[SPEAKER_01]: They say there's nothing new under the sun and ain't that the truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: The working songwriters have been on the air for over 10 years and over 300 episodes now.
[SPEAKER_01]: As you've probably noticed, only the latest 100 published episodes are available in your podcast app and on Spotify, so we're bringing back some of the gems of past years.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What is the vault?
[SPEAKER_01]: The vault is a private member's only section of my website, JoePug Music.com, where you can access any episode of the show for streaming and for download.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the meantime, we're bringing back some classic episodes to the main feed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is this a reason not to join the vault?
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course not.
[SPEAKER_01]: because it means that our latest episodes will only get pay-walled all the sooner.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is this a relatively convoluted system?
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: But such are the trade-offs that the ever-changing media landscape leaves us to navigate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for being here.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's always an honor that you listen to this show, and I hope that you enjoy some of these classic episodes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Today's classic episode with They Might Be Giants was originally aired on November 5th, 2021.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope that you enjoy this classic episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our guest this week is one of the founding members of an indie rock institution that's been recording ground-breaking music for albums, film and television for four decades now.
[SPEAKER_01]: John Flansberg formed they might be giants with his musical co-conspirator John Lonell in 1982.
[SPEAKER_01]: Originally part of a thriving DIY music scene in Brooklyn, New York, they broke on to the national stage with their album Flood in 1990, which garnered extensive play on modern rock and college radio and eventually went platinum.
[SPEAKER_01]: They performed Bob Mould's song, Dog On Fire, which became the iconic theme song for The Daily Show with John Stewart, and they contributed the theme song to the hit television series, Malcolm in the middle.
[SPEAKER_01]: They recorded a series of children's albums for the Disney sound label, including here come the ABCs, and here comes science that went gold.
[SPEAKER_01]: They've recorded for Electra, Barsook, Rounder, and Rough Trade Records.
[SPEAKER_01]: They've won two Grammy Awards, and a Tony Award for Best Original Score for the SpongeBob Square Pants Musical.
[SPEAKER_01]: Spend magazine has said that they spend different musical genres cruising from one to the next with carefree Panache, NPR has noted that they know how to craft an addictive refrain and exactly when to deploy it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rolling Stone has called them a pair of misfits who reconfigured what it means to be cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Atlantic, once for an article, simply titled The Enduring Appeal of They Might Be Giants.
[SPEAKER_01]: What a privilege it was to speak with John about his musical journey over the years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am very intrigued.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's start.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Go ahead.
[SPEAKER_01]: Working songwriters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it really working songwriters or is it just performers who have carved out a career for themselves?
[SPEAKER_01]: What's the difference between those two things?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, at first, I thought, like, oh, this will be interesting because it'll be about like work for higher and like dealing with that whole secret enterprise, but I realize that that it's, you know, you just have like all these, you know, legitimate artists talking about their craft.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's mainly true, but it's like that's been my career for like the last or 10 or 15 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: I write my own songs.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a small cohort of people that are kind of Hindu.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I travel around to small clubs to play for them.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's how the show started talking to people like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I hear that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a little different.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: See, I thought it was going to be like, you know, people doing their Madison Avenue hustle.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that like the modern term for like a tin pan-allink songwriter basically?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I mean, I have friends who do music for television and music for, you know, all sorts of different, you know, effort, music and advertising and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like, and that's a world unto itself that's just, it's another, it's another hustle.
[SPEAKER_01]: That seems like I planned on starting this interview in a different way, but I now want to go in a different direction now that we're talking about this.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is where I wanted to.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't need to hijack my.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, this is a good hijack and the only problem is this is where I planned on ending the interview.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what started there and see where it goes.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have worked in so many different mediums as a songwriter.
[SPEAKER_01]: It seems like that is your calling almost as an artist.
[SPEAKER_01]: You feel like.
