John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants talks past, present and future
 Giant show John Linnell and John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants perform on Sept. 29 at the Rio Theatre. After 25 years of making music from the underside of the equation, Brooklyn duo John Linnell and John Flansburgh—better known as They Might Be Giants (TMBG)—still find themselves impressed. That’s according to the first words from the band’s new album The Else, on a track actually called “I’m Impressed,” a typically sardonic number about being shocked and awed by something while still wanting to run away from it. These quiet dichotomies, along with moments of inspired absurdity, have formed the backbone of the group’s tremendous output, which has actually accelerated in recent years: a pair of successful children’s albums (with a third on the way), television soundtracks, one of the first widely downloaded podcasts, a guest appearance on a popular web cartoon, a collection of live songs written on the fly about venues they were playing at the time … sometimes it seems there isn’t a day that passes without a new TMBG song being written. “We waste a lot less time than we used to,” Flansburgh says from his New York home. “We do a lot less stuff that we don’t want to do.” Once pigeonholed as a glorified novelty act, the diversity of the duo’s talents has been noticed by the music industry. “I feel like the mix of opportunities we have to do all this stuff kind of fuels our creativity,” Flansburgh says. “One thing about songwriting: if you’re constantly doing it, it’s much easier to access that mode of thinking. And it’s fun doing something without our name on it. They want a crazy disco techno song? Okay, that’s what I’ll do today. Or some drum-and-bass music that nobody would know is us. People have preconceived notions about musicians’ limitations.” While the band, in some ways, pioneered the notion of free tracks a la MySpace—in the 1980s, they set up and advertised a Dial-A-Song service in New York, in which anyone could ring up an answering machine that played a new TMBG song as its outgoing message—and their early adoption of things such as moderated chat rooms in the mid-’90s and the podcast early in this decade point to a band not afraid of embracing new technology or new ways of reaching fans, perhaps it’s that taste of behind-the-scenes songwriting that leads Flansburgh to defend, at least on some level, the studios-and-royalties system that file sharing and the internet are supposedly destroying. “I think it’s a really complicated question,” he says, “and what I notice in interviews is that when I read what I said, it’s not clear that I’m really talking on behalf of the songwriters and performers I respected as a kid, and I want to come to their defense. I feel like in many ways the very simple but vast system that collects royalties for musicians is essentially being dismantled. The negative effect of that is not a cultural conversation. It’s about a very small class of people who are already half-cursed anyway. Everybody knows how act two of Behind the Music ends. This is not a wise career path. You get the same look from your parents becoming a musician as you would becoming a heroin addict. But if you really make a living at it, there’s a practical side of it that’s shockingly dull. “So there’s this very hot button cultural issue that is essentially about music fans’ animosity toward entertainment corporations,” Flansburgh continues. “Most conversations have nothing to do with songwriters. People don’t realize how big and vast the performing rights organizations’ databases are. They wonder how you could possibly track all the songs ever written. They already do! Type in ‘I love you baby’ on BMI and 85,000 songs pop up. It’s an amazing set up, a crazy fraction-of-a-penny business that does putter along in its own weird way.” Even though from a songwriting perspective TMBG is still a duo, the live band has been a solid quintet since 2000, and Flansburgh says that he enjoys the excellent “first among equals” relationship that he and Linnell have with the rest of the band. “As a team, we really are together. It’s a strange territory. But, you know, good bands are rarely democracies. I think the way the Beatles were presented to the world, or maybe more importantly The Monkees, led people to believe it’s a perfect utopian collective, and that is exactly the way that bands sound boring. If nobody’s looking out for the big picture, it just turns to soup.” When asked what the newest thing is that he’s learned about music, Flansburgh reveals an even closer dissection of the Beatles. “For technical reasons, the Beatles always recorded the bass last, because with only X number of tracks to work with, it would lose fidelity if they did it first. This is later in their career. For them it was just a technical hurdle, but the side effect is all these wonderful arrangements where Paul is filling in at the exact moment nothing else is happening. Everything else is already there. Usually bass players are trying to stay out of everyone’s way, but if they come in last, they know where the holes are, and they know they can do something within the parameters of good taste.” It might seem like, after a quarter-century, such minutiae about the possibilities of recording would be the only undiscovered country left, but Flansburgh confesses he and Linnell still have larger goals for growth. “We both tend to fit more stuff into the lyrics than is necessarily needed,” he says. “When I hear a well-written, direct song, it has this lightness to it that I really envy.” He cites Steven Merritt’s “Acoustic Guitar” from 69 Love Songs as an example. “It’s a beautiful song with a very simple melody, and the conceit of the song is very plain, but it’s got a million verses that go on and fill out the idea completely, doing every variation in their own happy-go-lucky way. When I hear a song like that, I’m impressed! It makes me want to write better songs.” They Might Be Giants play at the Rio Theatre on Saturday, Sept. 29, at 8 p.m. For tickets or information, call 423-8209 or visit riotheatre.com .
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
|
