There's something to be said for the longevity of a band that has at no point in their career attempted to fit in, although to say that They Might Be Giants have spent a significant portion of their career being misunderstood is something of an understatement. It might be a faltering in the band's public image, but TMBG has always been perceived (even more than like-minded, if not sonically similar, bands like Ween and GWAR) as being from another planet insofar as, while people that don`t necessarily number themselves among the band`s fans like them and can easily rattle off the names of a couple of the band's songs when asked, they can't really tell you much about the band outside of that very short list of songs. For twenty-five years They Might Be Giants have occupied a niche in the popular consciousness as unique as Don Knotts and the platypus; they're recognized as being present in the rock pantheon, but not many people have any idea how to quantify them and no one is more aware of that fact than TMBG co-founder John Flansburgh.
"We're in a very singular place in the culture I think," says Flansburgh while on tour for They Might Be Giants' latest album, The Else. "I think that describing our audience as a cult is kind of inaccurate though. I feel like we exist in the world as a mainstream act, but what we're doing has nothing to do with Top 40 radio or anything even vaguely resembling the ultra hot cutting edge of music. If you tried to pitch a story to Access Hollywood on They Might Be Giants, they would laugh you out of the room, but the truth of the matter is that what we do is understood; the general public gets it. You would think by the way we are described in the music press, that we are this 80-foot cyclops of unknowable music—like we are the strangest of the strange and people just knock themselves out saying what a bunch or weirdos we are—but I think on some level we've achieved some very mainstream acceptance for what we do. We do big shows for thousands of people in big cities and they're of all ages and all different backgrounds. They're not fanatical—of course the people in the front rows know every lyric to every song and sing along—but there are a tremendous number of people in our audiences that may be into other bands more than us but they enjoy what we do and just know that it's going to be a good show.
"We can go in front of a 20,000-person festival crowd and everybody knows the spirit of what we're doing, they get it right away. We do really well in situations like that, but we're also saddled with this notion that it's all some kind of inside scheme. I just don't want the band's reputation to be put in that sort of ghetto anymore. Saying you're a cult band is akin to checking out on the whole experience; essentially accepting your own cultural irrelevance. I don't want to critique the culture, I want to add to it—but I want to add to the real culture, I don't want people to think, 'Oh, they're just a bunch of weirdos talking to themselves.'
"There is this thing about music culture and, having observed how They Might Be Giants is profiled in music culture for a very long time, there is this thing about music culture that is almost like a filter that you have to fit through for it to make sense to the rock press," continues the singer. "They really like it if you fit into a musical movement or are part of a scene because it allows people to draw connections between bands. But we don't really connect with any other band so that's what, in the eyes of the rock press, is the disaster. People love biography—they love when you're a total trainwreck or coming from a really weird place and your music has this crazy authenticity because you're from a group of people that is very far removed from the rest of society at large. They crave authenticity because that allows them to be the cultural surveyor of it. We've got exactly none of that going on [laughing]; we're white guys from the suburbs."
It's difficult to disagree with any of Flansburgh's rationale—throughout Ground Control's interview with him, Flansburgh never seems to get angry about such things, he only offers commentary—but even so, it's impossible to say that The Else isn't a more mature affair for They Might Be Giants. Put simply, The Else is where after TMBG draw a line in the sand with a set of the most conventional rock songs they’ve ever done that, paradoxically, also show off the band’s ability to make the ordinary into something extraordinary. Less manic than previous outings, the pop songs on The Else don’t feature the instantly singalong-choruses of prior work like "Particle Man," "You’re Not The Boss Of Me" or "Your Racist Friend," but get over on the whole songs rather than just catchy excerpts from them. "The Cap’m," "Climbing The Walls" and "Take Out The Trash" all take a more Weezer-ish tack in their heavy pop stance that balances consistent lyrics with great guitar licks that illustrate the band isn't just a novelty and makes those moments where TMBG indulge their cartoonish tendencies (as on "With The Dark" and "The Shadow Government") not quite as sugary, but mean more somehow.
With that, They Might Be Giants put their money where their collective mouth is and offer the punchline to their 25-year joke—they’ve done it with The Else and it ties the band’s career together in such a way that not only makes their prior output satisfying, but this album a revelation as well. No arguments are forthcoming from Flansburgh as he concedes the truth in the fact that, while They Might Be Giants may not yet be exactly a grown-up affair, a lot of changes in approach did go into The Else. "I think we really wanted to make an album that would get noticed by critics and by our fans as something of superior quality," confides the singer. "The last seven years or so, a lot of things have really come into focus. The band has found a level of direction and intensity that I think we spent a lot of the 1990s missing. We took on a lot at that time; we took on working with live players in the 1990s and whether it was the people we were working with or our own lack of ability to direct them, I don't think we broke through as a unit until the beginning of the millennium.
"We found a way to work that was as intense as we wanted it to be and as focused as we wanted it to be and I think this current incarnation of the band is a very tight unit. It's very much a band and we know when we're writing and arranging how we're going to make it work for the players that we're working with. That's a subtle thing; we've been in this band for 25 years and it's hard to stand back and say, 'Wow it's REALLY coming together now!' That'd be a weird press release. How do you explain to people that you've been creatively born again without undermining everything you've already done? I think we were just trying to make a personal artistic stand for the band with The Else; invest the time to make something that has the level of intensity that really reflects where the band is at."
