On taking the unexpected path

I’ve got young twins, so I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing a second relationship with your art. I was already a fan of They Might Be Giants, then all of a sudden I’m a fan through my kids listening to your music. There’s this unique double-sided fandom.

That’s so sweet. When we started doing kids music, it was a parallel career. We thought, “We’ll do this as a side project.” At the moment we did it, we were probably about as broke as we’ve ever been. It was like, “Let’s figure out a way to not be quite so broke right now.” If you’ve been in a band for 20 years, you’re thinking, “Will I ever buy a car? Will I ever do normal adult things?” You’re committed to your band and you’re like, “I swear I will never sell out the way all these other rock people sold out.” But then at a certain point, you’re also like, “But can I even just buy into a middle class existence?”

What was weird is that it took off in this huge way that was not anticipated at all. And in some ways it got a crazy amount of press attention because it was a real “man bites dog” story. Nobody was thinking They Might Be Giants was a band that was going to work for kids. I think in some ways what we were doing was a little bit meta and a little bit sophisticated and considered kind of artsy. But we figured out a way to thread the needle and do stuff that worked for kids, and it was a long run for us. I mean, we ended up making five kids records. We got a Grammy and we sold this sick number of records.

Did you buy that car?

And at the age of 62, I actually bought a new car. [laughs] I had never bought a new car in my life. And that was very exciting. But all things being equal, it was never our dream or our goal.

You shifted the concept of what children need to listen to. Even if you didn’t intend to lead a double artistic life, I can imagine those two sides fit together better than you expected.

You don’t know how something’s going to land. When we were doing the first kids record, we were probably at our most idealistic about what a kids record could be. We would think of references like Dr. Seuss or Bugs Bunny, things that were straight up great in their own specific way and don’t have the weird aftertaste of a lot of stuff that’s made for kids. Later on, out of necessity, we actually leaned on making stuff educational. The veneer of education is a cultural Trojan horse to get us out of the Walmart on Disney records and into the homes of unsuspecting parents everywhere. And then just lay our crazy They Might Be Giants stuff on them.

I hear you saying that you weren’t sure how it would be received, but you two seem aware of what your fans want. Not that it’s contrived strategy, but look at the way you’ve evolved your live shows. You’ve changed and grown with your audience.

Live is different. In a sense because live is the most contrived. I mean, live is theater. We’re designing the experience that everybody’s going to have, and we know how certain songs wash over people. We have a repertoire, we have limitations as performers, and we have a lot of life experience. We did a lot of touring before anybody knew who we were, and that made us better performers. But when you’re writing a song or putting a record together, the weird thing is you’re constantly being born again. You’re reinventing. You have some thread of an idea, and you don’t really have the awareness.

Different songwriters are different. Different performers are different. I don’t care for the music of U2, but I have to respect their ability to understand how to write to an audience. The most successful people in music and the most successful entertainers are people who know how it’s going to land in the audience all the way down the line. They’ve got some kind of crazy 1000-mile stare. You think of a band like Queen. It’s like, “When we get to the arena, this is going to really kill them.” I can’t even see past the empty page on my desk, let alone think about people stomping their feet in arenas. I’m just trying to figure out a word that rhymes with orange.

You’re not giving yourself enough credit. On your Big Show Tour, you’ll be playing different setlists night to night, even in the same city, with a big band. While you’re not thinking about arenas, you are thinking about what your fans would love.

On a practical level, on a band management level, I’m just trying to figure out how to hold onto a horn section. It’s so exciting to have that sort of musical Saturn V rocket on our backs when we do a show. The horn section, they are the show makers. They can do a chart that sounds like an amazing velvet curtain of sound behind us, or they can improvise insane stuff that has crazy extra energy to it. Beyond that, there’s a liveliness to the sound. It’s so vivid. It’s exciting for us.

