with the way it turned out. And it was a nice experience with them hanging out. We discovered that they like to have long lunch breaks. So a lot of delicious food was eaten over the course of it. But working with them, I have to say, was kind of difficult for us. We work really differently. They tend to work very slowly. We're spoiled because we have a very clear understanding of one another. We don't have to explain stuff to one another. John and I can speak in shorthand because we've known each other so long. . . . But with the Dust Brothers there were definitely points where we were staring at each other thinking, "What are you thinking? What's the big idea?"
That can be fruitful because we wind up doing stuff we never would've thought of. We solve problems we don't even think about. So it was definitely challenging and a lot of work. But it forced us to do something completely new. I'm happy with The Else. And a lot of people have said they like it like they like what we've done in the past. They said it leapfrogs over recent work in their estimation.
"Contrecoup" is one of my favorites of the new batch. Have either of you ever suffered a contrecoup?
No, we haven't. I'll tell you about that song. It was an assignment from a lexicographer that we put together for a radio show. This woman, Erin McKean, she's the editor of the Oxford American Dictionary. She's a frequent guest on the Next Big Thing show (on New York public radio). She had various artists incorporate words into their work that she chooses. They're words she believes are about to completely fall out of use, and she wants to rescue them. She gave us three words, and contrecoup was one of them. In a way it was a novelty, but I thought it came out well. It didn't seem as cheap as it was supposed to be.
Does it seem odd to be called a college band after 25 years? My father would've cut me off long before 25 years of college.
Yeah (laughs), we didn't know what college rock was. We were unaware there was such a thing. Until we landed on the college charts, it wasn't something we worried about. But then it became this genre. And you'd play in college towns. It wasn't really a choice. The goal wasn't to become a college band. It was just an available gig. Like bands that have success in Japan. It wasn't the original idea, but it became, in a way, an easy gig.
Are you guys big in Japan?
We are probably not big in Japan right now. We were never big in Japan, actually, but we did play in Japan in the '90s. It's an expensive place to get to. Expensive to just be there. But you also got paid handsomely.
I've spent too much time thinking about "We Want a Rock." Is it about political oppression? Or is it just about rocks, string and foreheads?
Uh, there's a little bit of stream of consciousness to writing that one. This sounds really abstract, but in order to begin wrapping a piece of string around itself, you need something to start with. Like a rock. I guess you can make a ball of string starting from nothing if you just make a tiny loop at the end of the string. But it seems theoretically impossible. It's a metaphor for getting started.
Oh. See, I'd allowed myself to see the string people as blue-collar workers and the forehead people as intellectuals, and you guys as going after political forces that oppress the former and ridicule the latter.
(Pause. Laughs.) Well, that's fine, too. I can't disagree with such a wonderful interpretation. But I'm afraid that's not what was in my head. It was just a general set of loose metaphors. You know, where do you begin? It's a funny conceit, saying everyone has this problem when it's really about the problem of the person singing about wanting a prosthetic forehead. It's hard to make the argument that everybody wants one. You're enlisting everyone else.
Sort of like an unreliable narrator.
Yes, it could be a very unreliable narrator.
I bet you get weird interpretations with a lot of your songs.
Yes. Yes, we do.
You guys never really fell into "a thing." Did you ever want to be part of a thing?
Yeah, I think we did. We were kind of part of a thing in a very loose way in early to mid-'80s, playing in the East Village a lot.
Punk rock had more or less folded up its tent and stopped being a scene, which was an enormous disappointment. What appeared in its place was this performing-arts scene. People coming to see Karen Finley also seemed to like and appreciate what we were doing. So that became our scene. But if anybody bothered to write a history of the East Village in the '80s, I don't know if we'd be considered part of it. But it was fun and friendly, with no real single idea running it. It wasn't really a genre so much. More like a grab bag that hung together. Which was nice for us.
A friend and I bicker, so could you cast a deciding vote between Lincoln and Flood?
Oh no, I don't have a favorite. There's such different flavors, I don't think of one leaning over the other. It's like picking a favorite child. The one I like more in the moment is generally the one I've listened to the least at any given time. It's always fun to come back to something you haven't heard in a while. We do go back because we'll decide to relearn an old song. It starts as a chore but becomes an unexpected pleasure. We find ideas we put on records that we forgot about.
I think it's a myth, but I once heard Prince listens only to Prince.
(Laughs.) Wow, really? Do you think Prince influences Prince? I don't know, that would be weird. I can't imagine you can make new music without listening to something other than your own. Maybe he mostly listens to Prince.
If you had to be stranded on a spaceship or a schooner, which would it be?
Hmm, and you'd never get to land? Wow, jeez. Either one, they both sound pretty bad. I guess it depends on the spaceship. I might say spaceship because I wouldn't want to get scurvy. But I suppose that could happen on the spaceship, too, if you didn't get the right nutrition.
If, like Chopin, you could have your body and heart buried in two different places, where would they be?
Hmm, where would they go? I don't know. Heart and body. I'd have to think about that one. It might be nice to be cremated and spread into the ocean. Then you're everywhere.
Do you have a favorite band whose name is a full sentence?
Jeez. There aren't a lot of them, are there?
I don't think so. Gene Loves Jezebel comes to mind.
Yes, though they were never one of my favorites. There are a lot that are close, but they're just missing a verb. There were a lot of great names in the late '70s and early '80s, a lot of different-type names as bands were straining against convention. That's when we came up with our name. A lot of times my favorite band names aren't necessarily my favorite bands. And a lot of times the great bands have not-very-interesting names. I think my favorite is still the Grateful Dead, even though I've never been a fan of their music. Go figure.