They Might Be Giants
Interview with John Linnell

Words: Aubrey Bramble
Photo: Autumn de Wilde

Appearing:
March 11, 2008
Jannus Landing
St. Petersburg

March 12, 2008
Revolution
Ft. Lauderdale

March 13, 2008
House of Blues
Orlando

March 14, 2008
Free Bird Live
Jacksonville

Fueled by steaming mugs of black coffee and a creative symbiosis unmatched by anyone since Lennon and McCartney, John Linnell and John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants have been delighting unconventional music lovers with their unique brand of clever pop since 1982, when they moved into the same New York City apartment and began recording music. From the 1986 release of their self-titled introductory full-length, They Might Be Giants, to the 2008 release of their latest album for kids, Here Come the 123s, John and John have completed a total of 13 studio albums. Add to that their unflagging work ethic and you've got an equally outstanding catalogue of side projects, commercial jingles, theme songs, live recordings, b-sides, videos, DVDs, and more. Most recently the duo ditched the more analog confines of the traditional "Dial-A-Song" phone line for its sassy 21st Century cousin, the internet podcast. With a new episode premiering each week until the material runs out, iTunes users can tune in to the TMBG Friday Night Video Podcast for Families, a promotional tool for the Here Come the 123s joint CD and DVD release out now on Disney Sound, free of charge. Also free of charge on iTunes, but occurring less frequently, is the TMBG adult podcast which is chock full of fan-friendly and often obscure aural tidbits.

On Valentine's morning, a mere two weeks before the start of their 2008 U.S. tour, John Linnell took a break from his vacation prep to dial me up and chat about all things Giants - present, past and future.


REAX: Happy Valentine's Day! How are you guys spending your time off before the upcoming tour?

John Linnell: Well, I'd love it if it were time off! We don't really have a huge amount of time off. We're supposed to be promoting our new DVD right now. In fact, we are promoting our new DVD, Here Come the 123s, but we also are exhausted from having toured all Fall and done a huge amount of work on other projects including our podcasts and other things too numerous to mention. But to be candid, John Flansburgh is in France right now enjoying just kicking back with his wife and I am packing right now to go to London to see some friends there while my son is on his Winter break from school. Then we'll be back and we're obviously jumping right back into the tour. So in a nutshell that is what we are doing on our non-copious free time off.

R: Do you think that you will have difficulty keeping up with your regular family podcasts and adult podcasts while you are out on the road?

JL: No, and the reason why is that we pre-recorded all the puppet stuff, intros and interstitial things. And all the other stuff is from the DVDs. So at this point we've finished doing that, and when we run out of material that particular thing is going to be over. The kid podcast is just right now to promote this Disney thing. You're right that we do have this ongoing - call it an obligation - to turn in these adult podcasts and we don't make those every week. They're extremely sporadic but people are still listening to them for some reason. The grownup TMBG podcast is kind of for fans I'd say, and people who are curious about ephemera because a lot of it is just really oddball, interesting material which is mostly unfit for official release. Well, actually last year's podcast we did compile onto one CD which is a bonus CD you could get with The Else, but other than that the stuff is not considered top shelf.

R: Have you guys ever considered doing a tour podcast?

JL: That's an idea. We could. You know, what's weird is we always assumed that we could never get anything done while we're touring and then we proved ourselves wrong in 2004 when for most of that tour we wrote and recorded a new song at every single gig, which turned into this project called "Venue Songs." I have to say I can't believe we'd never tried that before because we've been touring for 20 years and the fact that we just figured out that we could actually do creative work on the road is a little bit of a surprise. But it was a huge amount of work and we were relying very heavily on the band, the crew and everybody to kind of help us. We were doing a lot of extra work every day to get all the songs written and recorded. So it wasn't easy. When we're touring I think it's kind of exhausting just doing the work of doing a show every night, and we would probably rather just kick back and take naps and stuff (laughs). I'm a big nap advocate. In my late 40s, I find that napping is like a drug. I take a nap in the middle of the day and I wake up and I'm like a new person.

R: Oh, yeah. I used to teach high school for awhile and I found the afternoon nap to be a beautiful thing!

JL: As long as you don't nap too long. If you sleep for more than a half an hour you tend to be a little bit groggy and then it's hard to get past. If you sleep for an hour in the day I think it actually does more harm than good. It just messes you up. But a half an hour is a really good amount of time.

