The Catalyst interview: They Might Be Giants’ John Flansburgh

They might be high school buddies from the Boston suburbs. They might write quirky, melodic songs and make crazily creative videos to go along with them. They might, on occasion, write and record music for children. They might write imaginary themes for the old Planet of the Apes movies.

They Might Be Giants is the name of the duo, John Flansburgh and John Linnell (aka The Johns), and all of the above is true. Starting as a purely do-it-yourself (DIY) duo on guitar, accordion and vocals, they’ve made nearly 30 albums since 1982, have won two Grammys and the devotion of millions of fans around the globe. These guys are the Steely Dan of whimsy and weirdness.

All of this without ever landing a big hit (although their major-label debut, 1990’s Flood, sold a million copies). The Johns reached a zillion households with “Boss of Me,” their theme song for the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, and with music used in Disney Channel shows. They wrote songs for SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical.

The group (now with six backup musicians) is embarking on a national tour next week, and 17 of the 25 shows sold out before the ink was dry on the announcement (in November).

One exception is Jannus Live in St. Petersburg, where the tour (billed as “The Big Show”) will land Friday, Feb. 28. At press time, fewer than 100 tickets remained, according to John Flansburgh – who kindly spoke to the Catalyst Tuesday afternoon.

St. Pete Catalyst: The Big Show. What does that mean? Aren’t they all big shows?

John Flansburgh: Well, you would hope. But in today’s economy, too many shows are not so big.

The truth is, we’ve actually expanded our live band, from a five-person band to an eight-person band. We’ve got a three-piece horn section. Which is a very nice kind of benefit to everybody. It’s very musical, and it adds a crazy improvisational energy to things that have improvisation in them. And everybody’s kind of on their best behavior; everybody wants to be rehearsed, and nobody wants to be ashamed in front of schooled musicians.

One of the other challenges to the show is that we’re actually doing multiple night stands in a lot of cities. As we go along. There’s a huge amount of repertoire to learn. We’re just trying to keep the ball rolling – it’s a fun show, and there’s a lot of new stuff coming in, and new/old stuff coming in. We’re changing it up.

On your last tour, you played the Flood album in its entirety. What was that experience like?

At the end of it, because stuff had gotten delayed by Covid, which I think was a lot of people’s experience, what seemed like a very thrilling kind of liminal moment was suddenly taking on months and years of our lives.

We’re not the most sentimental guys, and we don’t tend to do things for, like, nostalgia purposes. So it was a little bit out of character for us. But the thing that made it a little bit easier was that the response was so great. From a fan point of view; people were going bananas for it.

So it’s hard to complain. But we will if we have to!

By the end of that tour, were you saying to each other “This wasn’t such a great idea”?

I think it still felt like a pretty great idea, just because it was so successful. But it felt a little bit more like work than it normally does, ‘cause we’re not really obliged to do the same show, over and over again, typically.

People can tell if you’re bored with yourself. And a lot of performers are profoundly bored with themselves. Keeping things challenging on a musical level is really sort of Job One. Having a big portion of the show frozen with a set list dedicated to doing one particular album, we were tippy-toeing close to that kind of problem.

When you have successful songs, you have to play them, right? Some of them in every show.

Listen, there are worse problems. If you’re in a band that endures for a long time, chances are you have a pretty deep catalog. Or to use a sports analogy, you’ve got a deep bench that you can draw on.

We do “Birdhouse in Your Soul” every night, we do “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” every night, but there’ve been shows where we haven’t done those songs, and nobody asked for a refund. But those songs are only like three minutes long, two minutes long, so it’s not the end of the world.

I suspect we’ll play “Particle Man” and who knows what else from Flood. We play a lot of songs from Flood still. Even though we just got off a Flood tour, it’s not like we don’t enjoy playing those songs. It’s fun. It’s a real communication, you know? The audience is very, very vocal, and the energy they put out when we break into those songs is so glorious. We would really have to be a bunch of Scrooges to go “Ehhhh, we’re not doing that.”

Are you still playing the backwards song in these show?

I think we probably will. That was a fun part of the Flood show that kinda came out of left field.

Just for people who don’t understand: When we would do the song “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love,” we would actually perform it, sonically, in reverse, and videotape our performance. And project it, reversed, at the beginning of our second set. It’s a little bit of a magic trick, because I think a lot of people are listening to it just thinking we’re singing in gibberish. They don’t really believe what’s happening.

And then when it gets reversed, it’s very clear that yes, it is a song that has been performed sonically backwards.

Photo by Shervin Lainez.

It always seemed to me that They Might Be Giants got the best of the indie, no-big-record-label experience. That there probably was never anyone telling you what you can and can’t do. Walter Yetnikoff isn’t up in some executive office screaming that he doesn’t hear a single.

In a way, if you go the DIY route, whatever luck you have, you kind of make your own good luck. Because at a certain point, you become very self-defined. The trick of working with a major label, or even more established indie labels – we’ve been on multiple labels over the years – (is that) people have desires for the acts that they sign.

Elektra was by no means a factory. All their acts were quite distinct from one another. They dealt with a lot of artistic temperaments, and a lot of very interesting people. But pretty much their goal was how to get your stuff on the radio. We were not exactly masters of that. We just wanted to figure out how to do something that felt true to us, that also might fit into a radio format. But now, those stations do not exist.

It’s been over 40 years since you and John started making this music. Could you have imagined, then, that you’d still be doing it after all this time? Forty years is a long haul for anybody.

It is a long haul! I certainly never expected it to be this long. When we started the band, I couldn’t really sing and play the guitar at the same time. So it’s not like I had a ton of ambitions for myself before the band kind of took us to another place, professionally.

I think you just kind of deal with things as they come. And this just turned out to be really fun. There’s a lot of interesting opportunities, and we kinda got a lot further than we were anticipating. It’s been kinda great.

Are you ever worried that you’re going run out of ideas?

Oh, I thought we’d run out of ideas in the first six months we started the band! But I’m an art school graduate; one thing that was really transferrable, coming from a visual arts thing, is that you just learn how to experiment. You learn how to challenge yourself in terms of different kinds of goals. And how you approach the problem-solving part of it

I was lucky in that way, because I actually had some kind of training in how to generate new ideas.

Jannus Live ticket link.