When you’re playing in an eight-piece band, there’s seven other people who are listening to what you’re doing. It makes you sit up a lot straighter. It’s a personal challenge to everybody to keep your musicianship as high as it can possibly be. John and I started as a duo, and then we added players. Now we have horn players. Do you work with people who are just as good as you? Who are worse than you? Or better than you? John and I have always made a point of working with people who are better than us, and by and large people who are much better than us, which is a weird dynamic. There’ll be times when we’ll be rehearsing and we’ll say something about the structure of a song that we wrote, and Danny, our bass player, who has an incredible musical memory will be like, “No, that’s not how this song goes.” And it’s like, “Oh, okay. All right. Sorry, Danny.”

Do you keep that perspective throughout the rest of your life? You don’t want to be around somebody that’s going to judge you, whether it’s about your art or about your personality, but the longer you live an artistic life there’s the risk of getting complacent. You could just be like, “Well, let’s churn out the same stuff.” But you don’t do that.

We try hard. I think about someone who’s taken to the show by their husband who’s much more into the band than they are. That is a big component of making the show really great: figuring out what we can do that has a strong enough pull. I think in general people put a lot more emphasis on hits or popular songs or radio songs than really trying to figure out a repertoire that has a linear, more theatrical appeal.

I remember when John [Linnell] brought the song “Older” into the show. That song has the line, “You’re older than you’ve ever been, and now you’re even older.” And as you hear the song, it’s just this linear gag that the first time you hear it is really interesting because you really don’t know what’s going to happen next. And it’s just very in the moment. And as something you experience in seeing a band, you kind of can’t underestimate how great that kind of experience is. It’s like, “Wow. I’m watching the show and I’m living completely in the immediate moment listening to this song.”

We got a chance to play that song a bunch before we even recorded it. These days with YouTube and everything kind of spoiling things, you’re really dissuaded from working stuff out live. When we first started, we would do songs live that were years away from being recorded. And that was a whole other element to the show that was kind of interesting. We had a lighting guy who was in The Breeders crew. He worked for the Pixies for years and years. And he said that when The Breeders did their first tour in the United States, they actually played all the songs that were on their first album, their first full album, but they didn’t have any of the words sorted out. So [Kim Deal] would just kind of mumble through a bunch of stuff incoherently. They were playing in clubs. You couldn’t necessarily hear the songs that clearly anyway, so it wasn’t any great loss. But they basically workshopped their album on tour, which sounds thrilling.

When you have the longevity that you two have as a duo, how does it feel to not have that fluidity anymore, to not have that likelihood of failure in a live experience?

It’s interesting. Our career doesn’t rely on a new album being successful. That is a level of achievement that only comes to certain legacy bands, and that’s a nice place to be. In a lot of ways, and this sounds funny, but I mean it quite sincerely, we’ve essentially clawed our way to the middle. And that’s not the most comfortable place to be in rock music. When you look around, you realize that it’s actually kind of a precarious place to be. Most of the time things are either something that blew up so huge, so long ago, that it has its own fixed audience that’s never going to leave them, or the audience left them so long ago that they’re never coming back. We’ve done enough festival shows with bands that blew up at some point, and then you realize they’re not even playing at the local club or the theater down the street. They need other people’s audiences to get people out for them, which is a really weird existence.

But where do you want to be?

I want to be exactly where we are, because I feel like playing in legit theaters with real sound systems is the most complimentary place for a band like us. The sound is actually good, so the theatrical experience is actually a quality experience for the people in the audience. I much prefer playing for 1500 people or less. I’ve played plenty of places that hold 3000 people or 4000 people, and I can tell you, it’s not really as cool, in terms of just what people are experiencing.

On the opposite end of human experience, I wanted to ask something related to the horrible car accident you were in that led to postponing a lot of tour dates in 2022.

Oh, it was horrible. Don’t drive drunk. I mean, I wasn’t driving drunk. I got hit by a drunk driver, and it was terrible.

I wanted to say I’m really glad you’re okay, but also when it happened, postponing the tour, did you for a second think, “I don’t need to be doing this. I could be at home relaxing.”

