They Might Be Giants’ John Linnell (right) and John Flansburgh play the Rio Sunday.
John Linnell may seem to be having a lot of fun.
The They Might Be Giants accordion player composed a guide for how to build and grow a robot population, which became the title track for the band’s new album Nanobots. At their last Santa Cruz show, he and guitarist John Flansburgh divided the audience in half with a flashlight and made half the crowd chant “People! People! People!” while the other half chanted “Apes! Apes! Apes!” And both front men have a knack for writing ridiculously short songs.
Indeed, given the group’s bouncy melodies and quirky (if at times dark) lyrics, it’s easy to picture Linnell and Flansburgh hanging out with a drum machine, a box of crayons and a half-ounce of weed to write songs. But in fact, music is a tough job.
“It was hard in the first place. It’s hard to write songs,” Linnell told Santa Cruz Weekly on the phone in advance of TMBG’s show at the Rio this Sunday. “It was always hard. It gets harder the more you do it, mainly because you’re trying to find something new to say. You don’t want to repeat yourself. You want to improve on what you’ve done already. It’s a really hard job that just seems to get harder.”
Take for example, “Call You Mom,” Linnell’s upbeat-sounding love song off the new album—their sixteenth—told to a woman the speaker wants to call his mother. Linnell says the music for the song, which has guitar riffs reminiscent of ’60s rock, and a key change after verse three, came first. Then he wrote two versions of lyrics, and threw them out before reimagining the song as it is now. “There are times when it’s a slog. You’re piling it up brick by brick,” Linnell says.
Linnell and Flansburgh have been slaving away over 30 years. They Might Be Giants released their self-titled debut on cassette through Bar None Records in 1986, and went platinum four years later with 1990’s Flood.
The band garnered further acclaim when they won two Grammys, one for Malcolm in the Middle’s theme song “Boss of Me,” and a second for Here Come the ABC’s—one of their four kid’s albums. Linnell, surprisingly, hasn’t decided if music is a good way to teach kids, but he says it can help them memorize stuff.
“You remember peculiar things—like oddball things that you wouldn’t even think were going to be memorable—from hearing them in music,” he says. “I guess that’s the notion of advertising, that you’re putting something in someone’s head with the Trojan Horse of a catchy melody.”
Their latest studio album, though, features what Linnell has called the band’s “adult material” and turned into their most ambitious effort in years—a return to form, reminiscent of 1992’s Apollo 18. The songs on the 25-track Nanobots average about 90 seconds in length, with “Hive Mind,” track 13, clocking in at only six.
“It’s an expression of our love for the insanely brief piece of music, which we rediscovered on the last album,” Linnell says.
He says that when it comes to songwriting, Flansburgh, like himself, has a range of processes: some songs take days, while others he produces in an afternoon. Nanobots’ opening track is Linnell’s “You’re On Fire”—which came quickly as the singer messed around with some major guitar chords.
“There are times when—it’s a bit mysterious—it’s strangely easy,” he says. “I think if we understood how that were possible, the whole thing would be easy. It’s just very odd and lucky that there are times when you sit down to write and everything flows, and it seems like a miracle.”
They Might Be Giants play Sun Oct 27 at 8pm at the Rio Theatre, Santa Cruz.
