The songwriting team of John Linnell and John Flansburgh--better known as They Might Be Giants--has produced some of the most unique, intelligent, and cultishly loved music of the past two decades. Having recorded multiple albums for both children and adults, their often surreal lyrics blur the line between childhood and adulthood, encouraging the listener to take a second look at the world they think they know.
On the eve of a massive tour to support their new album Nanobots, Linnell spoke with Buzzine's Jesse Livingston about self-doubt, visual aids, bizarre true-life stories, the aim of songwriting, and the strange impulse to reproduce oneself.
Join Us was your first album for adults in about four years. It was very well-received by both critics and fans. Did the success of that album inspire you to release Nanobots relatively soon after?
I don't know, actually. I don't think so. I think it was more intimidating. We spent a long time making Join Us. I think we were mainly worried that we were not gonna reproduce the high standard of that one. We took less time to make Nanobots, but it was a more concentrated working schedule. We weren't going off on tour in the middle of trying to record it.
Were you spending more time in the studio writing the songs?
Well, we never write in the studio. We're way too uptight for that. We try and demo everything out ahead of time, and we usually have the song form and most of the basic ideas completely together when we submit it to the other musicians for them to come up with the "band version"--which is then what we go in and record. We make demos and email them to the guys before the session. There are some decisions that get made in the studio about the arrangement, but the songs are... Well, I should say that often we don't finish the lyrics until afterwards, and that's kind of a bad habit that we've gotten into over the years. We realize that since the vocals are gonna go on last, and there's a scratch vocal that everyone's playing along to, we have the luxury of changing the lyrics--improving on them, ideally.
So, you're recording the demos at home, yourselves?
That's right. We each have little home setups--as I think everyone in the world does at this point, right?
Right. Which song are you happiest with this time around?
Hmm. I'll have to look at the album to answer that. I mean, generally, I'm very pessimistic when we're in the process of recording. I always feel like we're failing. [Laughs] And that's been the case with every album we've ever made. When we're in the midst of it, I'll have this dark feeling that we've lost it, and that everyone's gonna see that it's just not happening. By the time we're done, I'm usually starting to cheer up. When I'm listening to the stuff with a little bit of distance, I start to feel like it's not so terrible.
I think there's a thing where we're so immersed in what we're doing that it's very difficult to even hear it anymore. When you've been working on it for a long time, you stop hearing what you liked about your idea in the first place. That's just an unfortunate aspect of doing this kind of work. When you're recording, you tend to listen to the song over and over again until it's hard to hear what ideas you put into it.
Speaking of dark feelings, there seems to be a theme running through your songs about the individual struggling to overcome mental illness or paranoia or a depressive view of the world. I'm thinking of lines like, "I am both the bag and the boxing glove," or the song "Black Ops." Do you see that as a theme for this particular album?
No, I would say that we just apply our incredibly grim worldview pretty much universally. But, you know, you might say that this is kind of a routine for us: we gravitate towards dark lyrics or lyrics that are addressing something unpleasant, and then the melodies are sort of fun and cheerful. I don't know why, but that contrast has always appealed to us--the idea that you can deliver this message with a pleasant melody, and it goes down a lot easier, I guess.
Do you see music as a way for people to overcome depression? Do you feel that you're doing a moral duty by writing songs that encourage people to cheer up?
No. No, I don't think that what we do is supposed to be good for you. It's an expression of something we like. We're trying to do songs that we would like--that we as consumers would be into. I would say that's the universal rule that we've applied. We don't have any other more specific objective in mind.
Just out of curiosity, is the song "Nanobots" about the theory of the Technological Singularity - the scenario where artificial intelligences start building their own intelligences and everything gets out of control.
Oh, right, right. Well, in a way it is. I'll tell you what it's really about: it's about reproducing, which is always on my mind because I have a fourteen-year-old. On the one hand it seems like this perfectly natural thing to have children, and on the other hand there's something so odd about that as a kind of behavior. You could almost say that's all that humans and other animals have been doing all this time, is just making more of ourselves. And it's not at all clear what the point of any of that is. But it's a process that brings up this notion of how much control you have, because--I think this is the cliche with nanotechnology--is that once you get it going, it just takes over and has a mind of its own, and you don't have any control anymore. Which is very similar to the experience of having kids.
You released multiple videos for the last album. How important is it to you and to John Flansburgh to make videos for the songs?
Well, they're really great promotional tools. There's something weirdly compelling about seeing stuff happen while you're listening to music. We learned that pretty early on. I think we were a little resistant to it at first. We were thinking, Why can't people just listen to songs? Why does there have to be a video? because it would inevitably kind of alter the original thought that we had. We were thinking that the pure song is somehow superior to this thing where there's... Of course, this was the Eighties, so whatever song it was would then have a woman with an asymmetrical hairdo and shoulder pads dancing around with dramatic lighting. We thought, How does that help us enjoy this song?
But I have to credit John Flansburgh with being very thoughtful about these kinds of choices. He manages to find animators mainly who do really interesting stuff--visual counterparts for the songs. I really do love David Cowles' videos that he's done for us, and a number of other people who've just come up with these great ideas that I think really enhance the song. I was very, very impressed with the video for "Meet the Elements." I thought it made it so much more interesting. And similarly with "The Mesopotamians." So, I'm all for it, personally. If you can do it right, it actually really does help.