'Intense' is certainly an accurate descriptor for both the sound of The Else as well as the band's schedule. While the band has had a long-standing history with cartoons, kid shows and television in general—including song placements in both Tiny Toon Adventures and Malcolm In The Middle—two years ago the band embarked upon a second autonomous career making kids music with Disney, and has since expanded the scope of the project to include monthly video podcasts and DVDs geared toward children. "Truth be told, I think we, as a rock band, have been slightly undermined by our kids' career because, as a press story, the kids' career is such a UFO," explains the singer. "It's so unusual for a band to try and do kids' stuff beyond just a one-off and have a parallel career in that vein. We have two things going on at the same time and there aren't many bands that even try to do that. Maybe it's a mistake, but I think to some degree it has robbed us of something very real and exciting and legitimate that has been going on with the band on the rock side. The kids' side is such an attention getter that it may have overshadowed the rock side of the band. Think about it; if you went to your editor and said you've got this story about this crazy and pretentious band of art rockers from Brooklyn that suddenly embarked upon a legitimate career making kid's music, your editor would be really interested. If you said that you wanted to write a story about these pretentious art rockers from Brooklyn who've been subtly evolving as a band for the last 25 years, the story might be less delicious because that would be what every band says.
"I think we are a little more grown up and the fact that we've taken on this parallel career of making kid's music might extract some of the more lighthearted vibes from the songs," continues Flansburgh, ruminating on the creative directions that opportunities have led They Might Be Giants into and the effect that it has had on the band's music. "When you're working on a piece of music and you have the opportunity to present it to little kids, your first thought might be that it would be perfect for them whereas unless there's that additional layer of adult interest in the writing automatically, it would be harder to see how it could work in that forum. I guess that fact has brought a little more focus to the adult stuff and made it a little more acidic. I'm not even sure if 'mature' is the right word; I think there's something pretty emotionally arrested about us [laughing].
"I don't feel innocent, but I certainly don't feel mature."
In addition to the childrens' podcasts, with the demise of TMBG's much-applauded Dial-A-Song campaign ("The computer that ran it broke down and it would've required so much in the way of improvement to make it really, really good again," laments Flansburgh.) the band has also begun releasing free podcasts for its older fans to enjoy as well. According to Flansburgh, it seems as though technology has finally caught up with They Might Be Giants as the requests for and subscriptions to the podcasts have come in staggering numbers. "We have a free MP3 service that's very active and currently has over 100,000 people subscribing to it and the podcast now numbers in the hundreds of thousands as well so, in a way, technology has now eclipsed our wildest dreams and we're just kind of rolling with it," marvels Flansburgh at the band's success in the online arena. "I mean, the Dial-A-Song thing was a really abstract feeling; you really didn't know who was calling and, when you did find out, it felt like the most random thing imaginable. I remember getting calls from policemen that were on duty and calling from pay phones that were just walking the streets of New York and call because they wanted a bit of entertainment.
"Doing this podcast now is probably the closest we've ever come to having the means to broadcast our own material," continues the singer. "It still seems very mysterious; it goes out to all these people—more people even than buy our records. Given that it's free, of course some of that can be chalked up to curiosity seekers, yet it still feels a little abstract—almost like putting your song in a little bottle and throwing out to sea."
Even with the additional, multi-media attention though, Flansburgh maintains that the band's live show is still the best form of advertisement for They Might Be Giants. "Since we started this tour, we've been working on the show every day," says the singer flatly and with an ample helping of determination in his voice. "When we get off stage, there is a brief period of high-fiving and then we really critique what we're doing. We're very hell-bent on making the next show better than the last and the guys that we're working with are extremely unshy about making their opinions heard on almost every level from the staging to the arc of the show to the song selection to the minutiae the arrangements. It's a very intense band to work with; it's not a hobby."
"Our sets are really long—like an hour and forty-five minutes to two hours long—so there's a pretty big scope to the song selection," continues Flansburgh. "We're doing songs right now from our first album that we haven't played since the 80s and we're very aware that there are some people in the crowds that are recidivists to the show and we want them to have a satisfying experience to the show as well as those people that are coming out to see us for the very first time. Obviously, the new album is a huge injection of content to put into the show, but we put the whole thing on the blocks before the tour and went out of our way to make the whole thing new. For example, we just did a show in Atlanta and through the miracle of the Internet, I was able to go back and find the set list from the last time we played there and we only played three repeat songs from the last time and those were the ones that I think we'd be remiss if we didn't play them; like if we didn't play "Birdhouse In Your Soul" and "Istanbul," people would be pretty cheesed. That said though, I'm happy that we have a big enough repertoire to be able to do that and not have it feel like we're just playing to our strengths. From a fan perspective, this show is a mondo, boffo knock-out hit; people have been flipping out and I feel like our live show might be the best possible form of advertisement insofar as showing how and where the band has evolved. It's really tight."
Flansburgh has noticed the effect that the work has had upon the show in the audience's faces as they leave as well, noting, "I think people walk away from the show feeling like we had as much fun as they did, but we really work hard at it in our attempt to make it something special. It's essentially paradoxical insofar as the fact that there is this stagecraft part of it that's really quite intense and then the actual show is quite celebratory."
The Else is out now. For more on They Might Be Giants, visit www.tmbg.com