R: Now that you are not solely supporting The Else, can fans expect to hear any of the Here Come the 123s material on this tour?

JL: Well, we haven't quite learned the 123s properly, but we will do a couple of tracks from the previous one (Here Come the ABCs) and it's possible that there may be one or two songs that we'll have together to play but we're not going to feature the 123s stuff heavily. We're gonna save that for the full-on kids show. Actually, you know we're going to be playing an all-kids show in Atlanta so I guess we better start rehearsing!

R: Is it difficult to switch from adult brain to kid brain when performing live or recording?

JL: I think it's not as big a deal as you'd think. And the fact that we told everybody they're not allowed to brings their kids to our adult shows, one would think we're doing something radically different but that's not really the case. The reason we don't want under fourteens to come see us at our adult shows is mainly for the safety and the health of the kids, a lot of whose parents apparently don't realize that it's just not a good environment for young kids, especially very young kids where the music is very loud and it's chaotic, the floors are covered with beer... We just want to warn people, and more than just warn people. You have to forbid people because it's just that bad. It's a drag for us. But having said that, I think in some ways we really do adopt the same attitude for our kids material that we do for our adult material. That was what made this transition sort of fun and easy for us. We realized that we could more or less kind of just be ourselves and apply the same sort of undefinable "Giants-ness" to kids material, and it worked. Kids get it. And even if they don't get it they still like it, you know? People often assume that kids have to understand everything to enjoy it and that is certainly not the case. That's something I kind of remember from being a kid. You find stuff interesting that you don't fully understand.

R: That goes back to the old cartoons from Max Fleischer for example, which used to contain so many adult references and yet were immensely popular with children.

JL: Yeah. In some ways it was more compelling because there was something mysterious that you wanted to know about it.

R: I want to talk about The Else and the recording process for that. I know The Else was released this past summer, and that Here Come the 123s was just released in February. Was there any crossover in the writing or recording of The Else and Here Come the 123s?

JL: Yeah. Well, we weren't planning on it, but we actually did one track that wound up as a 123s track which originally began as a Dust Brothers production. Actually it finished as a Dust Brothers production. So there's one track on 123s which was part of The Else sessions, which was produced by the Dust Brothers, which is actually for kids. I think most of it was fairly clear which project we were working on but as I've said we apply the same vibe in both cases. So it's the same musicians, the same studio; it sounds like the same band.

R: Any pros or cons to working with the Dust Brothers on The Else?

JL: The pro is the result. We're really happy with The Else and we couldn't have done that record without those guys. They were a big part of the whole result. It really moved us in a completely new and interesting direction that we wouldn't have gotten to on our own.

I suppose the con was that it was a lot harder in certain ways because we had four people scratching their heads in terms of the production. And those guys work very differently than we do. They work a lot slower. To tell you the truth, I think John and I probably work faster than anybody else that we know, so that's not really saying a whole lot. We tend to agree and make decisions pretty quickly and basically we kind of know what we're doing and we mostly know what the other person is thinking. You know, that's really been sort of the basis for our working relationship for loathe these twenty five years (laughs). With those guys I have to say that even having finished completely the project with them I still don't understand the basis for a lot of their decisions although I'm very impressed with the result. I don't completely get everything that was going on in their heads. I would say that choice of drugs is probably part of the difference between the two cultures of the Dust Brothers and They Might Be Giants; John and I drink a lot of coffee and those guys I think are high on pot. So that maybe had something to do with it. I gotta say it was really fun and I love those guys and we had a great time when we weren't working together with them. They're both into fine dining and they're great conversationalists and it was fun hanging out with them. So the whole thing was a plus, but there was a weird aspect to working with other producers where we didn't feel that same ESP that John and I generally feel with one another.

R: How was it recording in L.A. this time around?

JL: We've recorded in L.A. before. Mainly when we're in the studio we're not so much thinking about the town. Although The Boat Studio itself is a very interesting place. Are you familiar with the studio? It's in Silverlake. And it looks like a boat. Somewhere online there's a picture of it.* Basically it looks like a movie version or even a stage set version of kind of a large cruise ship with portholes and everything. On the inside it looks like a studio but it's a really interesting, oddball building like much of the native architecture of LA. It's a weird structure. So that kind of set a funny... a good tone. Those guys have a lot of gear that they are partial to that was part of what went into the sound.

