They Might Be Giants’ John Flansburgh sat down with program coordinator Ahni Brown Harbin for a chat about their upcoming album “The World Is To Dig,” performing songs backwards, and how the world is running out of nouns.
Ahni
Thank you so much for being here this morning!
John Flansburgh
It is great to be here! My name is John Flansburgh, and I’m in the band They Might Be Giants!
Ahni
I’m a huge fan! Since I was four years old, “Birdhouse in Your Soul” has been one of my favorite songs.
John Flansburgh
Oh, so you were raised on They Might Be Giants?
Ahni
Yes, very much so.
John
And that was a positive experience for you?
Ahni
[Laughing] Very positive experience.
John Flansburgh
Interesting. That’s cool. That’s great.
Ahni
Yeah, I have the blue canary nightlight.
John Flansburgh
Oh yeah. I know. That’s paying all our mortgages now. People love that thing!
Ahni
It’s awesome. It’s a lot of fun.
John Flansburgh
Excellent.
Ahni
So, your new album, “The World is to Dig,” which I’m super excited for… Can you tell me a little bit about where the inspiration for this album has come from?
John Flansburgh
Well, we’ve been making albums for a long time. And I think when we started, we really didn’t know how they were formed. But if you record in one place over a short duration of time with the same people, a set of songs will kind of create its own context. It kind of makes its own gravy. And that is really the case with this new album. I feel like it does have its own unique vibe, but it really comes out of the scope of the songs collected together. We try to edit ourselves quite a bit. Even though there’ll be 19 songs on an album, we’ll probably record 25 or 30 tracks. And some tracks will just be false starts, like we don’t even finish them. And then other ones will just be too much alike, too much like something else on the record, and maybe not as good of a version of that, so we’ll cut that. But we try to be harsh editors of our own work. So, it takes a while for us at this point. We’re a little more critical than we used to be. We don’t go into albums with an overarching concept, but they do sort of naturally hang together. It’s an interesting process!
Ahni
That is amazing. And “The World Is To Dig” includes a cover of the song by the Raspberries, which it never got much success. Why did you choose to include this cover instead of a different song?
John Flansburgh
Well, the song is called “Hit Record,” and it was a minor hit for the Raspberries, but it’s an incredibly catchy song. Their version of it is actually more mid-tempo, and has tempo shifts and stuff, as well as some strange saxophone solos that can only be described as very mid-70s. But the Raspberries were a band that I really loved as a kid, and they were in some ways kind of early progenitors of what is now called power pop. They were almost like a retro rock band in their time. They seemed like they were still like supporting the idea of Beatle-y pop music in a time that things were getting very shaggy.
Led Zeppelin was a much bigger, much more important band that were contemporaries of the Raspberries. But it’s just a great song. And when you’re covering a song, I guess you’re sort of thinking, “Well, what can we do to make this song more interesting than the original version of the song? What can we bring to it that’s different?” We’ve had some covers that have been pretty successful in our career, like the song “Istanbul not Constantinople” is a cover of a song from the ’50s. And it’s an interesting and kind of odd song in its own way, but the original version of Istanbul is very slow and seems very logy. And so sometimes all we’re doing when we cover a song is like basically picking up the tempo a little bit. And that is certainly the case with “Hit Record” by the Raspberries. Also, it’s kind of a cynical song, it’s really about trying to get noticed and have people check out your music.
But John (Linnell) had the idea to cover the song. I was sort of surprised, it was out of left field! We were talking about how we didn’t really have a single for this record, and we were getting a little concerned because it was very late in the day, and I think maybe just because that was the topic, John was like, “Why don’t we do a cover of ‘Hit Record’ by the Raspberries?” And I was like, “OK, cool!”
Ahni
Is that how most of your covers start, just kind of like a suggestion? Or is it sometimes more planned out?
John Flansburgh
Usually, the covers have been very practical. I mean, we’ve done a couple of things with The Onion, they have a cover project where they just have a list of songs and you can pick from any of these 20 songs, but they’re all kind of guilty pleasure covers, like doing a cover of Destiny’s Child song seems as unlikely to us as I’m sure it seems to anybody. So they kind of all come at us from different directions. I mean, the original covers that we did very early on in our career, we did Istanbul, and we did a cover of “Why Does the Sun Shine,” which is a science record that was recorded in the ’50s, the song is often referred to as “the sun is a mass of incandescent gas,” and we learned both of those songs because we were first going out on the road. We were contracted to do two sets of songs, we had to play for like two hours or something, and we were a New York City band, and before we started going on tour in the United States, we had never played for more than like 25 minutes. Sets were really short; you would just jump on stage and do a bunch of songs and jump off. And suddenly we’re playing in a bar in Norfolk, Virginia, for a bunch of sailors. And most of the bands that were playing there were just cover bands. So, playing two hours of covers is just playing every song that they know how to play. But we actually had to learn these new songs just to stretch out our show, so it was kind of kooky.
Ahni
Do you have a favorite cover to play?
