Since the mid-1980s, They Might Be Giants? have been releasing wonderfully quirky, thought provoking music. Over the years, they have grown beyond the initial line-up of The Two Johns (Flansburgh and Linnell) and have reached a level of comfortable success that most bands can only dream of. John Flansburgh recently took the time to talk to us about the band, children’s music, the state of the music industry and a few other things.

REAX: After all that TMBG has done; after all the musical ground you’ve covered throughout the years, how would you describe TMBG to someone who has never heard the band?
JOHN: When I get into a taxi carrying a guitar, inevitably the taxi driver will say, “What kind of music do you play?” Typically I say we play rock music, kind of like The Beatles? but with more personal, idiosyncratic kind of lyrics. There’s a level of casting about and experimentation that we’re always kind of drawing on. Not that our music is experimental in nature, but sort of the inquiry of what we’re doing. As songwriters and producers, we’re trying to stretch out all the time. And then there’s parts of it that harkens back to traditional song writing. We write choruses and verses; use rhyme and things that are in many ways old-fashioned 20th century ideas; and maybe the most old-fashioned of them being melody. I’ve had conversations with musicians about how melody is kind of passé. I have a hard time excepting that. It does seem that for a lot of people that it’s not that big a component of what they’re excited about with music.

REAX: You’re right on, it does seem to be lacking from a lot of music that is shoved down the throats of the masses. Even someone as experimental as Sonic Youth are, their last few albums have been choke-full of guitar hooks, as most of their “rock” albums have been.
JOHN: They were always very riff-based. For many guitar players, it’s the power of the riff. Its kind a great thing. But music just keeps evolving.

REAX: That it does, but sometimes not for the better.
JOHN: There’s always a lot crap. When I was a teenager, it seemed that it couldn’t possibly get any crappier.

REAX: But it did.
JOHN: (Laughter) One of the very nice things about being impossibly old is you can hear music that you grew up with but with a sort of evolving context. I was a teenager during the Led Zeppelin years as well as the disco years. In both cases, the audience for that music was really intolerable for kind of opposite reasons. It was really hard to separate the music and it’s place in the culture. Now that it’s all very much in the past, I can hear that music and appreciate it for what it is and in a lot of cases; the music is actually quite glorious. It was hard to feel positive about it at the time. All my associations with it were these very unpleasant, popular threads of culture, a lot of dumb people.

REAX: That still happens. There has been music that I’ve despised earlier. I have gone back and revisited this music to find how wonderful it was after the fact.
JOHN: It’s one of the things that make it tricky to really understand popular music out of context. You don’t hear it; you don’t take it in that way. It’s so often about a time and a place.

REAX: The current trend for a few years now has been for musicians to play one of their signature albums from front to back in concert. Some seem to have embraced this from the start; others have been more reluctant but still enjoyed the process and the outcome. How did the Flood shows come about and how are they going?
JOHN: We’ve done it periodically over the past decade or so. We try to come up with excuses to play in New York as much as we can because we’re lazy and we don’t want to travel. We’ll do these stands where we play different shows or different sets. A while back we got the Flood album under our belts. We’ve played a number of full album shows for different albums over the years in New York. What’s curious about this tour is we’re promoting a family album but many days of the week we’re playing in adult rock clubs where kids are not allowed. We’re going back to a lot of places that we’ve played in the last couple of years. Just given the unique circumstances of this tour it seemed the right moment to actually do these Flood shows just as a way to change up the show for people who are coming back after our 2007/08 touring. It’s seems like a way of doing almost like a greatest hits show but the truth of it is that we would play Birdhouse or Istanbul at any given show. Those are some of our most popular songs. We would play them at virtually every show. To actually go back and play all these album cuts is actually a much more challenging performance than it is like a big nostalgia show. There are a lot of songs that are actually kind of strange off that record. It’s really interesting and fun for us.

REAX: How is writing a children’s album different that writing a “rock” or “adult” album?
JOHN: In some ways it’s very much the same. I think we have very high standards about how we approach the kid’s stuff. It’s probably the secret to the success of the kid’s stuff. We spend a lot of time putting the tracks together and making the albums work. You hear about a lot of kid’s projects that are kind of done on the cheap. I think ultimately there can be interesting material but it’s nice to hear a well-recorded record.

REAX: I have a 5-year-old son, and he’s very into music. He loves the TMBG children’s music but isn’t interested in a lot of other children’s music. Frankly, I don’t think most of it (other children’s music) is very good.
JOHN: What’s strange is the second you start doing children’s music you get elevated to being an expert in children’s music. I had a very awkward exchange with the New York Times a couple of years ago where they wanted me to review a bunch of children’s records. I was listening to the records to review and I’m in no way an expert of kid’s music. I don’t even have a kid, but I am a big music fan. I can think about it critically. A lot of it is very fluffy stuff. I’m not sure what makes children’s music so successful. There is something irreducible about a good song. If it’s interesting and has good ideas and has some elements of surprise to it, it’s going to capture everybody’s imagination. Writing for kids, what you see is what you get. Kids are not going to be fascinated with your biography. They’re not coming at it with a notion of history or culture. They’re just experiencing a song in a very immediate way, which is great if you’ve got something very immediate to say.

