John Flansburgh Art They Might Be Giants Fan Art

"Volume," the 23rd album from They Might Be Giants, opens with, of all things, a kind of a press briefing.

In the opening rail, "Synopsis for Latecomers," John Linnell invokes a PR flack trying to explain away a series of increasingly ridiculous mishaps—a cargo ship institute abandoned in the desert, a haunted forest, a volcano emerging below the city—that showtime to experience uncomfortably close to our own news cycles. "You'll go your answers," he waves us off, "all in due time."

Linnell and his musical ameliorate one-half, John Flansburgh, have never been about easy answers. As the venerable Brooklyn alt-rock band They Might Be Giants, they write songs that are by turns surreal, funny, challenging, impressionistic—and if you expect likewise close, deeply melancholy. Y'all have to express mirth at They Might Be Giants songs, or else y'all'd weep.

Mayhap it took the by WTF year-and-a-one-half of disasters to put their brand of reality-bending weirdness into perspective for listeners. But one gets the sense that, although the momentum of their current project may have been blunted by the Covid pandemic, Flansburgh and Linnell's enthusiasm for the arts and crafts is equally powerful as ever.

"If y'all ever really want to get in touch on with mortality, be in a rock band for 35 years," Flansburgh jokes. "Keeping things interesting is a big creative and physical challenge. Information technology's taken over our lives in every manner imaginable, and so it's of import to keep it heady."

Now older and wiser—both are at present in their 60s—and perhaps getting a little restless, they've stopped worrying then much virtually how people see them and are focused on pushing musical boundaries while maintaining that inimitable alchemy of "pop" and "weird." (Need a primer? Click here for a TMBG playlist for fans and newbies alike.)

Don't let's starting time
It's been almost twoscore years since their offset gig, at a 1982 Sandinista rally in Cardinal Park. Friends since high school in Lincoln, Massachusetts, Flansburgh and Linnell reconnected in Brooklyn, where they moved in 1981 after higher. They started out playing small shows, just the two of them, an accordion and a drum automobile, and became a key part of the eccentric DIY music scene in 1980s New York City. When a cleaved wrist for Linnell and a burgled apartment for Flansburgh left them unable to play live shows for a bit, they began recording demos that fans—or maybe curious potential fans, as their typical show omnipresence at the time was around 35 people—could call in and heed to as an approachable bulletin. Punch-A-Song quickly became legendary amongst New Yorkers of a certain age (and parents of out-of-area fans hit with unexpected long-altitude telephone bills).

In 1990, "Alluvion" took the band mainstream. Quirky, upbeat songs like "Birdhouse in Your Soul" and "Particle Man"—and the irresistible encompass tune "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)"—are burned into the collective Gen X consciousness, and it's easy to forget the band has put out a score of records since and so. The duo picked up a backing band for 1995'southward "John Henry," gained further popular visibility with their themes for "Malcolm in The Middle" and "The Daily Show" and earned a Grammy for their children's album, "Hither Come The 123s." With a shift to the band format, Flansburgh says their sound got a fiddling safer, simply live shows got actually fun.

"We did a show in Boston where we did all of our songs A-1000, then we did N-Z, on two different nights," Flansburgh recalls. "Just completely random, but we've been writing songs for thirty years, so nosotros can do a set of songs that are A-M and it feels like a valid fix."

A 30th anniversary tour for "Overflowing," interrupted by Covid last yr and now moved to 2022, dovetails with the launch of "Volume" and gives fans a chance to take in the total scope of their work. They've been playing songs from "Mink Car," for example, their semi-obscure eighth album that was released on and quickly eclipsed by the events of 9/xi, then taken out of circulation entirely when the label, Restless Records, went out of business concern.

"Doing 'Mink Automobile' is kind of for us," Flansburgh says. "It was a record we spent a lot of time on and collaborated with the dearly departed Adam Schlesinger [of Fountains of Wayne]. I think it didn't actually go a public hearing because of events beyond anyone's control. It's something nosotros're proud of."

Merely every bit much as the tour might look like a victory lap, the Johns are still more interested in pushing their music frontward. Case in point: a mysterious vocal showed upwards in the setlist early in the tour last year. A fan video of the performance played backwards revealed the band had learned to play and sing "Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love," a deep cut from "Flood," entirely in reverse. Google "Stilloob," ("Bullets," inverted phonetically) and prepare for some major David Lynch vibes.