John Flansburgh
Wow, John and I did like a very low-key version of the song “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar” by Jonathan Richman, which is just a great song. I love Jonathan Richman, and I love that song. It’s just like the spirit of that song is really great. So that was fun to play.
Ahni
That’s amazing. So kind of a little bit off of that, you’ve done some really incredible TV and movie soundtrack stuff. What would a dream project, past or present, be to work on for you?
John Flansburgh
Well, first of all, thank you for saying that. It’s very blush-making. We would love to work with the people at Pixar. And I’ve made this clear over the years, and I even met with the people at Pixar once, for one of the most expensive meals of my life. But because we contributed a track to the movie Coraline, I feel like they think of us as a band whose box has been checked. You know, like, “Oh, they did another animated project, and so we can’t work with them.” But I have to remind them that Randy Newman has made songs for a million movies, including theirs. And people keep coming back to Randy Newman for new songs. Give us a break, Pixar! We’re ready to collaborate!
Ahni
Speaking of that, you’ve worked on a lot of kids’ stuff over the years. I grew up on “Here Comes Science,” that was the anthem of every road trip in the back of my mom’s minivan. So how did you get into that? What drew you to making music for kids?
John Flansburgh
Well, when we broke free from the shackles of our major label deal in 1998, ’99, all of the sudden, the phone started ringing with all these different ideas from various people, and the Massachusetts label Rounder Records said that they had just done a kids project with NRBQ. And everybody was very happy with the results of that, so they asked if we would be interested in doing a kid’s record? And we hadn’t really thought about it, when our first record went into Tower Records, they filed it in the children’s section just because of the cover, so I think for a long time, we were afraid of being misunderstood as a children’s act, because we really weren’t. I mean, we’re not that transgressive, and we don’t use swear words, but we were very much not for kids. But it was a one-off. It was a way to kind of just
dip our big toe into another way of working. And it seemed like an interesting invitation to write for kids. But I don’t think we ever thought we would have a parallel career that at some times was even eclipsing our regular rock band career. Doing kid stuff was, for about 10 years, kind of what most people were interested in from us. I mean, we ended up doing projects with Disney and doing a lot of stuff on Disney television. And that was like a big time thing in a weird way. But there’s kind of nothing more wide open than writing songs for kids. You can really write about anything. It’s kind of fantastic.
Ahni
How has writing for kids affected the way you write for adults?
John Flansburgh
Well, I just want to preface this by saying, like, I’m just as precious and artistic and pretentious a person as you’re going to find. But one thing about being a precious, artistic, pretentious person is that people can be very careful about how they work and really get caught up in the details of what they’re doing, and they tend to work very slowly. And there was nothing about our 10 years on Elektra that helped us really accelerate the pace at which we were working. The first 10 years of our career, a lot of our work started out on Dial-A-Song, which was like this ever-thirsty format for new songs. So it was like boot camp for songwriting. It was like, “Oh, we need more songs, we need more songs, we need more songs.” So doing stuff for kids, doing stuff for advertising, doing music for television, we spent a lot of time in the middle of our career doing stuff on deadlines. And I don’t think you don’t get into music to work on deadlines. You quit your job because you’re sick of working on deadlines. But there is something very empowering about learning how to write fast and record fast and just kind of work on your kind of gut instinct. And that was actually a real education in how to be productive and focused and just do a different kind of work. And it really boosted our confidence in a way that was actually very, very useful.
Ahni
How’s that impacted the way that you come up with ideas for songs?
John Flansburgh
Well, John and I are both always batting ideas around. And we have big backlogs of sort of half-baked ideas. When we did kids stuff, the albums would have themes. And it was almost like just writing to the theme was this very easy trampoline to jump on to create new songs. One of the big challenges about writing for adult stuff is that you’re kind of trying to figure out how to write another complicated adult song. You’re dealing with a lot of fully sophisticated ideas. And sometimes I feel like we’re just running out of nouns. Like, when
you have a very popular song about a bird, you suddenly get very shy of writing another song about a bird. I guess I’m sort of feeling a little looser in my decrepitude. Somebody pointed out that I’ve actually written two songs that mention cicadas, and I think as a younger man, I would have been very self-conscious about the fact that I had repeated myself on a topic as narrow as cicadas, and now I’m like, “Hey, you know what, I’m just a guy who’s into cicadas!”
Ahni
Nice. I like that, that kind of radical acceptance almost.
John Flansburgh
I’m not sure how radical it is, but it is like a following. Sure.
Ahni
Some of your ideas are so out there. I would love to know a little bit about the process of coming up with some of the songs that are a little bit more absurd. If you have anything.
John Flansburgh
There’s a humorous sensibility in what They Might Be Giants output is about, but I think we’re trying to figure out how to make songs that are interesting enough to be listened to over and over again, baking something very durable into the songs. If you were just trying to write a song to be funny, I feel like our songs should be funnier. But I don’t know. Humor is a very dangerous thing. When I read descriptions of our band, I often think, “I don’t think I’d like a band like that.” Not that I’m into things that are self-serious, but I’m not that drawn to things that seem over the top or super wacky.
Ahni
Do you see what you do is over the top and super wacky, or do you see it as something else?
