Alternative rock band They Might Be Giants have sold out two of their three gigs in the Twin Cities in June, part of a tour where the group is diving into their back catalog to create unique shows each night. The two-time Grammy award winners throw back to their Dial-A-Song Days and will sprinkle in hits from their Grammy-nominated album “BOOK” and their platinum album Flood, plus surprises and improvisations along the way. A while back, I had a chance to talk to John Linnell, who formed TMBG with John Flansburgh back in 1981, about the tour, the band’s history, and what comes next.
Sheila Regan: Where are you talking to me from?
John Linnell: Brooklyn, New York. I’ve been home, mostly, for a while now. And we’ve been doing a lot of recording. So we’ve compiled a massive list of new songs. Nothing will be coming out before we come on to Minneapolis.
SR: Do you have studio space at your home in Brooklyn?
JL: The sort of usual routine for both John and I is we have home studios where we do most of the songwriting, and a lot of the pre-production. And then the typical thing— although we try and mix up our process as much as possible— is that we send homemade demos to the other musicians that we work with. And then we all meet up in Manhattan in a studio in Midtown, and record more of a live band version, but often incorporating some of the tracks that we’ve already recorded, because that’s how we work nowadays. Some of your demo stuff can make it onto the finished version.
SR: Can you tell me about the new songs you’ve been writing?
JL: Well, I don’t know if I can sum them up, particularly, but I will say they sound a lot like They Might Be Giants. There’s a pretty broad variety of sounds that we’re working on. I think this sounds like our 21st century work, for the most part. You know?
SR: You mentioned the new music you are working on is a “21st century sound.” What does that mean?
JL: We are so deeply within the project, that it’s hard for me to characterize it. I feel like that more and more, we’ve just cemented a kind of a brand, right? It’s defined by what we’re interested in more than anything else. There’s not really a name for the genre, exactly. It’s just where we’re at. I suppose there’s a lot of bands that I could say that about, that they don’t seem to belong to a genre, they actually just are. I think that John and I, always from the beginning, tried to make music that we would want to be consumers of ourselves. That was sort of what defined what we were, what we were wanting to do. That’s been pretty consistent. We’re a bunch of old men now. So how that relates to how the culture perceives us is probably different now from the way it was 40 years ago.
SR: What’s your plan for your 3-day engagement in the Twin Cities?
JL: We will be trying to do three completely different shows, as much as possible. We’re learning a lot of deep catalog stuff in order to prepare for this.
SR: Are there a lot of folks that will come to multiple nights?
JL: I think there will be yeah. I mean, there’s always a sort of a slightly overheated front row crowd that are paying intense attention to what we’re doing and copying down the setlist and things like that. We’re playing to them as much as we are to the rest of the audience. So we’ll be trying to make it interesting from one night to another. I will say when I was a young person, I actually didn’t mind seeing a band play the same exact set twice. Because it just was interesting to hear the same song again— to me. But we feel some obligation to not just try not the exact same set night after night.
SR: You guys did a number of children’s albums. Was that kind of because you were fathers?
JL: At the time it felt coincidental. We were offered a job with a modest budget to make an experimental children’s album. My son was a year old. It was Rounder Records; I don’t think they were really particularly focused on the fact that I just had a child. I think they were more like, well, here’s a possible project that we would be willing to underwrite. We were not taking it deeply seriously as a career move. We were just kind of enjoying having a different thing to do in the studio that seemed kind of low stakes, actually. And then what was great was that record kind of took off, outsold the one that we’d made the same year for adults. We kind of backed into doing children’s music, but it didn’t really have to do with having children particularly.
SR: I wonder if the popularity of that music was because your fans were all having kids?
JL: Some of them were, yeah. That’s absolutely right. And also, if we’d been calculating, and kind of been able to predict the future, we would have known that a lot of these kids who heard our kids music in the early aughts were going to grow up and become adult They Might Be Giants fans, which is what in fact happened. That was just a fringe benefit that we had not predicted, but that worked out really well. The other thing is, we’ve generally had parents and their children become multigenerational TMBG fans. So it wasn’t wasn’t a plan on our part, but it worked out pretty well for us.
SR: Anything you might say just about how They Might Be Giants has evolved over the many decades?
JL: Well, it’s been very organic. We never charted our future for ourselves, we just we’re going kind of intuitively from one project to the next. We were lucky. I mean, the basic arc of it was John and I started as a duo. And we were playing in these performance art kind of spaces in downtown New York in the mid 1980s, and then we became a touring band, but as a two-piece with a tape recorder and we made records. I suppose that was something we aspired to. We wanted to make records, not just play in New York City. Then after about 10 years, we are starting to hire other musicians to tour with us, so by the 90s, we were more like a traditional rock band, but still wanting to expand the definition of that as much as we could. By about 25 years ago, we hired the particular musicians that we’re still working with. I would say, it’s kind of settled into a particular mode. But we still stretch out and do kind of oddball projects now.
SR: Do you and John hang out outside of creating music these days?
JL: A little bit. We live in different parts of the state, so we mostly just see each other at work, which is quite often, and then on tour. We won’t be doing a bus tour this May and June. So that’ll be a little different. We still are still getting along. And we’re constantly communicating. I spend, I’d say, most of my time here in Brooklyn. John has an apartment in Manhattan, but he’s mostly upstate in upstate New York, and that’s where he has his projects to do.
SR: Anything else you might say about what you’re excited about right now?
JL: I’m excited about going back on the road, because I think this will be a very civilized situation for us. And it’ll be good for the audience too. Because we won’t be exhausted. Because we’re doing multiple shows in different towns, I think we can concentrate our energies on the show much better.
As of this writing, there were still some tickets left for June 14 at First Ave. ($39.50). More information here.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at [email protected].