The EM Poll

Conversing with Giants

Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Geary Yelton

           

They Might Be Giants talks about their personal studios, production techniques, and tag-team songwriting.

BONUS MATERIAL
Read "Conversing with Giants: The Extended Interview"
Gear talk with They Might Be Giants

John Flansburgh (right) sums up TMBG’s niche in popular culture: “On some level, we like to think of ourselves as floating somewhere outside the earth’s gravitational pull.”
Photography by Michael Lavine except where noted othewise.

If you've ever attended a They Might Be Giants concert, you know what an enthusiastic audience the band has. You also know that John Linnell and John Flansburgh, the founders and core members of TMBG, are two of the most inventive, original, and prolific songwriters you'll find anywhere. Based in New York, the two Johns (as they're affectionately called by their fans) have been writing, recording, and performing songs together since 1982.

Linnell and Flansburgh spent their early years performing as a duo in alternative rock clubs and performance-art spaces, quickly attracting a dedicated following and eventually landing airplay, first on college radio and soon thereafter on MTV and Nickelodeon. Their breakthrough 1990 album, Flood, yielded two of their most enduring hits: “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and a remake of the 1953 classic by the Four Lads, “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” Their popular Dial-A-Song telephone service has been available since 1984, and they've been distributing their music on the Web for more than a decade, with free and paid MP3 downloads and frequent Podcasts.

In 2002 TMBG won a Grammy for the theme song to the TV show Malcolm in the Middle. They also recorded the theme and created the incidental music for Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. Just describing all their accomplishments could easily fill a feature-length article.

I recently caught up with the two Johns shortly before a performance at the Neighborhood Theatre in Charlotte, North Carolina. They invited me aboard their tour bus and graciously answered more questions than EM has room to print. You can find an extended version of this interview at www.emusician.com (see the online bonus material).

DO YOU HAVE PERSONAL STUDIOS IN YOUR HOMES?

JF: I have two personal studios. I have my studio in Brooklyn that we used to rehearse at and one upstate in the Catskills. I spend about half my time up there.

WHAT KIND OF SETUP DO YOU HAVE?

JF: Our setups are pretty simple. Basically, we're just running Digital Performer and a bunch of [MIDI modules].

JL: We recently moved over to a lot of software — samplers and synths — from unreliable hardware. We have [Mac] G5s.

JF: We kind of came up with MIDI before digital recording.

YOU USED THE ORIGINAL MOTU PERFORMER, DIDN'T YOU?

JL: Yeah, exactly.

JF: I think our very first album has some Performer tracks.

JL: Well, no, the first album was all drum machine synced to the timecode on one of the tracks on the 8-track. And then the second record, we got the Mac Plus running Performer — version 1, I think. Pretty much just the drums and bass were on the computer. For some moronic reason, I insisted on playing the keyboards live, even though we'd already learned to start doing that stuff. Lincoln is all human, nonquantized keyboards.

YOU DIDN'T WANT TO SEQUENCE THE KEYBOARDS?

JL: We were just dipping our toe into sequencing at that point.

DOES TECHNOLOGY GET IN YOUR WAY A LOT WHEN YOU'RE TRYING TO GET AN IDEA DOWN?

JL: Absolutely, yeah. I thought that's what it was for [laughs].

YOU'VE WORKED WITH A LOT OF PRETTY ACCOMPLISHED PRODUCERS OVER THE YEARS, AND YOU'VE PRODUCED YOURSELF ON A FEW ALBUMS. HOW DID THE EXPERIENCE OF WORKING WITH THE DUST BROTHERS COMPARE?

JL: It was completely different from everything we've done before. We worked with producers who, in a certain way, were kind of traditional. They want to take the material and just sort of polish it, and [the Dust Brothers] were not interested in that approach. It was a great, different direction for us to go into, because they were willing to [mess things] up. It's just like, throw all the cards in the air and try something else. In some ways the actual process was frustrating, because they work so differently from the way we work that it took some patience on our part to get to that.

JF: It's hard to explain the difference between them and other producers. Because they are coming from sort of a hip-hop background, they're not worried about preparation time. They're in the studio trying things every which way they can imagine. Even if they think they've got something that's good, they're interested in experimenting to some degree to make something great. John and I tend to give ourselves very free rein when we're off the clock. If we're in a project studio, we do all these very time-intensive things that sometimes [are] fruitful and sometimes aren't. But then when we actually get into the studio and we're working with our band, we're quite deliberate and quite focused and tend to work extremely fast.

Most engineers that we work with have a hard time keeping up with us. One of the things about working with Pat Dillett, our long-term collaborator and coproducer, is that he's one of the few people who's really capable of working at this manic pace that we're working.

Working with the Dust Brothers was a big lifestyle adjustment for us because we had to accommodate their pace, which was just much, much slower. Sometimes it was hard to know even what we were trying to achieve. We would have already recorded the track that would be the final track, but we were trying to figure out if we could top it. That's just a luxury that we've never afforded ourselves. We've always had small budgets, and we just kind of came up that way. The time that you're in the studio, you're on the clock.

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