John Flansburgh
I feel like I’m a little professionally dysmorphic about the subject of art. I don’t think about how what we do lands in the culture, I don’t want to get into that sort of self-reflective, K hole of becoming a mannerist version. There was this period of the Renaissance, which was this great infusion of fresh ideas in painting that introduced perspective and naturalistic lighting ideas into painting. And it was clearly seen as a very high watermark in creativity and painting. And then there’s this period like 100 years later, where that is now referred to as the Mannerist period where things, body proportions get really distended and
light sources become really unreliable and kind of heightened and hype-y. I just feel like if you listen too much to reviews and critiques and maybe even listen too much to your own audience, you run the risk of letting other factors define the possibility of your output. I really want to stay away from that.
Ahni
How do you maintain that balance of interacting with your audience and also making sure that you’re staying authentic?
John Flansburgh
Well, I think I tend to reject any negative reviews. I don’t listen to our audience that much. I’m very aware of the difference between the front row and the back row and everything in between, and I think a lot of musicians make the mistake of listening much too closely to the front row. And there is a difference! But I don’t know. In general, we’re not a band that writes anthems. We don’t do things that make it seem like a group activity. I wish we were more generous in that way, but we’re just not those kinds of people. When I see acts that really have the ability to gather their whole audience together and just become, a single
cell entity with their crowd. I do respect that, but it’s just a recessive trait in us. Ahni
When you’re performing live, you do have a very cool way of being able to connect with the audience and being able to make it a unique experience. I saw you perform “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love” backwards. That was one of the coolest live music moments I’ve ever experienced. What made you decide to perform it backwards? I have to ask.
John Flansburgh
Well, it was right before COVID, and we were doing a tour. We had not finished our album in time. But we were kind of obligated to a whole bunch of shows. And we thought, well, this is a good time to just do a tour where we play the “Flood” album, and so we thought, speaking of the front row, there’d be a lot of interest in the front row if we did that. And then we were sort of pondering the idea. We have to play 50 shows where we would play all these songs off of “Flood.” Won’t that start seeming kind of same-y after a while? How can we make this fresh? Well, we could learn one of the songs backwards! And then we were also dealing with having video in our shows. We had cameras on stage that were being projected onto the screen behind us, so we knew we could actually record what we were doing. And we thought, well, if we learn a song backwards, we could then flip it, and play the backwards version backwards again! It’s kind of almost like a vaudeville trick. We picked “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love” because it’s very percussive. And those percussive
sounds show up on reverse audio very clearly. It’s the kind of thing that works backwards. And also, the song is kind of short. The idea of memorizing a song sonically backwards was really daunting, so we didn’t want to be stuck on stage for four minutes playing a song. But we sort of dedicated ourselves to it, and we all did a lot of private study and then we came together and played it at rehearsal and recorded it and reversed it and heard how it sounded. And at first, it was very bleary-eyed, it sounded very insane. But then we focused up our performance, and now we can do it pretty reliably. And it sounds like the song! I mean, it is kind of a stunt, but it’s fun to see something like that kind of come together in front of you. It’s memorable.
Ahni
Do you have anything planned for this upcoming tour that’s similar to that? Or are you leaning away from the vaudeville stunts.
John Flansburgh
Once you learn how to do one song that way, you kind of just want to keep on doing it. I don’t know. We should probably learn another song that way, but I can’t think of what it would be.
Ahni
Why have you chosen to play multiple nights in a few cities instead of doing a whole big tour?
John Flansburgh
Well, we’re doing different shows every night. It’s “an evening with,” so there’s two sets. We’re essentially opening for ourselves, and in the opening slot, we’ll play half of a different album every night. It’s just a way to really change it up for ourselves and keep the show fresh.
Ahni
Awesome. And why have you chosen Boston?
John Flansburgh
Oh, well, we’re playing a half dozen or a dozen cities, we’re from the area, and it’ll just be nice to hang out there. It’ll be fun. And as I said, we’ve got all these different shows to do. There are a lot of great mid-size venues in Boston that we can play for multiple nights. So it’s good!
Ahni
And then I have a little bit of a selfish question, because I’m always looking to beef up my playlists. What have you been listening to lately?
John Flansburgh
Well, you know, I mean, in the last couple of days, I think, like many people, I have been checking up that microtonal act with the unpronounceable name. They are called Angine de Poitrine, their stuff is all instrumental. It’s just drum and guitar. And the guitar player has a bass and guitar instrument that he uses a looper with. They wear polka dot costumes. They’re kind of a phenomenon. I’m kind of into the band Hundred Gecs. And for me, most of my music listening is stuff from the middle 20th century. So I’ve been listening to just a wide variety of stuff from the pre-rock era. Oh, have you heard of Snail Mail? I really like Snail Mail.
Ahni
I have, it’s super good! Well, thank you so much for your time.
John Flansburgh
Absolute pleasure for me! And yeah, keep on DJing. I super love your radio station, so.
Ahni
Oh, thank you so much!
John Flansburgh
Again, thanks for having me.
Ahni
Thank you so much. Bye!
