They Might Be Giants have been putting out their own brand of alternate rock for over 30 years. John Linnell from the band said that the reason for the band’s longevity was that they enjoyed what they did. “I think some young bands are disappointed early on to find out that after the success, really playing, recording, and touring still remains a job! [If you] find it wasn’t glamorous enough you’d be frustrated and want to quit”, said John. “I think with us we were already well into our 20s when we started, we started having some success doing this when we were in our late 20s. I don’t think we had any illusions about the glamor of what we were doing. I think we just really liked the job. We liked writing, singing, performing and recording it all. Maybe it was because we didn’t have any illusions about it to be shattered and now we’ve been doing it for a while we are very clear about what the job is and we like it.”
The band have just released their 16th record, however John said that it’s not an easy task to keep coming up with new material. “I would say it gets harder and harder. We don’t want to lower our standard, we don’t want to make anything inferior to what we’ve done. We don’t want to repeat ourselves. We have to come up with new material and after having so many albums it gets increasingly difficult to come up with something that doesn’t sound like something we’ve already done. So it’s a big challenge and it’s a lot of work but we like the challenge and we like the work. We’re getting a lot of encouragement at the moment from the critics and the audience which is amazing!”
Their latest album features a series of songs going for under 30 seconds scattered amongst the track list. John said that writing shorter songs was “easier and more fun! Maybe it’s more satisfying to write a 3 minute song where all of it belongs there and it all hangs together properly. A shorter song is easier to write and if you don’t like it you can just write another short song, they don’t take very long to write.”
After over a decade, They Might Be Giants are about to return to Australia, playing shows across the country. “We are playing a lot of new material but we have 25 years of back catalog as well,” said John. “We will be playing mostly old stuff but a good chunk of the show will be from our new album. We will be playing some of the songs that were popular, and we’ll also play some deep back catalog songs for the hard core fans. There’s a whole lot of other stuff that happens at the show for entertainment, you’ll see a lot of stuff at the show that will be surprising and fun!”
Over the tour there will be two types of shows being played “We have one show which is the current show and will feature songs from the new album along with our back catalog of songs that people love and then there’s another show which is all about the Flood album where we will play every single song off the album. It’s one that we learned many years ago. It’s probably our most popular album of all time, it had a bunch of songs that were hits in various parts of the world so I think Flood is a reliable crowd pleaser.”
The lyrics of They Might Be Giants’ songs have often lead to large discussions and debates about their deep meaning. “It’s all quite hilarious,” said John. “People think, in some cases, much harder than we did in writing the song. They really get deep into each like of the song. Sometimes it sheds light on something in the song which hadn’t occurred to us.” In the case of their 1992 song The Statue Got Me High, one person’s interpretation was adopted by the band. “Somebody compared the song to the story of Don Giovanni which I was not familiar with. It was kind of wonderful that they came up with that. It made the song more interesting to me.”
They Might Be Giants have recently branched out putting out a series of albums specifically for children. “We didn’t think of it in very serious terms at first,” said John. “It didn’t seem like a career move, more like we were goofing around in the studio and writing fun songs that were appropriate for kids. It was very light hearted and as a result kids liked it. Because it sold so well we thought we could actually do kids music! We think because people are less likely to pirate kids’ records, We’ve actually seen more revenue from the kids albums than our other albums.” Their previous three children’s albums dealt with letters, numbers, and science, however their next children’s record will not take on a specific subject matter. “We have no plans to do another Here comes album. For the next kids record, it would be nice to be open ended like the first album, No. It has a whole unfocused collection of very random song topics like what we do for the adults albums so it would be fun to do the next kids album that way.”