After 31 years, the band They Might Be Giants is still going strong. And John Linnell, one of the co-founders, isn’t quite sure how they’ve avoided splitting up.
"That’s a good question. I wish I knew the answer,” he said. “I don’t know what it’s like to break up, so we don’t have anything to compare it with.
"My sense is that it’s often to do with disappointment. Bands often have a meteoric rise — and that’s why you’ve heard of the ones you’ve heard of — and then after that, anything else is a disappointment. They don’t have any sense of what they’re supposed to do after they do what they wanted to do.
"We didn’t have a specific goal, no one thing that was going to be what we wanted to do,” he added. “It was more of a sense of what we like doing, and we wanted to keep doing it.”
And they have, through 16 studio albums, including the platinum-certified album “Flood” and three gold-certified children’s albums, and decades of touring.
The core of the band, known as TMBG, is Linnell and John Flansburgh, who met in junior high school in Massachusetts. They became friends in high school, working together on a student newspaper, and they started recording music together. They formed TMBG in 1982, taking the band’s name from a movie starring George C. Scott. They didn’t name themselves in honor of the movie, Linnell said, but they thought that “it just seemed like a band name.”
The band gained popularity with playful tunes and catchy melodies, and their popularity grew with their “Dial-a-Song” in the 1980s, when they set up an answering machine that would play songs, demos and snippets for people who called in. Hundreds of songs popped up on that, some of which were later refined and released on studio albums. The band later started streaming songs online and creating podcasts.
They also gained popularity in the 1980s and ’90s on MTV and some of their music was used in cartoons on the TV show “Tiny Toon Adventures.” Over the years, they have also branched out into children’s music, releasing albums for kids with educational tunes. They have won two Grammy awards.
The Two Johns, as they are sometimes called, form the core of the band, but other musicians take part as well. They have had the same touring band for more than 10 years, Linnell said, with drummer Marty Beller, bass player Danny Weinkauf and guitarist Dan Miller.
Miller, incidentally, quit his previous band, Lincoln, after a disagreement while they were on tour in Winston-Salem in 1998. TMBG recruited him that year for their fall tour.
As for the Two Johns, “John Flansburgh does all the hard work. I’m the lazy member of the band,” Linnell said. “I tour, which is the hardest part, I think, and that’s shared 50/50. But he’s always been more involved in the managerial and the packaging, and he’s very keenly interested in the overarching package…. But you know, there’s some reason he likes working with me, and it’s not my good looks, though that plays a role.”
Which one of them gets to sing which song is “determined by who wrote the song, generally,” Linnell said. “We each write songs, and whoever wrote it is entrusted with the job of singing.”
There are a few exceptions, he said, where he has written a song that he feels would sound better with Flansburgh’s voice.
The band has a huge back catalog of hundreds of songs, some of which have become fan favorites over the years, such as “Ana Ng,” “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”, “Don’t Let’s Start,” “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” “Particle Man” and “Boss of Me,” which was the theme song of the TV show “Malcolm in the Middle.”
While their current tour is in support of their newest album, “Nanobots,” which came out this spring, they often mix in some audience favorites in the show.
"I think there are some songs where it feels a little like we’re covering someone else,” Linnell said. “Songs that are a quarter-century old, it’s hard to get back to that person. But the ones that we play we think are the good ones. The ones we reach back and cover, so to speak, are the ones we like. It’s fun to have such a huge backlog.”
It’s also fun — at times — to still be touring after all these years.
"It’s a combination of fun and misery, but I don’t want to complain too loudly,” Linnell said. “It’s insanely lucky we get to keep doing this. It would be small of me to complain about it.”
They are touring more than 100 days out of this year — down from the 200 or so during their busiest year in 1990, Linnell said. But that’s still a lot of time on the road, including dates in Australia earlier this year and in Europe this November.
Their opening act on this tour is Moon Hooch.
"They’re terrific, a three-piece that plays woodwinds — clarinet and saxophone — and a drummer, and they do something that’s kind of related to dubstep trance but different,” Linnell said. “When asked what kind of music they play, they say ‘cave music,’ but I think they made that term up.”
And what does Linnell say when people ask him to define what kind of music TMBG plays?
"I wish we could think of something as clever as cave music,” he said. “We’ve enjoyed this privilege of not having to say what we’re doing for 30 years now, and probably one of the keys to this whole operation is we don’t sit down and define it for ourselves.”