Founded in the 1980’s by Massachusetts natives John Linnell and John Flansburgh, “They Might Be Giants” has established a cult following with decades of music — including children’s albums and the Grammy-winning theme song to Malcolm in the Middle.
The early 2000’s sitcom got a revival this year, but “They Might Be Giants” never left. The band has a new album out and they’ll be at the House of Blues on June 5 and June 6. GBH’s Tori Bedford spoke with Linnell ahead of their stop in Boston. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Tori Bedford: So this is your 24th album, and we just talked — you have countless EPs and singles and songs for children’s movies and books and creative projects. I don’t know how many songs you have. Do you know how many songs you have?
John Linnell: No. There’s a wonderful website somebody put together that is a compendium of everything there is to know about us. And we actually, John [Flansburgh] and I, will go and refer to it. It’s just an exhaustive enumeration of everything we’ve ever recorded and every show we’ve ever done.
Bedford: I mean, yeah, it’s a decades-long career, and I’m just so curious about how you do it, like how you continue to be so prolific, how you deal with burnout, if you have periods of writer’s block or struggles with mental health that prevent you from feeling creative. I mean, you’re just always making. How do you do that?
Linnell: How do you know me so well, Tori? You know, it is a big struggle, but we’ve made a bunch of changes over the years, especially recently. We, for a long time, were doing tours on buses, and we’d play every single night in a different town. And we’ve kind of put the lid on that. We tend to do this sort of thing where we’re coming to a city and playing multiple nights. That’s much easier for us, and the way we structured the show — personally, I have just started sitting down on stage. As of about a year ago, which I never did in the 40 years that we were playing before that. I’ve been standing up for that entire time, but I play the keyboards, so it’s actually kind of considered normal to sit down in front of a keyboard, and I’m finally, you know, acquiescing to that.
Bedford: In the spirit of talking about working around struggles to create something new, can you talk about “Dial-A-Song” and how it was created, and the circumstances around it that sort of led you to get to the point where you made it?
Linnell: We kind of early on, we had a lot of ideas, you know, about how to do things that circumvented the usual channels of trying to get a major label deal, which is what everybody was doing. And then we — we had a series of mishaps. I fell off my bicycle and broke my wrist, and John Flansburgh got his apartment broken into, and lost a bunch of important gear for our live show. So basically, we couldn’t perform live. And Flansburgh said, “Well, why don’t we try this goofy dial-a-song idea?” And I kind of thought we’d get into trouble for doing it for some reason. It seemed like, ”Is this, like, legal?“ We got a phone machine and we put all our songs on it on a kind of rotating basis. And then we advertised in places. And it kind of, it kind of fortified this thing generally that we were cultivating, which was getting people to have a sort of personal connection to what we’re doing, like that they felt like we were their discovery. I think Dial-A-Song really helped that idea along.
Bedford: I know somebody, I just have to ask, who used to hack into people’s voicemail machines in the '80s and '90s. Did that ever happen to you guys with this?
Linnell: That did happen to us. I think they broke into our manager’s answering machine, you know, back when answering machines were these plastic boxes that you had on your desk. And not only figured out the codes, the remote codes for manipulating his machine, but listened to all his incoming messages and got the phone numbers of everybody else. And then he started doing it to us. He did it— he broke into my machine, and it was a total nightmare. It was really creepy and made us intensely paranoid.
Bedford: I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh at that. I just think it’s such a — it’s of a time.
Linnell: Oh, it’s— yeah, it’s funny that you brought that up. That— I mean, that’s way in the past now, but yeah, it made us super paranoid.
Bedford: I do think that your music, it’s very open-minded, and I think there’s a spirit of weird — good weirdness. There’s good weirdness. It reminds me kind of the ethos of people. I love Paul Reubens. He made stuff for adults and kids and always encouraged people to be themselves, even in a world where people weren’t necessarily ready to accept that.
Linnell: Yeah, I agree. I agree. You saw that documentary?
Bedford: Yeah.
Linnell: Yeah. He’s great. He’s an inspiring person.
Bedford: But I feel like you do a similar thing where, you know, you’re kind of — there’s a lot of messages, especially in the children’s songs, that are like, you should just be yourself, not be judged by the world. And where does that come from?
Linnell: I think that’s just our general feeling about, that’s who we were growing up. John and I felt like we were outliers when we were in high school together. We gradually realized in the fullness of time that everybody kind of felt that way. It wasn’t just us. It was like ... you know, that was kind of normal.
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