When I asked if there was some deeper reasoning behind this remix, whether the song had taken on some new significance with age, the tension between entertaining and experimenting peeked through.

"It had nothing to practise with the original vocal," Linnell says. "We were simply trying to come up up with something interesting. It'due south kind of fun to piece together in the laboratory how to perform a song alive with a ring. It'south one of my favorite experiences."

Particle men
Laboratory is a skilful word.

The Johns are as much scientists as artists, and, whether live or in the studio, their music is a testing ground for theories most limerick and experiments with obscure particles of the musical universe. While they oasis't abandoned the raw, crowd-pleasing energy of live shows, they've worked to recapture the eccentric experience of drum machines and synthesizer samples on their recent studio recordings. From 2011's "Join Us" on, the band has taken a sharp plow away from music that sounds kind of like kid stuff into territory increasingly more singular and experimental.

With "Book," they wanted to immerse the listener completely in They Might Be Giants' globe. In improver to a CD, vinyl, cassette and digital release (don't carp trying to snag the very limited edition eight-track; information technology's long sold out), They Might Be Giants have paired the album "Volume" with … yeah, a book.

"On my personal saucepan listing was making a book that was cute and cohesive and dissimilar from the kinds of books I've seen earlier," Flansburgh says. "It wasn't our goal to simply make something fancy, merely to make something fancy that'southward elevated, an interesting object to accept." It was of import to both Flansburgh and Linnell to craft an experience as much as simply release a tape. Flansburgh cites as a lofty inspiration George Harrison's sprawling mail service-Beatles masterpiece "All Things Must Pass."

"With the book, you can command a trivial more," Linnell says. "You're issuing an object with a set sequence of songs; it was meant to be listened to in this way. Online, people kind of download willy-nilly; this was a render to that idea of curating something."

The Johns worked with Brooklyn lensman Brian Karlsson and New York graphic designer Paul Sahre to craft something more than your typical coffee table book of art photography.

Sahre is a longtime collaborator with the band, creating the visual language for the terminal 10 years' worth of their albums, events and music videos. Flansburgh describes him equally "the Jay-Z of graphic design;" Sahre has been a fan since he discovered Dial-A-Song as a pupil in design school. The mutual admiration makes for an like shooting fish in a barrel, organic partnership that helps realize whatever over-the-top ideas the Johns can come up with. In this case, they had been discussing doing a book for some time, and they decided to go "ridiculously analog," as Sahre puts it.

For the book, Sahre manually typed out each of the album's songs on an IBM Selectric III typewriter, creating abstract images from the words. Some lyrics are laid out adequately straightforward; others rotate around the page, stack in layers and coalesce in dumbo, playful, sculptural forms.

"There's ane place where the type runs over itself and spins in this trippy way," Sahre says. "I typed it out directly, then took the sheet out of the typewriter and put it back in at a slightly different angle, lined up ane letter, so typed out the exact aforementioned affair up and down. Over and over."

A spread from 'BOOK," courtesy TMBG

If it sounds crazy, or at least boring, zero expert comes without work.

"Any time you're doing something like this, the appointment is nine-tenths of it. I'll get these cryptic emails from [Flansburgh], 'you are genius' typed backwards, and that's the approval. Information technology's a privilege to work with them," Sahre says. Still, he adds, "If there are whatever graphic designers out there planning something like this, do not exercise it, email me beginning."

Illustrating the songs on "BOOK" with Karlsson's candid, intimate street photography was a natural fit. He was recruited to the project by Sahre, and Flansburgh immediately continued with what he called Karlsson'due south "egoless, outward-looking style." For his office, Karlsson finds They Might Exist Giants' songs to be a perfect match for his approach to making photographs.

"A lot of time you're responding to impulse, whether it's music or photography, and only after, when you're nailing things downward and shifting things around until they fit merely the right way, does it become something special," he says.