Well, the thing is, it was after the first show we had done since COVID. I was taking an Uber home and it was so life-affirming. And to be perfectly honest with you, having shows to get back to really helped me heal faster. If you have a reason to get better, you’re just going to will yourself to get better that much faster. When we started doing shows, I was in no condition to really do shows. Obviously this country is in a very weird opiate mania right now, but living with actual active physical pain that never goes away, I can really understand how people get hooked on those kind of drugs. If you have a situation where you just can’t either mentally or physically escape the pain of living, suddenly a terrible idea seems like the greatest idea in the world.

When you go through an accident like that and you are somebody who is needed in the public, whether it’s for yourself, for John, for your band, or for your crew, it must put an enormous amount of pressure on you. I know John wasn’t beating down your door like, “Get up from bed! Let’s go!” But still…

For me, it’s the best kind of pressure, the best kind of incentive. I feel very fortunate. I don’t think the appeal of what we’re doing is that universal, but it does find an audience that does find it very specifically interesting. And I’m very glad that it’s worked out that way.

As you go through massive events in your life, both negative and positive, do you feel the same way writing new songs as you did when you first started the band?

It’s a weird challenge. When you’re writing songs that lean on nouns as much as ours do, it’s hard to think, “Oh, I’ll write a song about a bird.” And then you’re like, “Oh, wait, wait. We already have a song about a bird.”

A really famous one. Yeah.

Yeah. And in that way, things start getting in the way of what might be your most natural tendency, because obviously you don’t want to repeat yourself. It’s hard enough writing a song and not bumping into a much better song by Cole Porter. Nobody wants to be in a competition with Prince. If you’re in a competition with Prince, you are going to lose. But what’s beautiful about writing a song is that you’re in dialogue with all these songs. You might be writing a song and you realize like, “This is kind of like a song that was written 100 years ago.”

We had a weird work-for-hire situation when we were working with Disney. The head of the Disney Network called us up and they were like, “We had a song already in place for this Mickey Mouse Clubhouse thing, but we’re not going to use it. And we’re wondering if basically over the weekend can you cook up a theme song for this animated series?” And the thing that’s tough about it was a really tight deadline.

That’s fine. I’ve done stuff for advertising in TV and TV shows, and I’ve gotten very used to writing with a deadline. Sometimes it actually kind of helps because it just focuses your effort. But I’m up here in Sullivan County in the Catskill Mountains, and we had friends over for the weekend and my wife is like, “Come on, what is this? What are you doing? We were going to have fun this weekend. No need to work.” But the friends that we had over were musicians as well, and then they ended up singing on this song as well. But when I was putting the track together…

The other thing is, they specifically wanted the song to spell out Mickey Mouse. It’s like, “Oh, okay. How hamstrung can you get?” You’re really making it very hard to not have us just be a satellite. But the one thing that I picked up on with the original is that the way that the original did it, it was sort of mono-melodic. It’s just repeating the same note over and over again. So I made mine completely scale-wise. It was like an arpeggio going M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E in this up and down thing. It’s moving as much as possible.

The other thing is, I quizzed the people at Disney about the history of Mickey Mouse as a character. Because I had nothing to work on and I had to get these songs done in two seconds. So I was like, “Does he have a slogan? Does he have a catchphrase?” And they’re like, “Oh, yeah. He’s, like, Mickey Mouse. You know? Mickey Mouse?” [laughs] But somebody there knew enough about it that evidently his first little catchphrase was “Hot dog!”

How do you feel when you get the call for a project like that? What do you need to feel confident?

It’s much more like being a tailor. What makes it easy is that it’s a very egoless process. What you’re doing isn’t really going to reflect on your feelings about your own identity. In a way, it’s the least self-conscious way of working because you’re just working in the abstract. You’re working on behalf of somebody else who can’t put the music together. We’ve done bigger jobs where we’ve done libraries of music and soundtracks to TV shows where we’ve had to do soundalikes, and that can really feel like a weird kind of homework. Some things are just very hard to reproduce, even in the most general sense.

