Few indie rock bands can claim the sheer breadth, longevity, and sustained creative inspiration as They Might Be Giants, whose body of work spans nearly four decades, twenty-plus albums, and many hundreds of songs. John Flansburgh and John Linnell’s storied discography includes alt-rock hits (“Birdhouse in Your Soul”), college-rock classics (“Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head”), and the occasional TV theme (“Boss of Me”).
Their new album BOOK (out Friday, November 12th) goes in another new direction: Its 15 tracks are available on their own, or accompanied by a large hardcover lyric book, featuring original art connected to the new batch of songs, as well as selected pieces from their last few releases.
As always, the songs stand alone; this group is less ornate than some of the band’s past compositions, with a stripped-down sound that nonetheless conveys a wide range of feelings: Pulsing anxiety, wry humor, and relatable disorientation, among others.
Ahead of release week, Consequence spoke with Linnell about BOOK, the band’s creative process, mixing pop with experimentation, and getting back on the road.
They Might Be Giants has engaged in a lot of different multimedia projects over the years — albums, music videos, dial-a-song, your smartphone app, the children’s videos and albums — and I read that BOOK started as an outgrowth of a coffee-table retrospective book someone had suggested. What made you guys decide to go in this printed-art-object direction at this point in your career?
You know, this is always the lead question, and unfortunately, it wasn’t my idea. [Laughs] I can’t exactly articulate what was going on, but John Flansburgh — if I can be so presumptuous — I think that he felt like there’s a lot of things now that bands put out that feel so ephemeral, because it’s all online and there generally isn’t a physical object anymore. People don’t even buy CDs anymore, or vinyl — although vinyl has become sort of a niche thing, as well, and we have put out a lot of vinyl recently.
I think John felt like it’d be nice to have a physical object, and then he expanded on that idea and thought, “How about a big-ass book? A 12-inch-by-12-inch hardcover would be nice, so that there’s room in the package for vinyl if somebody wants that, or it could just have the CD, or you could just download the music, but the book itself is very much of a tangible, physical object that people would like to have.” And also that you can’t pirate quite as easily. I suppose you could print your own copy. That would be a way to get a free copy.
How do you listen to stuff these days, when you listen to music for fun?
Well, that’s an embarrassing question; I listen to a lot of stuff on my laptop, through my laptop speakers, which is a terrible way to listen to music. I don’t really go around with earphones or headphones too much. I guess I listen to music in the car, which is a little bit of an improvement over the laptop speaker. I hate to say this, but I’m more of a casual consumer.
I think John is more of an explorer when it comes to not just contemporary music but historical music. He’s much more interested in going into the deep, deep catalog and discovering new things. And he’s actually been my source for things I find out about, either through him or my wife or son. I don’t what it is — I’m not very inquisitive. I have no intellectual curiosity.
Listening to the new album, I was thinking there’s kind of a ‘60s pop-rock sound on some of these songs, like “I Can’t Remember the Dream” or “Lord Snowdon.” I don’t know if that’s just because I was listening to the Zombies recently…
Oh, yeah, I think if there’s any one particular strain that John and I gravitate towards, it’s something like Top 40 radio from the ‘60s. It was a very range-y thing at that time. If you check out the Top 40 from the late ‘60s, there’s rock, but there’s also psychedelia, and soul and R&B, and country music. It was a great time for popular music where it was all being presented in the same venue; it wasn’t all niche-marketed. A lot of people were listening to the same range of things, but it was a broad range.
How do you process those influences? At this stage in your career, there’s a very clear They Might Be Giants sound — obviously that sound encompasses a wide range of things, but it’s certainly identifiable for a lot of fans. How do you mix your influences with your awareness of your own sound?
A lot of our awareness about what we sound like is kind of second-hand. I don’t know if you identify with this, but I’ve always felt like when I look in the mirror, it’s not as easy to characterize my own looks as it is with everybody else. I see people and think, oh, yeah, he looks like this kind of person. And I look at myself and I don’t quite see anything there. I’m like, I don’t know, it’s just me; I don’t know what I look like.
It’s similar to being in this band: I know what people think we sound like, but I don’t really hear what we sound like because to me it’s just the sound of us, and I don’t know what that is, other than by that definition. In some ways, that’s also how we define ourselves: We don’t have an idea of what it is we’re doing, we’re just intuitive and we try to do something good, and this is the result.
That makes sense. You mentioned that Flansburgh sort of brought the book concept to the fore. When you were writing these songs, was a lot of that done knowing that this was going to be a book project? When did it come together?
It was a little ways into it. The book concept came late in the game. John should really be fielding this particular question because I don’t know when he thought of it, but I know we were working on the album for a while before I was aware that he had come up with this idea. And it wasn’t really in the forefront of my mind. Writing and recording this stuff, I wasn’t thinking, “Oh yeah, this will be great for a book.”
