John Linnell and John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants have been making music for 30 years, and they still haven't run out of things to say. While other bands with that kind of longevity just go through the motions and secretly hate one another, the Johns somehow manage to get along and keep making good records.
Their 15th record, Join Us, has been three years in the making. During that time, They Might Be Giants have been putting out wildly successful kids' albums, and Join Us marks their return to "adult" rock n' roll.
We were lucky enough to spend some time on the phone with John Linnell, trying to figure out what this record is all about. It turns out that after 30 years, a band can just make music without having to explain themselves. Join Us is a They Might Be Giants record: you'll either get it, or you won't, and Linnell is totally okay with that.
Join Us is out July 19th.
The narrative around this album so far seems to be about going back to your original sound. That seems kind of strange for a band that's always been about trying new things.
I would say that we're very intuitive when we're working, so we don't have this charter that says we're going to go back to our original plan or something like that. I'm not even sure who makes up the narrative at this point. We did a set of interviews for the press release, and [the writer] was like, "What's the story? How are we going to talk about this Album #15? What can you say that you didn't say about the last one?"
I'd say that we mostly have the luxury of not having to say what the hell it is we're doing, what's different about the new project, y'know. That's how we work. The chatter is after the fact.
I guess it always feels like we're, in some sense, trying to get back to the original impulse, however we are approaching it formally. We're trying to make music from scratch, you know.
This album, for example, Join Us, when we started recording, there wasn't a notion of it being a particular kind of album. We obviously are changing all the time in ways that we're not necessarily even controlling. Just getting older and having your perspective change is a way of evolving.
I'm sorry. I'm kind of coming up with excuses for why I can't explain what the theme of the new album is.
Flansburgh said in an interview that he felt The Else was "too aggressive" and that you guys were in a more natural place with Join Us. Do you agree with that?
I think he's right about The Else. It was something we noticed while we were making it. I said something along the lines of "This is the least cuddly record we've ever made." But again, that wasn't something we planned out.
Here are some observations I've made about this one: I think Flansburgh is really opening up his lyric writing in a way that -- I mean, he's had songs in that direction in the past, but his lyric writing on this album -- can I say record, or does it just sound like I'm 80 years old? -- his lyrics are much more elliptical and free-associative in a very interesting way. He's freed himself up in a very cool way in his lyric writing.
That's always seemed like your department.
That's true. I think in the past, my lyrics have been the ones that have been the least concrete and the most obtuse. It's kind of interesting to me to see John writing stuff like -- well, he's not doing the same thing I have done. He's coming up with his own language and style, and it's really good.
I recently read about a study that analyzed a bunch of pop lyrics and decided that music is more self-centered and aggressive now --
Oh, I saw that. Yeah, yeah. I was kind of amazed at the conclusion they drew. Not only did they say that statistically the words "I" and "me" showed up in lyrics, but they said that this proves that people are more self-centered than they used to be. That's kind of a big leap.
It would be kind of like saying that because there are a lot more slasher films, people are more homicidal than they used to be. It's the same kind of leap, I think, to go from the art, the artifice to saying "this is the way people are living their lives now, and this is the way they think now." I think that's a huge mistake. I think it's a huge fallacy. Lyric writing is very often mistakenly thought to be autobiographical, and in our case, that's the biggest mistake of all.
Do you think your lyrics have moved in one direction or another over time -- more inward-looking or more outward-facing?
Mine personally, as opposed to John's? I'm interesting in how his lyrics have changed. I have less to say about my own lyric writing, because I'm kind of inside of it. I think it's a cliche about getting older, but I feel more comfortable with the formal parts of it. I've written a lot of songs, so I kind of know the ropes in some sense. Nothing to say about the quality of it, but I know how it works. I wouldn't say I've gotten more personal, though. We've always had the notion that the most interesting thing you can write about is something in your imagination. Real life and autobiography, at least for us, doesn't hold a candle to stuff you can just make up.
Do you worry about the current generation of kids being more self-centered? You're raising a kid now, so are you at all alarmed by this internet-enabled exhibitionist phase people seem to be going through?
I'd be worried generally about kids being too self-involved and not thoughtful. I think honestly it's a stage of growing up. Babies are incredibly self-involved, children less so, and you hope for your own kids that as they get older, they get more interested in other people and more concerned about other people. It keys into politics. The political position that is self-interested is kind of a more childish position. When you start worrying about other people and realizing that your fate is tied to the fate of those around you, that's a more grown-up attitude. That's what I want for the culture as a whole. That's what I want for the political endgame: for people to care about each other.
Are there things that you'll try now, musically or just in life, that you wouldn't when you were younger? Or do you think it's kind of gone the other way, where you're ...
... less comfortable.
Yeah!
I dunno. I think John already said this. We are essentially uncomfortable people, in a certain way. But maybe we're more comfortable with being uncomfortable, because we realize that's what we're like. And we're not in high school anymore, so it's not such a problem socially.
I'd say there are things we tried in the past few years that we were nervous about early on, and at a certain point, we kind of realized it was good to get more other people involved and we felt less like we were diluting the project. We made a bunch of records with just us and a producer, and then we started having a regular band involved, and we've given more responsibility to the other guys. We've worked with producers who took more extreme liberties with what we were doing. We'd have a song and the producer would say, "Let's completely change that around." I think we're more comfortable with that now than we ever were back in the day.
Having said that, we didn't do a lot of that on this new record. We produced it ourselves. We worked very, very slowly. This is probably the slowest we've ever worked on something. Maybe that's something that distinguishes it.
You started writing this in 2008?
