EXCLUSIVE: They Might Be Giants Take Us Through Their Four-decade History

DECADE ONE: PUT YOUR HAND INSIDE THE PUPPET HEAD

Over the 36 (37?) years John Linnell and I have been working as They Might Be Giants, we have had many lucky breaks, but almost all of them seem to have come pretty much by surprise. In 1985, before we had any record deal at all, we were approached by an ambitious young man named Adam Bernstein who wanted to direct a rock video. He said he would pay for it and that he had no budget, but that contradiction didn’t seem so important. As he seemed to have no credits, we figured he was probably doing it for the practice. The video for Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head, entirely improvised save for some dance moves stolen directly from New Edition videos, was shot on the docks down the street from our Williamsburg apartments. It got a fair bit of play on late night MTV and helped us land a deal with two fellows running an independent label out of Hoboken called Bar/None Records. Our album was released and after a couple of US tours hitting major cities and towns with culturally influencing “college rock” radio stations and when we had sold 10,000 copies six months later, we had a big party for all our friends who had helped us so much along the way and it seemed like things might have run its course.

Then, very much like the events in the The Buddy Holly Story, or The Wonders, or perhaps the end scene of Spinal Tap when they are informed, “Sex Farm is on the charts in Japan,” a very small commercial radio station in Pittsburgh began playing a song off the album called Don’t Let’s Start - and not just playing it, but playing it like it was a big hit. And then their sister station in Long Island, NY started playing it as well. Then all these college radio stations, which had recently coalesced around the indie scene, started playing it. So it was quickly determined we should make another video with Adam for Don’t Let’s Start. MTV played this video as well, but this time they played it as if it was a big hit. They played it in the daytime, right up against real rockstar acts. Almost overnight we went from playing to crowds often less than a hundred to five hundred or a thousand. It was very exciting. 

Adam would go on to many glorious things in television including directing Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, and taking part in the creation of 30 Rock. 

DECADE TWO, PART ONE: INTERVIEWS

We were signed to a major label in 1990. A tremendous amount of time was spent telling people what we were doing. Sometimes it seemed like the main thing we were doing was talking about what we were doing. Here is an interview I gave some years back about being interviewed that I think is a successful survey of the situation that defined much of the '90s for me.

DECADE TWO, PART TWO: GAS MASK, AN IMPROVISED SONG PLAYED ONCE. 

A transcript from They Might Be Giants On Stage, September 13, 1997.

(Mad keyboard playing and crowd cheering…)

Flansburgh: The very first time we were in Japan, I turned on the TV in my hotel room, there was a talent show, and there was a band playing called Gas Mask. They were four or five guys, and they were all wearing gas masks.

(Crowd laughter) 

F: They did a song that only had two notes. There was the first note and the second note. Fellows, let's demonstrate now. One note, please?

(Band plays one note) 

F: The other note?

(Band plays a second note) 

F: And the song went like this, back and forth. 

(Band plays the two notes, back and forth, over and over again. Flansburgh sings: "GAS MASK! GAS MASK! GAS MASK! GAS MASK!") 

F: Now, I thought Japan was the place for me. I thought I had found the place where I was gonna live for the rest of my life. 

(Cheering) 

F: I was unpacking my bags and putting them IN THE DRESSER of the hotel, thinking, “Hmm. $200 a night... I could last here for a while, and then I'll find a cheaper place." 

(Crowd laughter) 

F: And then I continued watching the show, and then it suddenly, like, all became, just like the same as everything else you see on television. Nothing else was really quite as good after that. 3...4... 

(Band plays the song instrumentally)

DECADE THREE: YEAR BY YEAR

2000: We started doing incidental music for television shows including The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and Malcolm In The Middle. The Malcolm theme earned us our first Grammy.

2001: We contributed a CD of music to McSweeney’s Literary Journal, and on 11 Sep released Mink Car on Restless Records. A month later the company would close forever. 

2002: Rhino Records released a two-CD career retrospective, and the documentary Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns) was released in theatres. These projects came out at what is currently the midway point of our career.

2003: We made a children’s book and CD called Bed, Bed, Bed collaborating with the painter Marcel Dzama. The track Bed, Bed, Bed, Bed, Bed was sung by Kimya Dawson of the Moldy Peaches.

2004: Drummer Marty Beller joined the band, completing the current line-up including Dan Miller, Danny Weinkauf, John Linnell, and me. Marty is still “the new guy.” 

2005: We released a CD/DVD set called Venue Songs which collected songs written and recorded about each venue we played at over our US and UK tours. The project was narrated by John Hodgman.

2006: Uncredited, we recorded 22 original songs for 22 different television commercials for Dunkin' Donuts. It was actually a really fun project and none of the songs are about donuts.

2007: Working with the Dust Bros, we recorded the song Take Out the Trash. Later I re-recorded the vocal in “Simlish,” an ubbi-dubbi type pseudo-language for its inclusion in an edition of the game The Sims.

2008: After years of breaking phone machines and malfunctioning computer programs, the original Dial-A-Song line, residing in the kitchen of my Brooklyn apartment, was retired. We would return to the idea, in a modified format in 2015 and 2018. We released our third album for kids called Here Come The 123s. It won a Grammy.

2009: They Might Be Giants was nominated for a Grammy for the kids' album Here Comes Science. In 2017, TMBG's Science Is Real title would be adopted as a slogan on thousands of T-shirts and countless signs by protesters in the March for Science in Washington DC. 

DECADE FOUR: CAREER DYSMORPHIA

I don’t know about you but I kind of love Spotify. I discover a lot of new music on it and rely on it as a constant reference tool. I have even posted some personal playlists for our fans. I was listening to a really great band from Ohio called Guided By Voices - really just trying to catch up. They are a band notorious for their short, poppy songs, as well as for putting out a lot of music. Although they broke up officially in the mid-2000s, they reformed in the '10s and have been hard at it ever since. Then, as I grooved to the latest GBV I noticed that they really have been putting out two, sometimes three albums a year for a while. I had a strong reaction: “That’s so crazy. Who could ever track that? They are playing HARD TO LIKE! No matter how good it is, no one except their most hardcore fans could track their output.”  But then I listened some more and reengaged in the blistering lo-fi glory that is the GBV sound, and it all started making sense again.

In December of 2018, we released our third album of the year, My Murdered Remains. It has a bonus disc of 16 songs. I think it’s pretty great. It has this song on it I really love called The Communists Have The Music. Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but I fully expect everyone to be noticing this release. Download My Murdered Remains right here. 

They Might Be Giants kick off their Australian tour this week, head to theGuide or scroll down for all the info on dates and tickets.