I was just doing my usual thing of trying to write good songs, and then for us there’s a selection process that comes after we come up with a pile of stuff. There’s some point where we think we’ve got enough stuff to choose from, then we listen to what we’ve got and say, “Okay, these songs all fit together and would make an album.” So the book thing came in the midst of that process.
Do I have it right that some, but not all, of it was made during the quarantine period last year?
We’d definitely written most of the songs before the pandemic, and we even recorded some of it before then, and we wound up doing this kind of finale of recording in December of last year, where we reconvened in the studio and just finished the stuff that hadn’t been finished. But of course it was this completely unusual recording session where we were having to swab our noses before the session and everything, and this was only to get the thing done. I think we were all a little bit worried about just leaving the house at this point. But it was necessary, and it was kind of great to see each other again because we’d been apart for so long. But it was really an odd, non-conventional recording session.
You guys start the songs separately, right? How does that writing process work?
Well, in the case of a lot of stuff we’ve done recently, I’d say most of the songs, one or the other of us just writes the entire song and makes a demo, and then we bring it in and then everybody has all kinds of ideas about where it could go. But typically the song is demoed to the point of actually sounding like a song. We’ve also done a lot of collaboration. In the case of this album, John asked me to write some basslines for him, and I sent him a pile of MIDI files, which maybe included some keyboard parts as well, and one of the songs he wrote on top of that, which was “I Lost Thursday.”
And then in the last couple albums, he has provided me with a bunch of loops, of drumbeats and rhythmic vibes and things, and that’s been a good way for me to get started. So I’ve had some Flansburgh beats that I’ve written Linnell songs on top of. We’ve done a lot of that kind of thing, really for almost as long as we’ve been going, or almost as long as we’ve been able to. I think there was a point in the ‘80s where we both started using samplers and computers, and it became easier to give each other materials. So a lot of stuff from that point on, we were doing that thing of making sounds or making a song structure.
But even on the first album, like the song “Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head,” for example, I’d written a whole song and then I removed all my lyrics for the verses and said, here, you take this, I’m not happy with the words that I’ve got so far, so you take this and write some new lyrics and you can sing it. And we’ve done a bunch of things that way.
I read an interview with you ages ago, around the time of the John Henry record, where someone asked if you were worried about any songs getting lost in a 20-song record, and you had mentioned “The End of the Tour,” which I remembered so vividly because it got me into that song, which I now love. With BOOK, or even the last couple of albums, are there songs where you’ve felt like, that may not be a single, but you hope people check it out? Not to play favorites, of course…
There are songs that everybody kind of focuses on, like on Flood it was “Birdhouse” and “Istanbul” where people were like, “Those are the songs for the singles.” I always like the fact that there are lots of different songs and they play off one another, and that they are in different styles. We have the luxury of doing something that isn’t super poppy because there’s another song that’s like a big pop song — we can then do something that’s a little stranger.
That’s something I think we feel is really essential to what we do. We want the weirdos to get included. It’s important that there be a range. I don’t know if you agree with this, but one of the things I like about our work is that the songs sound very different from one another. So that’s sort of a musical treat: you get a pop song, but you also get something that’s harder to listen to, or just more confusing. You get the spinach, and then you get the chocolate cake of the pop song.
That’s interesting you say that, because I feel like part of being a hardcore They Might Be Giants fan is that there’s sort of a point of pride in picking offbeat ones as a favorite, like, “Oh, my favorite is actually ‘Weep Day’” or something like that.
There’s at least something about the song where you can say, well this one goes in a new direction, and I didn’t have to think too hard about the pop song, but this particular one has so many elements that are new and interesting that I can sort of turn it over in my mind and try and work out what’s going on. On the previous album, that was how I felt about the song “I Like Fun” — that it had so many unusual elements that I had this warm feeling about it, because John and I are, like, pushing 60, and able to come up with something as unlike our other work as that. That felt kind of like a good achievement.
And it’s still a pleasure to listen to, and it was fun to play live and everything. I think I would be bored if we just played pop songs. But I love pop music. The pursuit of a nice pop melody is fun and interesting to me as well. It’s necessary to have all those different ingredients.
That diversity and quantity of material is one of my favorite things about the band. If you’re getting into They Might Be Giants, there’s a huge wealth of stuff you can listen to: twenty-plus albums, and rarities, and live versions that are different from the studio versions. When you work at such a consistent clip, how do you delineate when you’re done with one phase and into the next project? Obviously the album being done is one way…
I think you’re right that there is a mental process that goes on where we’re characterizing what we’re doing, and thinking about the shades of light and dark… when you’re deciding if you’ve finished something or not. But I would say we don’t have a clearly verbalized way of talking about it. This is the great advantage of working with Flansburgh: We don’t have to discuss this job, we generally agree about stuff.
