In more than 30 years together, They Might Be Giants has been a lot of places. They’ve performed on stages around the world. They’ve won two Grammy Awards. They’ve been seen and heard on television and in movies, with contributions to the likes of “Malcolm in the Middle,” “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” and “Coraline.”
But they’ve never been to Pensacola.
Until Sunday, that is.
“Looking at it, I think we haven’t played in Pensacola, but it seems familiar to me,” said John Linnell, the keyboard-, accordion- and woodwind-playing John who is half of the core duo behind They Might Be Giants; his partner, John Flansburgh, plays guitar, bass, trumpet and percussion, and both write and sing lead and backing vocals.
On tour behind the band’s sixteenth studio album, “Nanobots,” Linnell took time for a phone conversation about the band’s storied career.
Vinyl Music Hall is one of the smaller venues on your tour. What do you like about more intimate spaces?
It is a very direct connection that you have to the audience in that situation. We have played in big arenas and stuff, and it can be weird. It’s more work, in a way, to rock a larger room because you’re so far away from everybody, you’re not getting the type of intense feedback you get in a smaller room. So we’ve done that. Sometimes, rather than playing one show in a big room, we’ve done multiple nights in smaller rooms in New York, and that’s a much more fun for us.
They Might Be Giants has offered many interesting entry points over the years, from Dial-a-Song to video and a major early Internet presence to your kids’ albums. Was any of that an intentional strategy?
I would say that there was a lot of stuff that was kind of lucky for us, and sort of unlucky at the same time. We were lucky that we established a fan base back when there still was a record industry, because it probably would have been much harder to do it without the apparatus of the music industry in the ‘80s and the early ‘90s. Then, when the business itself shrank, we were forced to make decisions, some of which involved emerging technologies. Not only was it possible, but also necessary to put out a record on the Internet in the late ‘90s in order to keep the ball rolling, in a sense.
I don’t think we’re at the cutting edge of any of this stuff, but we are always interested and are usually there in time to become a participant.
In some ways, another example of that is we had the Dial-a-Song in the ‘80s, and gradually it became more and more difficulty to maintain. We only really worked out how to do it with these answering machines, and in some ways, you could say the Internet has obviated that system for us. We don’t really need to do Dial-a-Song in that way because people are already listening to music at home on their phones. In some ways, it’s come all the way around to the normal way people consume music.
You’re known for a somewhat intellectual fan base. To what would you attribute that?
The thing we like to stress is that we have an unusually broad fan base. We have a broad range of ages and a broad demographic range.
I think we are a band that is embraced by collegiate people. There was a period where I guess our third album (1990’s “Flood”) was sort of the standard piece of equipment when you enter college. “Here’s your ‘Flood’ album,” you know? (Laughs) It was lucky for us. We didn’t even really know college radio was a thing until we were on college radio, so it was a lucky coincidence.
But to what do we attribute that? I think we have a self-selecting audience. We never figured out who was going to like what we did, or decided that it was either limited to or specifically aimed at any group of people. That strategy worked because we made records for ourselves, in a way, I suppose.
At this point, do you feel like you have a lot of fans who have grown up with the band?
Yeah, but not only that, but multigenerational fans. At this point, we’re conscious of it, at least. We started making kids’ records 10 years ago, and those kids are starting to grow up. In that situation, a lot of the people who bought them were the parents, who were They Might Be Giants fans. And now the kids have gone on and they’re old enough to go out and see us themselves. That’s something that wasn’t the original plan, but it’s certainly working out for us.
There’s an interesting “age 14 and older” restriction on this show. Why?
It’s sort of more to do with the fact that we are [sometimes] considered a children’s act, and we have certain shows where we want to stress that we’re not doing kids’ shows. It’s disappointing for some people, but we find that a lot of people bring their very, very young kids into situations where there really isn’t the proper ... I guess, mainly, it doesn’t seem like a safe place to bring really little kids, and people don’t know that. So we had a period of playing shows in clubs and bars and people would bring little kids, and it was nerve-wracking and distracting for us, because it just wasn’t a safe place for little kids. I don’t think its so much the material as to do with the welfare of the kids. And maybe it’s [also] more to do with the volume that we’re playing at and the environment.
We played an outdoor festival a couple of weeks ago in Philadelphia, and there were teenage kids who decided it was appropriate to start slam dancing. It doesn’t seem like appropriate behavior for our show, but it still does go on, surprisingly, so between that and the volume, and I think we want to feel license to, even if we don’t take advantage of that ability, that we can say [expletive] on stage and not upset the parents. Actually, kids love swearing, I’ve gotta say, but the parents object to it.
You’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of “John Henry,” the first full band album. Do you have any thoughts about that versus the early days as a duo?
I think we certainly look back fondly on that, and we have parts of the show that are just John and I for a song or two. We haven’t done the tape-recorded show in quite a long time, the show with a track. It’s definitely a pleasant memory. I feel like it’s such a retooling of our show that maybe at this point — never say never— it’s not what we’re prepared to do now. We’d certainly be netting a lot more dough if it was just John and I on stage — we wouldn’t have to pay everybody, and we could have a smaller crew. But I suppose our greed has not overcome our sense of what kind of show we’d like to do.
What keeps your partnership fresh and fruitful?
I think it’s fair to say at this point that we are comfortable doing this together, and the benefits are very obvious to us. We are, to employ a tired cliche, greater than the sum of our parts, mainly because we have these complementary abilities. And it’s, just in a practical way, an incredibly fruitful franchise for us, that we have a name that can book shows. It’s very easy to run this operation at this point because its so well established. It’s very hard to start up a new band, or even to start up your solo career. John and I both did solo albums and toured as solo artists at various points, which was interesting and fun, but I think we realized, having had both experiences, that we liked doing They Might Be Giants better.
What would you say are the individual strengths you bring to the table?
I mean, I think it’s hard to separate it all out, and I think we spend a certain amount of energy, each of us, emulating the other person’s ideas. But [John Flansburgh] has an art degree, he’s done a lot of visual art himself, and he’s more keenly interested in the visual side and generally, in the packaging of a project. I think I’m more technical on the musical end. I have some music school background and just am generally more interested in the nuts and bolts of music, so that’s probably more my focus. We both write songs, and we both think we can write any kind of song, I suppose, but we probably each have our own strengths and weaknesses, and I don’t know that I can break those down.
What’s funny is recently, John’s lyric writing has gotten more poetic. He’s become more elliptical and open ended in the way he writes lyrics. And I’d say my lyric-writing recently has been more traditional and more straightforward. It seems like we’ve almost reversed roles in that way. I think when we started out, I was writing the more trippy lyrics and John was writing more plainly. But I’m saying that and I’m thinking of all these exceptions to that, so it’s very hard to actually break it down.
Can you give fans a preview of your show?
Assuming we get the technical kinks worked out, we will have a large projection screen behind us with entertaining stuff going on that’s essentially part of the light show. We bring lights, but we also have a sort of multimedia thing going on. You get to hear our songs played as well as we can by the two Johns and the three-person supporting band, and there’s a lot of visual stuff. And we will have puppets, I just want to point out, for people who love puppets, and that seems to be almost everybody, according to our demographic research.