R: To change the subject slightly, I'd love to ask you about your music videos. I am myself a filmmaker and a digital video instructor and I often use your videos in the classroom as an example for my students. What is the music video process like for you guys and how do you come up with your concepts?

JL: I would say that most of the videos we've made were pretty early on. The stuff that was kind of identified as our "oeuvre," eighty percent of it was in the 80s or early 90s back when people were willing to throw a lot of money at video budgets. Although we spent almost nothing on the first couple of videos, I should tell you. The first video for "Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head" was just the price of the film I think. We borrowed gear and we had people who were more or less working for free as a favor to the director. We hand-colored all the stuff and did a lot of the legwork ourselves. And in fact the film I think wasn't even all paid for. Some of it was the end bits of the Jonathan Demme film, "Something Wild" (1986). So when he didn't use up the film in the camera there'd be some left over, and our director Adam was one of the cameramen on that film so he just would take all the end bits and use them for "Puppet Head." So that is how we did that one. We got into a routine where John and I would make up these sort of awkward dances. We thought, "It's a music video, there should be dancing in it." And then we'd come up with these sort of robotic dance moves that just seemed more interesting when it was two people doing the same thing even though they were these stilted and awkward-looking moves. At a certain point we just got a whole, huge number of people to all do them. So that was one of the things. Pretty much anything went. I think it was, "What looks good visually?" The main thing early on was we didn't want to illustrate the lyrics to the songs. We scrupulously avoided ever doing that. It was kind of a hang up ours: "No reference to the words!" Other than that, it was a lot of having fun with figuring out what exactly we were doing.

I have to say I've changed my tune. I'm not against the narrative being expressed. In some ways now what we do with these Disney DVDs is we're actually really illustrating the lyrics of the song because it has to be clarified more. We've hired these mostly Flash animators who do really wonderful work and don't need to be given a lot of instructions. They're great at coming up with beautiful visual compliments to the songs.

R: I am a huge fan of your documentary, Gigantic. When that was being recorded, did you ever feel like you were on an episode of "This Is Your Life?"

JL: Well we had no assurance while it was being made that it was going to be necessarily complimentary. That was the thing that was a bit nerve-wracking. We were not getting approval on the movie. The director could have made a movie about how horrible we are as people, or how pathetic or something. We were actually really relieved when the film came out that it seemed to be that he was focusing mainly on the work that we were doing and the example of a band that kind of was making stuff up as it went along. It seemed like we were a great example of a band who failed at figuring out the formula for success and in so doing came up with a method of liking ourselves enough to stay together indefinitely and do creative work that we liked and not worry about the career choices. To me that's what I got from the film and it was a much better kind of rockumentary than a thing which is just about the personalities of the people involved. I don't think there's really that much to say about John and I as civilians. We're maybe not that interesting beyond the work that we do. I do think the work we do is interesting and good and that's why I'm glad that that's the focus of the film.

R: I saw you in 1997 at Jannus Landing and see that you will be coming here again this time around. Is that a deliberate choice on your part?

JL: I'm not always in on the decisions but I have to say that it's always been fine. Jannus Landing is a nice gig for us. We've seen them upgrade the dressing room over the years. That was a welcome change.

R: While we're on the topic of Florida, do you have any interesting stories or fan encounters from touring here over the years?

JL: There's one good one actually! At one point in the show we had a little part that was open-ended and I would play different songs in the middle of another song. One of my favorites to do in that section was the 60s song, "Elusive Butterfly of Love." Not super well-known now, but it was a big hit back in the day. The guy who wrote it lives down there somewhere; I think he lives on the East Coast. And we got this note - I think we were playing in West Palm Beach - and it was from him, Bob Lind, the guy who wrote the song. He gave us some records and stuff, and it was a very funny note because he was saying, like, "you turkeys have been intruding on my territory" or something like that. But we couldn't tell from his note if he meant the song or the state of Florida. We never actually met him. We just got this stuff from him. We then took one of the tracks that he gave us and turned that into the intro for the whole show. So our relationship with Bob Lind has deepened even as we've never made any real personal contact with him.

R: One last thing. I know the old Ace of Base hit, "The Sign," was a favorite live cover of yours. Did you know that Ace of Base recently reunited?

JL: Well, that makes me feel old. I remember when they were the new Abba; the young version. The idea that they're doing a reunion is terrible.


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