REAX: I’ve noticed that with the TMBG children’s records (compared to artists that are putting out music exclusively for children) the TMBG stuff doesn’t talk down to kids. It’s approached in a very intelligent way. The music is intelligent and the lyrics are intelligent. Where as other artists are singing about “What’s your favorite color?” or something very trivial. There is a subject matter and a very educational bit that goes along with your stuff.
JOHN: As I said, I’m not really up to date on a lot of kid’s stuff. There is a general movement to raise the general quality but I’m not that well versed in it, so I’m sort of loath to comment. As a naturally suspicious person, I can’t help to wonder if a lot of our success comes out of the mediocrity of the general scene.

REAX: It probably goes both ways. It is very good music, that’s really the point, as you said before.
JOHN: We work very hard at it. We invest a lot of ourselves into it. We approach doing kids albums with as much rigor and intensity as we do adult albums. They’re real projects and they’re artistic efforts and hopefully that shows.

REAX: TMBG has recorded 14 albums (four of which are children’s albums), won two Grammys, done theme songs from various TV shows, written songs for a Dunkin Doughnuts ad campaign and were even the spokesband for the “International Space Year” in 1992. Back in 1986, did you ever think that any of this would happen? Was it your plan from the start to slowly take over the world?
JOHN: We don’t have very much perspective on that. I remember when our first album came out it was a tremendous victory for us. We had been a local band in New York for three or four years and were on a very low trajectory. It’s been kind of a dream. We have a strange kind of success because we’re not so big where we can’t just walk around the world and have our civilian lives. There is certainly room for improvement. We could be wealthier and more successful, that’s for sure. It’s a great life and I’m really grateful that we’ve been able to keep as musically active for as long as we have. There never came a breaking point where we couldn’t carry on for one reason or another. After 25 years, there is a lot of potential for catastrophe; you know, health issues, a million things could happen. It’s been great that we’ve had such luck keeping the wheels on the bus, as they say.

REAX: Several years ago, you were one of the first bands to have their own online music store and you were the first major label band to release a download-only album. Other artists are now taking to the Internet to release music. What is your take on the state of the music industry and where does it go from here with this new model?
JOHN: In general, we don’t really think of ourselves as early adopters but we’re open to the idea of putting stuff out there in new ways. It’s an interesting challenge for us on a creative level. Going all the way back to Dial-A-Song to now making audio podcasts, it helps us battle off our natural tendencies to be very precious about what we do. In terms of natural temperament, there’s not much different between us and a band like Steely Dan. In a different time, in a different generation we could be the band that is held up in the studio for two years working on 20 seconds of recorded information. I think we beat all the odds by being a prolific, easy-breezy band in the way we put our self out there.

I think the writing has been on the wall for a long time. It was very hard for people to accept in the beginning of the 2000’s that the music business was going to be in such trouble. To a certain extent, the music industry was really it’s own worst enemy. That book, “Appetite For Self Destruction” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/books/07garn.html) does a complete job of outlining the problems of the music industry. But beyond that, I think the general public kind of fell for the party line of the music business a little bit to fully. The music business has always been a bigger struggle than people realize.

The myths of Elvis Presley?, The Beatles? and Michael Jackson?; the nature of selling music as a superstar platform, that’s an idea that is very hypnotizing to the public but it’s not that based in reality. In a way, the record industry wasn’t doing itself any favors by creating all this distance between the artist and the audience. The real cognitive dissonance is when you get people like Metallica jumping through that fourth wall of superstardom and grousing about lost royalties from Napster. They are very unsympathetic characters. They’ve been built up in the public’s image so much as these untouchable billionaires. It doesn’t even make sense.

A lot of people assume that we’re millionaires. It’s very confusing to people that we are so earth-bound in our lives. But that’s the deal. But now, it’s 2010 and the whole record industry has completely imploded. I don’t think it’s ever coming back. I don’t think there are any working models for selling music that make any sense at all. It’s sort of a downward spiral; but hey, our parents grew up with poetry and you don’t hear about to many poets anymore either.

REAX: What’s next for TMBG? Is there a new rock album in the works?
JOHN: We’re making some inroads on the rock album. We’re doing an educational project. We’re talking to PBS and 13 (which is the local New York Station) about doing an educational project with them. But for me personally, I really want to get back to the good ship rock. I like making music for adults. I’m kind of itching to get another rock album out and get back to where we started.