Something like that. It's been a number of years. We've been doing other stuff, but we started recording some of these tracks a few years ago. This has been our Chinese Democracy.
There's that saying about the sophomore slump, and how first albums are always better because you have forever to write them. Is taking a few years like doing that first album over again?
Yes, exactly. That's a great peg. This is our second first album.
I like that. It doesn't seem like you're too weighed down by having made 14 other records, though. Do you feel like that's an advantage when you write a new album?
I think that one great advantage is that we're not trying to define who we are. At this point, people are either okay with it or they're not interested in it. Even people who are finding out about us for the first time quickly learn that we have this long history, so what we're doing is kind of settled in some sense. We at least are perceived to know what we're doing.
A lot of bands that've been around as long as you guys have seem to be phoning it in at this point, but your albums haven't really dropped in quality over the years ...
There's something nice about bands that are nervous. I think our first album sounds very nervous. We probably didn't feel very confident, and we were worried that people wouldn't like it. That's not bad, y'know? It's good to worry about what other people think. I would say and hope that we're still somewhat worried and we don't want people to hate us.
One of the reasons we took so long to make this is that we did write a lot of songs, and sift through them and reject a lot of them because we feel like we don't want the standards to drop.
It seems like Flansburgh was champing at the bit to get back to making the "adult" albums, and he just wanted to rock out and play loud. Were you on the same page on that?
Probably just in terms of volume, he's more comfortable playing loud as a natural thing. For me, I like loud volume, but I can also take it or leave it. The thing with the children's thing was not so much about the volume for me as whenever we had to be at all self-conscious,which was surprisingly not that often. But I feel like we work best when we're not really thinking too hard about who it's for. Obviously, with the kids thing, you do have to worry about who it's for.
I think we were happy to make these records where some of it was going to go over the kids' heads, and the happy result of that is that some of the kids get things that you don't expect them to get. They're smarter than you think. We tried not to filter that we were trying to filter too much.
What amazes me is that kids are attracted to so many things. It's actually the adults who have the problem with challenging material. Kids are actually interested in it.
It reminds me of the whole Rebecca Black phenomenon, where you have this manufactured pop ...
About half the interest in her is negative, right? It's a weird phenomenon of actually exciting a lot of hatred.
Yeah, exactly! But at a certain point, it becomes unironic. Artists have gone on tour and covered this song, and I can't tell if they're kidding ...
That's a very contemporary problem. They can't remember if they're being ironic. The first thing I ever heard about it was that my son and his friends all hated the song, and it was kind of interest to them because they hated it. It was getting negative attention.
Kids are smart, though. It's a completely meaningless song, and they get that.
Oh yeah. I think the emptiness of lyrics like "Today is Friday and tomorrow is Saturday" just had this poker face quality, this almost deadpan quality. Like, "Really? That's your thesis?"
Ha! Yeah. But going back to your new album, are there any songs you're particularly excited about? "Can't Keep Johnny Down" is a great single.
Thanks. You know, it's a very mixed-up record in the best possible sense. There's some possibly misguided ideas that we just pursued to the bitter end. For example, there's one song where the entire band sped up a substantial amount, and the vocal is at regular speed. Some of the people we played it for were like, "Those drums sound a little thin." They didn't get the point of it, so I don't know if that requires an explanation that we did this on purpose.
It's a sound that I like. I always like a narrow canvas. There's so much that has these crazy low ends and super-high high ends. That's one track.
There's another track on the record where there's one song in the left channel and another song in the right channel, and they go together in sort of an old-fashioned way. Almost like a showtune or something. That's called "Spoiler Alert."
Talking about extreme high and low ends reminds me of those remastered Rolling Stones albums. And by remastered I mean "completely ruined."
So they basically just compressed the shit out of it, trying to make it sound more contemporary?
Yeah, so it's good that someone's thinking about these things, instead of just turning everything up.
I definitely think there's a default position that is tyrannical. I would say we're just as proud as anybody to go fall in line with "This is what sounds good, so we'll go with that." But when you hear somebody who takes the trouble to look at it a different way and come up with a completely differently approach, it's refreshing. You can't believe how sheeplike the overall culture can be. Everything sounds like everything else. It is a little depressing.
Have you heard anything like that recently?
No, I'm just so out of it all the time. Most of the stuff I like, I'm like, "I've just discovered this great thing," and everybody else already knows about it, inevitably. I heard Das Racist recently. I really like their music.
The other day, I heard a really amazing song and thought it was from a great new band ... turns out it was an old XTC track. Whoops.
Exactly. In some ways it's kind of a pleasure when you think something's new, because you realize it could be new. You could do this now and it would sound really fresh. Flansburgh was talking about hearing this Bob Dylan song, "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" -- I think it's on Blonde on Blonde -- and he's thinking, "Is this a new Dylan track? This sounds unbelievable." Because he'd never heard the song before. It makes you think you could have something new that sounds as fresh as that.
Yeah, absolutely! So, what are you reading right now?
Well, my wife and I have been on a Russian novel kick, so I'm a little ways into this version of The Brothers Karamazov. It's a weird translation, it's not the current translation that everybody likes now. This is a guy named David McDuff. It's an interesting, wacky version of The Brothers K.
And I just read Nicholson Baker's U & I, which came out twenty years ago. It's about his intense, almost stalker-like obsession with John Updike. He talks about how he wants to be John Updike's friend, even though there's no real basis for a friendship there. It's a very funny book, because it's this intensely confessional-sounding story, where he's admitting to this embarrassing, almost slavish interest in this other writer. It really isn't clear whether this is real or whether he's completely bullshitting.