By Jim SimpsonTwo-time Grammy winners and college-radio veterans They Might Be Giants bring their playfully surreal sound to Atlanta for two shows at the Variety Playhouse, March 5 and 6. The first is a “grown ups” (14+) show Friday, and a Saturday matinee for families (tickets for both shows are on sale here), where the Johns (Linnell and Flansburgh) will feature their smart, jumpy tunes – and puppets! – just for the kiddies. We spoke with accordion virtuoso John Linnell just before the TMBG show in Tallahassee Wednesday evening.
We’ve always heard that too much television is bad for us, but your music seems to owe a certain amount of its appeal and quirky, goofy charm to that medium.
It had an influence. We felt like TV was just part of the culture, typically, and I think that we’ve had the opportunity, especially over the last 10 years, to pay back our debt by doing television themes, incidental music and commercials.
I was thinking specifically about the selections that appeared on Apollo 18 as “Fingertips,” the 15-second songs that sounded like commercial jingles.
Yeah, I’m glad you pointed that out. Those were based on a kind of TV ad that was prevalent at the time, which was an ad for a collection of songs where they would play just the choruses of each song as the titles scrolled past. For many of those songs, the only versions we got to know were the ones in the commercials, so we only knew just a little snatch of a particular song. It seemed like that was its own kind of music, just knowing only three bars of a song.
You also did a song called “Oranges and Graphic Design” as a commercial for a web design company called The Chopping Block. Were they friends of yours?
They’ve done design work for us and we’ve done jingles for them in return, and we’ve played at parties for them. We’ve had an agreeable relationship with them, and they were just happy to trade with us.
TMBG are well-known for their exceptionally smart lyrics. Are you the primary lyricist?
John and I really do share all the different parts of songwriting. We’ll both write entire songs, for the most part, and we each try our own songs and bring them to the project.
This might not be the best description, but I’ve always got the impression that some of your songs, at least the lyrics, have a sincere insincerity about them, but in a playful way – with healthy does of paradoxical wordplay thrown in.
I don’t know if I’d describe it that way, but there’s kind of an oblique mysterious kind of lyric that we were into fairly early on, a kind of surrealism. But we’ve always done a broad range of types of lyrics with different rhetorical modes … we’ve done stuff that’s very earnest, and we’re ultimately sincere about what we’re doing. There’s not too much that’s unclear about the intent of what we’re doing, there’s nothing hidden. A lot of the songs are just objects that are meant to be appreciated on their own merits.
You’re just laying out interesting ideas for people to think about.
Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it.
Some of your early work has a definite country or roots music feel to it – on a quirky level, to be sure – like “Hideaway Folk Family” and “Alientation’s for the Rich.” Have you ever considered recording your own unique brand of Americana record?
We haven’t really done a stylistally themed album before. We’ve done EPs that have a particular attitude that’s roped together. We had one called The Spine Surfs Alone where the material was more aggressive and sort of a little more demented than usual.
Along with that tour, back in 2004, you did a series of “venue songs” where you wrote and performed original compositions for each city’s venue. You even released an album called Venue Songs. For Atlanta, you wrote “Variety Playhouse Freak-In” that compared our venue to a hospital where the “nurses are guitars” and the audience pays their hospital bills in applause. Will you be playing that this Friday at the “grown up” show?
We absolutely will. We’ll be playing it at the Variety Playhouse grownup evening show, but not at the family matinee show on Saturday.
I would hope not, because the song’s ending is rather freaky.
[Laughs] Right. … Continue Reading
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