When we were doing the music for Malcolm in the Middle, they would be putting in these very imaginative sound cues. They would have some reggae tone or some actual ska music from 1962, and it’s very hard to reproduce that vibe on a computer. You’re working with a set of sounds that are in some ways inherently electronic, even as vivid as they can be. Their limitations are very immediate. And you’ve got a piece of music that they want the exact vibe of, but it was recorded on an island 50 years ago. But I enjoy that kind of challenge.

Right after we left Elektra, we got all these work-for-hire things, as I said, to keep ourselves alive. But it helped in learning how to work really fast. We basically started from 1990 till 2000, working slower and slower and slower, in that way that rock bands who have record deals do. And then all of a sudden we were in the all-you-can-rock buffet trying to just churn stuff out as quickly as possible. But you get a lot of good skills and you learn how to do it.

Over COVID, having a lot of downtime, I started examining my record collection and started examining the history of music that I fell in love with. I got back into music listening more over COVID. And quite specifically, it rekindled my love of The Beatles. And I have to say, talk about writing on a deadline. The worst deadline of my life was just like any day of their career. And their work ethic was just so…Everything about The Beatles was extra amazing to me. They’re so stylish and so smart, and then all their songs are great.

Do you contextualize failure in comparison to a level of perfection like that?

I’ll give you a perfect example. We made an album called John Henry that was contoured. It was too long. It was too normal sounding. And it didn’t have any of these sort of exceptional things that They Might Be Giants offers as a project. Part of that was we were working with a producer. It was at a very specific time, which was a kind of a post-grunge time. Everybody at your record company, they’re all on your side. They all want you to have success. But their idea of success is really contoured by a lot of often very short-lived musical trends.

There were people at Elektra who loved us as a project, and there were people at Elektra who did not love us as a project. One of the reasons they didn’t love us as a project is because a lot of people who worked at record companies loathe the idea of novelty acts. Novelty acts require all the work of having a hit record, but you can’t really build on it in the same way. And I think they perceived us at best as being a novelty act. But, in fact, there were other acts on the label that were much closer to being novelty acts, but they just didn’t feel that way. There’s some high points in John Henry. There’s some really odd things on the album. But overall, I feel like it’s very mid-tempo and… It just seems very safe. And I don’t think anybody wants to hear They Might Be Giants being safe.

We were also in this huge transition, because it was the first record we were making with a full band. We didn’t have a big skillset of how to make a live recording sound edgy. There’s certain ways you can approach recording a live band where you’re painting yourself into a corner to make it be extreme and make it be powerful and make it be vivid. But that involves decision making. And everything about modern recording, especially then, was about maintaining maximum flexibility till the end. Nobody ever committed to anything. Nobody ever said, “Well, that’s a weird sound, but let’s go with it.” It was really like, “Well, that sounds good, and it’s clean enough that if we want to replace it later, we can replace it.” But it’s like, we don’t want to replace it later. I don’t want to come back to this. Let’s just do it up all the way.

But that speaks to your intentionality as an artist, where even a mailing list email will have that passion. Heck, when you announced the car accident it was poetic. Is that a part of your artistic business or is that just the way you’d write even if it were more personal?

John and I share this impulse that the great thing about the legacy of rock bands in general is that you have this opportunity to keep on making everything new again. If you can take advantage of that, it’s just such an opportunity. There’s so many ways that creative people get boxed in. And if you keep your eye on the ability to get the most out of whatever platform you’ve been given, it’s a wonderful energy to surround your project with.

We’ve been early adopters with a lot of technological changes, and it’s the legacy of doing this Dial-A-Song project early on in our career that we felt like we’re not worried about working with computers, we’re not worried about putting our music online. We’re doing a lot of things with technology. To us those are opportunities to expand our audience. Those are opportunities to work in a different way. It’s not about getting there first, or trying to find glory in something, so much as it is about just enjoying the possibility of experimenting. And that’s a really interesting way to run your creative endeavor. The identity of the band is so wrapped up in that, that it kind of rubs off even on doing like an email blast to a mailing list. We want it to be personal. We want it to be us. We’re regular people doing regular things with lots of regular worries, but when it comes to the band that we’re in, we want it to be a dream.