Are you working on any videos for Nanobots at the moment?
Yes we are. I'm not involved in the process of making them. I'm just the songwriter. But we're getting some of the same geniuses that have done stuff in the past, and we'll see what they've cooked up for us very soon.
On a personal note, the first rock'n'roll cassette I ever bought was Flood, and it was after I saw "Particle Man" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" on the show Tiny Toon Adventures. You guys have talked about how you almost became a children's band for a while, and it seems like even back then your music was appealing to kids. First of all, do you remember how that episode came about?
Yeah. There wasn't any real work on our part. We were contacted by this production company that said, "We're making this thing that's kind of based on the Looney Tunes characters," and they wanted to use two of our songs. They were going to be featured pretty prominently. They just gave us a check. We didn't have to really discuss it with them. We weren't concerned that our artistic intentions were being violated in any way. They were just using our songs for their cartoon, and that seemed perfectly fine. Of course, we were really surprised and pleased at how influential those two cartoons turned out to be. We made a lot of fans who were probably around your age. It was like a great farming system for future fans.
So, did you ever find out how they first heard your music?
I don't know. No, I don't know that story. I mean, Flood was kind of a big college record, so I imagine there were people at that time who were entering production houses as interns who were fans of ours because we were big on the college campuses. And that's continued to be a great feeding system for us. We still get young people who wanna do something with our music. I mean, some of them are not so young anymore. [Laughs]
As a songwriter, do you see that much of a difference between your kids' songs and your adult songs? Is the process of writing them very different?
Well, there's one basic difference, which is that [in the kids' songs] we're not at liberty to swear or dwell on a lot of those depressing topics we were talking about--death and divorce and things like that. But other than that, yes, I do think that in some ways we do take a similar spirit to the kids' music. We don't really censor ourselves... A lot of the kids' projects we've done have been ostensibly educational, but we always think of them as entertainment for kids. The education is just kind of a smokescreen, because I think kids are gonna learn the alphabet no matter what.
As far as the adult songs go--I know you've said the song "Can't Keep Johnny Down" is not about you or John Flansburgh specifically, but you guys do have a lot of songs that reflect a misanthropic point of view. As successful music stars, do you guys still feel misanthropic in your daily lives?
I wouldn't say that. I mean, I hate the idea that that's who I am. We're trying to write interesting songs. You try and pick up the rock with the weird, ugly thing underneath it to make the song have some juice, I would say. And I don't go around hating humanity. Absolutely not. I mostly like people.
The song "Can't Keep Johnny Down" is actually a reflection of certain memories of people I've run into. There really was a guy who flipped off my wife after she politely was telling him that his gas tank was open on his car. It was really a startling, weird experience. It had nothing to do with our worldview whatsoever. We pulled up alongside him, and she said, "You know, your gas tank's open," and the guy started swearing at her, and she was like, "No, no, no! I'm just trying to explain that your gas tank is open!" [Laughs] And then, they guy's wife leaned over past him--past the driver--and told us to f*ck off! It was a really shocking, weird experience. So, I don't know. Things like that are very memorable, and you want to kind of unpack them in some way. I think that's partly what motivates putting that kind of stuff into song lyrics. It's so weird. I still don't know what that was all about.
Do you feel like you're often just trying to explore the weirdness of human beings in the songs?
Sure. Absolutely, yeah. "Explore the weirdness of human beings."
Do you and John Flansburgh ever compete to see who can write a weirder song?
No, we're not about being weird in particular. I think that we're trying to say something that's true. You're trying to get at something that everybody recognizes and identifies with, but say something original. That's the job. You don't wanna keep retreading cliches--lyrical or musical cliches. You're trying to be interesting, and there's a lot of different ways to do that. But, yeah, I wouldn't say the idea is to be weirdos.
Wow, Let’s leave that there.... You've been pioneers of self-releasing your music. Do you feel more pressure to meet deadlines now that you're self-employed?
Ah... no! [Laughs] I would say we feel less pressure! But we still feel some pressure. What happens is, we start making a claim about when the album is gonna come out, even though we're the ones creating the deadline for ourselves, and then at a certain point the publicist and the booking agent and everybody else is behaving as if that's when it's really gonna happen. So, then we kind of have to respect the date that we announced. In other words, it's a kind of self-imposed pressure.
Your live shows are always very energetic and loud, and there are always entertaining stunts like the rhythm stick and the sound guy beard tally and the bit where you spin the radio dial. Do you have any new stunts in store for the upcoming shows?
Yeah, we will, but I'm not gonna give them away. We're gonna bring the puppet theater out again. We had the little video camera with puppets as part of the show last year, and we're gonna continue that. We've got new songs for the puppets. And there'll be some other stuff. It'll definitely be an entertaining show.
You have about fifty shows booked across the US in the coming months, starting at the Port City Music Hall in Portland on February 27th (20130 Being known for unique live performances, the emotional and physical content of the show must get a little draining sometimes, especially on a long tour. Do you ever struggle to stay sane on tour?
Yes. It's hard work. But we've discovered the power of taking naps. Early on, we discovered the incredibly useful medicinal qualities of coffee for touring--but now we're pairing that with... I think everybody in the band now takes naps during the day, 'cause we're gettin' old, y'know? So, that's been terrific, actually. You take a nap, and you wake up, and you feel like a new person…