Photo by Shervin Lainez/Courtesy of They Might Be Giants
They Might Be Giants
They Might Be Giants
Since forming in 1982, alt-rock veterans They Might Be Giants—featuring vocalist/guitarist John Flansburgh and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist John Linnell—have rarely played by traditional rules, thriving instead on the mystery of where they’ll go next. The band’s current tour, which stops in Milwaukee on Sept. 24 and 25 at the Pabst Theater, exudes this unpredictable spirit.
For each night of their multi-night stands, the band will play two distinct sets. The first will feature a full playthrough of one of the band’s 24 studio albums, while the second delivers a standard setlist of fan favorites and deep cuts. The song selection could include anything from the band’s early days of Dial-A-Song—their innovative, early call-in service for fans—to their latest album, The World Is To Dig.
“We're doing different shows from night to night,” Flansburgh said in a recent interview. “Basically, for the first set, we pick out an album that we [shine] a spotlight on for the first 25 minutes of the show or so. In a way, we're opening for ourselves. And then for the second set, we play all the favorites, so it's much more like a regular show.”
“It's important to just keep things moving if you're playing multiple nights. What's nice about it is having more repertoire. It's a much bigger challenge for us, and I think it keeps us excited about the show. There's always stuff to rehearse and work on. That's a much better answer to the problem of being on the road for too long than just being bored of yourself and playing the same show every night.”
Nightly Spontaneity
That nightly spontaneity has been a winning formula on the tour so far. With so many albums to draw from, the band has immense freedom to pivot. Sometimes that decision comes down to hours before they play.
“There's always a lot of negotiating what we're up for,” says Flansburgh. “A lot of times we decide the day of the show. Most of the time we're deciding the day before, or the day of the show, what we're going to do. But we try to keep it lively.”
For Flansburgh, it’s been “wild” to dig back into tracks the band has either never played live or only touched briefly in the '90s.
“A lot of rehearsals have gone into putting these shows together,” he says. “So, it's been a big challenge.” Still, he feels “very close to almost everything” in their catalog. “A lot of things still strike me the same way… I think we've been lucky in that the format we work in just works for us.”
That remains true even as the group has expanded into a powerhouse eight-piece band, complete with a three-piece horn section. If anything, it’s added to their spontaneous and engaging nature.
The Shepherd Express caught up with Flansburgh to discuss the band’s music, history, and their endless desire to innovate.
The band has always found creative ways to find songwriting inspiration and the band's latest album does that through the children's book. What about searching for new creative outlets is so thrilling for you?
I think when you start writing songs, it's kind of a manic enterprise. And as you become less delighted in your own efforts, you kind of start crafting things a little bit more and challenging yourself a little bit more. It’s hard to say why people write songs or what leads them to start writing songs. I've been writing songs for so long, I just sort of think of it as like what I do. I hope people can sense our investment in these songs.
Finding more stuff to write songs about is a kind of a strange enterprise when you've written a lot of songs. When you start writing songs, you immediately realize that there are things that you're better at than other things. But as you get better at writing songs and are sort of more confident about writing songs, you start getting drawn to things that might not come as naturally to you but are just kind of interesting to you.
So, a few years back, I put together a song called "Hate the Villanelle" based on this poetic form called The Villanelle, which is like a sonnet or a limerick. It has a very specific rhyme scheme. And it's like doing a really complicated crossword puzzle.
I'm terrible at crossword puzzles. And it took a really long time to finish because there were all these specific things that you had to do in meter and rhyme. Just to do the form of it and have it actually make any sense at all was really complicated. But I put together the simple lyrics already, so I just dug in and took it as a personal challenge. And I gave the lyrics to [John] Linnell, and he did a great job with putting the music together. It’s weird to be able to do it because for a long time I sort of thought of writing songs a little bit closer to being struck by lightning than being able to parallel park.
The band has a knack for finding inspiration in some untraditional places.
Yeah. I mean, we don't write love songs, and we don't write confessional songs. A lot of people coming out of the singer songwriter tradition, a lot of people write diaristically. They write sort of from their own direct life experience. I think we tend to come at it from a much more…it's probably closer to the way a novelist would work, I would imagine. I mean, I've never written a novel, but I feel like you don't immediately think that the novelist is writing from their own personal experience. You assume that there's some level of imagination and fantasy infused in what you're reading. But that's just us. That's just the way we work. Obviously, people love [traditional] songs. I think we're just a little bit shy of it.
The title of the band’s latest album, The World Is to Dig, was inspired by the title of A Hole Is to Dig, a 1952 children's book by Ruth Krauss. What were you going for with that?
The album is kind of just a set of songs that we've put together over the course of a couple of years. The title was just riffing on this Maurice Sendak [illustrated] book that I had when I was a kid. It just seemed like an optimistic way to kind of pull it all together.
Can you talk a little bit about your connection to the book?
Oh, it's a very kind of Bohemian. It was a book written by New York Bohemians in the mid '50s. So, it's got kind of a beatnik quality to it. And I can't help but think they were playing on the idea of dig working both ways. But maybe that's me. I mean, it's a curious book for kids because the syntax of the whole book is a little bit strange for a little kid. But I had it as a little kid and I loved it.