His images can be as oblique as They Might Exist Giants' lyrics: a piano half-sunk in sand; an overturned box spilling plastic forks across a sidewalk; a man passing by the camera and his serpentine shadow seemingly seeking escape from his body. And similar their songs, they tin can leave an itch you want to scratch. "I've ever found in all forms of art that things that aren't necessarily completely spelled out are the most interesting, the most evocative," says Karlsson. "If you don't give all the information to the viewer, there tin exist all these different realities."

Wait actually aye no
There'southward a favorite parlor game among hardcore They Might Be Giants fans, trying to suss out subconscious significant from the band's enigmatic references and tangles of polysyllabic lyrics. A fan-created wiki page, "This Might Be A Wiki," catalogs the latitude of their work, offer sometimes dozens of interpretations for every vocal. Chasing "Particle Human" downward that rabbit pigsty, though, tin be a distraction.

"We're non trying to be unknowable, the masters of mystery," Flansburgh laughs. "Fifty-fifty a song like 'Particle Man,' it'southward a story virtually the characters in the vocal, information technology's near similar a children's rhyme. You'd retrieve the song is like 'Beast Farm': 'Triangle Human is clearly Brezhnev,' and you're like, 'What?'"

OK. But on "Book," similar many of their albums, at that place'due south that tantalizing sense of some undercurrent, a wink and nod just below the surface.

Flansburgh concedes on making an album, "when we pull all the songs together, we sometimes realize the shape of the world we're living in." He compares "Volume" to their 2007 album, "The Else." "[Information technology] was made at the meridian of the Bush administration, and it's a very acid record, it's kind of gloomy in a way. Looking at this record, I come across a picayune of the worry of the Trump assistants maybe infected us inadvertently."

A person could be forgiven for reading political commentary, or at least a sense of profound discontent with the land of the world, into the lyrics of "BOOK." One song observes the unrelenting outrage of "tiny voices trapped in a hothouse without windows, devoid of air / alphabetize fingers raised in objection making circles that lead nowhere." On some other, "Drown the Clown," Linnell sings over the sound of a discordant calliope, "can't resist this rabbit hole / can't deny this troll," almost daring usto estimate which clown he's talking about. He hesitates to indulge the suspicion, though: "I think if you tin can pull off a song that expresses a political view, that seems kind of lucky." But he cautions, "We're not hither to just vent our frustrations. A song with a edgeless political view is oftentimes kind of a vibe killer."

Flansburgh and Linnell each pointed to "If Day for Winnipeg" as 1 of the album's more than satisfying successes. Lyrically, the song is about a grim historical footnote: Canadian government officials attempting to encourage the purchase of war bonds in 1939 apparently staged a mock takeover of the city of Winnipeg; think "War of the Worlds" meets "The Man in the High Castle." The subject affair is specific, weird and surprising, merely it was an afterthought to the music itself.

"The melody suggests the lyric," Linnell says, "rather than the other way effectually."

The song "If Mean solar day" began as a snippet of oddly tuned microtonal bell sounds Linnell was tinkering with. He sent them to Flansburgh, who recombined it with a drum loop and distorted tuba sounds to create a broken-mirror jingle simultaneously cheery and cringey. Flansburgh added the haunting lyric terminal, nearly equally if it had written itself for the song. The track is typical of their improvisational, back-and-forth songwriting.

"For me information technology's interesting to participate in the process. If I'one thousand not the acrobat, I get to be the trampoline builder," says Flansburgh.

On another track, "wait really aye no," Linnell sings virtually a maddening process of sifting through imitation starts to find a coherent idea: "pair of white magician gloves, camels in a caravan / wait um yeah no / thing you lot haven't tried earlier, misremembered anecdote / yep just non that." I tell Linnell I can relate to that sense of mounting desperation and wonder aloud if information technology was a fiddling peek into their process. "No, I didn't really think, 'oh, this one is about songwriting,'" he demurs, I'm sure with an impish grinning. "I like the sense that a vocal exists in an uninterpreted grade."

Before I can press further, the guys behind "Synopsis for Latecomers" remind me, "That's all the questions that time volition let."

'BOOK' embrace, courtesy TMBG

This article offset appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of Brooklyn Magazine. Click here to subscribe today.

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Source: https://www.bkmag.com/2021/11/11/they-might-be-giants-turn-40-with-a-new-album-an-art-book-and-a-tour/

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