To go back to the song “I Like Fun,” John and I have never talked about what the song means, or what it signifies or what it’s about or what the vibe of it is. It just is what it is, and it’s kind of irreducible, and we don’t need to explain everything to ourselves. Even though I think we do have an understanding of what it is we’re doing and we agree mostly on that, we don’t try to explain it to ourselves. The other thing we like to say is that we don’t have to defend it. We don’t need to make an argument for it; the song already is an argument for itself. That’s the way we prefer to keep it, not trying to overexplain it to ourselves.
I think I saw in some interview or another that you guys had started on some new stuff — is that the next record, or is that an expansion of this stuff? I know there’s always extra songs.
Yeah, we’re still at that stage. We’ve got all the leftovers that we’re going to put out in one form or another. But we’re still writing, and we actually have a recording session a couple weeks from now, so I’m trying to come up with a couple things for the band to do for that, and there isn’t a clear sense of, oh, well, this will be on an album or this will be something else. It’s more like, we’ll just see how this goes. Come up with some ideas and see how it works out.
I went to see the The Mountain Goats last night — they’re also very prolific, and they just put out a couple albums in the past year. John Darnielle was saying on stage that his instinct when putting those songs together, when they saw they had two albums’ worth of stuff, was to just pick out the best ones and throw out the rest and never speak of them again, but everyone else was saying there was enough good material for two. Do you ever struggle with that? Are there a lot of songs where you just completely get rid of them, or do you circle back later?
I would say if you’re struggling with something and it’s not coming together, my general feeling is, there are things where the idea is what it is, and you should either put it aside, or finish it in some form but then move on and try to write a different song, if you’re not feeling happy with what you’ve got. There’s this series about the Wu Tang Clan — have you seen this?
I haven’t, but I’ve heard about it.
It’s interesting — it’s a little bit corny, a little bit like a soap opera, but when they talk about the music, it’s really interesting, and they have all these different ways of illustrating the creative process. I watched an episode last night where they’ve got this song where the rap is good, and the beat is good, and then the RZA guy is like, “Well, it needs a hook.” And then they bring in Method Man and he sings this thing and it ties everything together.
And I gotta say, that is so far from our process. I don’t think John and I have ever listened a song that we’ve been doing, going, like, “All right, it’s good but it needs a hook.” Basically, if you don’t start with the hook, you’re never gonna get to the hook later on. I’ve never figured out how to write a song where I add the hook on later. So it’s just interesting to see — wow, you could do that? That’s crazy!
You’re going back on the road next year. Is it exciting, or is there trepidation about the unknowns?
The tour currently is, I think, a year later than it was going to be, and of course we’re keeping our fingers crossed, because who knows… and we want everyone to be safe, we don’t want people to get sick. We’re hoping this all will happen; it’s scheduled for next March.
I think it’ll be good, but our routine is that we all get on the bus together. Even under normal circumstances, we’ve had this thing where one person gets sick and everyone else on the bus gets sick, because you’re in such close quarters. So… the stakes have been raised! It’s worrying. But everyone will have been vaccinated, and I’m actually getting my booster pretty soon. So, triple-vaccinated. We’ll try and be safe as possible, and we’ll be implementing whatever we have to do to make sure the audience is safe as well.
Are there songs from the new record that you’re especially looking forward to playing out?
Yeah, “Synopsis for Latecomers” is gonna be fun, because it doesn’t sound like our usual thing, so it’ll be interesting to see how we can put that one together. I’ve got a new tech set-up for myself. For years and years, I’ve been using the Roland Fantom [as] my stage keyboard. And right before the lockdown, I just completely changed my stage set-up and I’m now using a laptop computer as the brains, and a keyboard controller that’s plugged into the laptop.
I don’t know why I did that; it’s probably a stupid idea, because the Fantom was incredibly reliable, and this seems like it’s asking for trouble. But theoretically it will give me more flexibility; I can come up with other sounds and try out different things with the laptop setup. So that’ll be my big challenge in the live show.
One question I stole from the TMBG fans Facebook group, because the people are dying to know: Are you going to be doing much accordion stuff on the tour?
Yes, I will definitely have the accordion and I will play the accordion. I can’t even remember — is there accordion on the new album?
I think that’s why people were asking, because I feel like there isn’t, or isn’t anything that pops out as obviously accordion.
Well, we have plenty of stuff in our regular live show where there’s accordion. Rest assured, there will be accordion. And maybe we’ll do some of the new stuff with accordion. Recently, we’ve had part of the show where we just strip it down to acoustic guitar, accordion, and electronic drums. That was such a great part of the show, I imagine we’ll bringing that back, but we haven’t planned that out yet fully.
Are there any older songs you’ve been thinking, “Oh, we haven’t played that in years, let’s bring that back?”
We haven’t talked about the live show at all yet — we just haven’t gotten together and discussed what we’re gonna do. But yeah, I’m sure there will be those things where we say, here’s one that we haven’t done in forever that would be fun, and change everything up and make the new tour more interesting. There will be that.