Why did themes of exploration feel like fertile songwriting ground for you?
I think writers want to believe it's important that you feel like you're doing something that's new. It's really dispiriting to feel like you're not bringing something fresh to it. Even if you've written a million songs, it's important to feel like the new thing you're doing has qualities that are fresh.
After four decades of making music, what specific corners of pop music did you find yourself most excited to dig into for this new album?
Well, I'm always thinking about rhythms and rhythms are kind of the spark of a lot of songs for me. So, I can spend countless hours working on beats and I feel like I'm doing something very worthwhile, even though I think for most people listening, that might end up very far in the background. But the energy of rhythm and harmony, chord regressions are really still very interesting to me.
It sounds like you reworked some of the songs to be more up-tempo. What sparked that desire to dial up the energy and pace?
Well, I mean, the truth is you kind of get energy from energy. I'm not sure how many of them actually got reworked faster. Over the years, we've just gravitated to writing more up-tempo songs. I remember when we first went out on the road, I think it almost freaked us out how much the audience directly responded to up-tempo songs. It didn't seem fair. We had lots of mid-tempo songs and slow songs that seemed perfectly interesting. But at least from us, they seemed to really respond to the fast song.
So, you think the live stage had a big impact on your thinking?
It definitely influenced us at a very formative time. We kind of put our first album together with just a limited amount of live experience. And then once we started touring, I feel like we had a much better idea of what people responded to. So, it wasn't like we turned everything around. I think we just focused more on the songs that had qualities that we felt like people would appreciate. Maybe that sounds really pandery. I mean, there are definitely musicians who think a lot more about what audiences think audiences appreciate, and there are definitely songwriters who never think about what audiences appreciate. I think we're kind of in the middle. I think we're unneurotic about that stuff.
I imagine it was fascinating seeing how the songs transformed as you made them more up-tempo.
Yeah. Well, you can go too far for sure, but usually if you can play it up-tempo, there's a payoff.
Is there a song that really surprised you in how much it transformed?
We did two versions of “New Wave Will Never Die.” The second version just had a lot more percussion on it. So, it wasn't faster. It just had more sound. I guess “In the Dead Mall” was probably one that really got hopped up. And that ended up being a very rocking song.
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The lead single “Wu-Tang” celebrates the rap group using the entirely unrelated genre. Can you talk about the inspiration for that song and how you landed on that pop arrangement?
Well, John put the song together. He is a huge fan of music documentaries. There's not really like a music documentary he hadn't checked out. And I guess he really enjoyed the Wu-Tang doc that came out about five years ago. And I think the idea was really kind of writing from the point of view of a fan and just like what their experience was. I'm not surprised that the music is unrelated to the subject. I think it would be really creepy if the music was related to the subject in a way. I don’t know. I mean, I wish John could tell you the whole deal.
The band also released the Eyeball EP as a companion to the album. How did you determine what songs belonged on which release?
There's a track on the EP called “Peggy Guggenheim” that's just instrumental. It almost sounds like movie music. I really love that track and maybe it should have been on the record on the album because it definitely would have gotten more attention if it's on the album, I guess. But it seems so different than the rest of the album in terms of just the arrangement and kind of the ambition of it. It's really almost a standalone song. “Eyeball” is a great song, but in some way, it sort of sounds like “Wu-Tang” in the way it works as a song. Harmonically, they might be kind of similar. And that's not necessarily like such a bad thing.
On our very first album, I feel like the songs “Don't Let’s Start” and “Rhythm Section Want Ad” are kind of run parallel to one another in the way they're put together. And they're both really great songs. I'm not sorry that they're both on the same album. I guess to be honest, our preset for how we sequence our records is we tend to go for maximum variety. And that might not be the smartest way to do it. But when you have songs that sound kind of the same, you can't help but think maybe it's a little bit diminishing.
The album features your live horn section on multiple tracks. How did tracking these songs with the full horn section in mind change your songwriting process?
Oh, it's just really fun writing for horns. I mean that was part of putting the “Peggy Guggenheim” track together was like I just knew that it was going to be a blast recording the live horns and that they would make it sound super swanky. They're incredible musicians. It's always interesting figuring out what's going to happen with them. But we have the great luxury of working with really talented people and that just makes life very, very interesting.
With playing songs live as an eight piece with the horn section, I imagine it's exciting to play in that format.
Oh yeah. I mean, the truth is like what they bring to it is so vivid. It really makes us sit up straight. It's like the more people there are in a bandstand, I think the more responsibility you feel to play well. So, it's definitely been a challenge. It keeps us on our toes. It makes everything sound better. It's great when the horns are playing.
What songs have surprised you most in how they sound with the horns?
Oh, well, I mean, there's so many songs. We have a song called “Call You Mom.” And there's another song called “When Will You Die” that have really active, very almost like Tower of Power horn parts. And they're just amazing.
For tracks such as “I Am Invisible”, you brought back the vintage drum machine. What about that retro gear felt a good fit for this material?
Drum machines were emerging technology when we started. So, a lot of our writing is working with drum machines, working on the computer with beats that we put together. You're always making aesthetic decisions. To be perfectly honest, I think of those drums as just a sound. I don't think of it as being retro in the same way that I just think I'm alive. I don't think too much about being old.