[SPEAKER_01]: You feel almost, it looks like you feel compelled to work in new mediums all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: How conscious of that are you or you just tend to work in the songs end up in different mediums because that's how it worked out.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's sort of a combination of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's probably half and half.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's something like the dial-assong service, which was sort of the introduction to the MIP giants that a lot of people started with.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was very much something that came out of my imagination and John Lonelle's imagination and just being up for the challenge of refreshing that project on a regular basis.
[SPEAKER_00]: that kind of ran in opposition to what our natural temperament to be kind of home-taping, steely Dan kind of precious recording type people that we were.
[SPEAKER_00]: It all of a sudden, the calls were just like lots of songs, lots of new songs, keeping it new.
[SPEAKER_00]: and putting it in this format that was just completely unlikely.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, playing songs on a phone machine is probably the worst audio experience you can have, but it was an interesting way for people to find out about the band, and it was an interesting way to kind of approach songwriting for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: But later on, I think the world was kind of hunting for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, when we get one, like having a song on television, like the Daily Show or Malcolm in the middle, those opportunities, you know, we wouldn't know where to find those people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those people found us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like we were lucky that we got to do those
[SPEAKER_00]: works for hire, but they were definitely, it wasn't something that like we pursued.
[SPEAKER_01]: Talking about that dial-asong service, it's always interesting to me how a medium can actually change the way people do their artistic process going forward.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think in a couple of ways, it sounds like it changed you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Number one, you had to create at volume right a number of songs.
[SPEAKER_01]: And number two, like you said, like, you couldn't imagine a worse audio medium.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you kind of had to, did you have to shift literally the way that you were writing songs so that they would come across
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we had to, in first of all, it just made everything very vocally driven because the vocals were the things that kept people interested in what we were doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, instrumental passages really didn't work.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was this other odd side effect of,
[SPEAKER_00]: If you had an instrumental section that had long sustained tones, it would make the message reject to the thought it was the end tone.
[SPEAKER_00]: So anything that went, Boo!
[SPEAKER_00]: would just basically automatically send it shuffling back to the beginning of the message.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we couldn't have anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: We couldn't even sing long sustained notes without running the risk of it making the machine go, you know, reject.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it,
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of it was just, you know, very eccentric on the job training and other things kind of made us key into what held people's attention.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the word thing was interesting because it made you realize how much audience is really key in on words.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't, I think we might not have thought that words mattered that much up until then.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, if you really want to know how little people like any song, if you put it on a phone machine and listen to people hanging up on it all day and day, you'll find out, we would try wheeling out instrumentals on it and they would just be, you know, people would just hang up after 10 seconds, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, it just, it just, it just seemed clear that the ones that had clear lyrics, grabbed people in a much more direct way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we would retain, people would listen to the entire recording, and they would just, it just was obviously more popular.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's hard to say exactly what the, how we gaged it, but I can assure you that it was self-evident.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's funny, in some ways, this has parallels to the way that if you listen to recordings from the, let's say, 50s, maybe a little bit into the 60s, like a Chuck Berry recording.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mix for those, because he was working with very limited, you know, output options, where audiences were listening to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's always vocal, snare drum, and then everything else falls to the way side basically.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's,
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's funny, but there you were 40 years later, kind of forced into the same conundrum and coming to the same solution that he came to 40 years before.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm not saying I'm an advocate for really loud vocals.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I have read enough interviews with recording engineers that, you know, if you read, if there's like some roundtable of five hit-making recording engineers,
[SPEAKER_00]: they'll tell you that they'll always end up talking about the conundrum of making the vocal loud enough for the artist or loud enough for the management or loud enough for the record company or loud enough for pop radio because
[SPEAKER_00]: When you have sort of persona driven recordings, whether it's Snoop Dogg or Adele or some country artist,
[SPEAKER_00]: making the vocals crazy loud is pretty much, it's been that way for, you know, almost forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's certainly not the most musical way to mix a record, but that's where a lot of people's interest lies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm always surprised at how loud people make vocals.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not my
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not my scene, but I'm aware that there are levels.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to think that somebody some live engineer that we worked with was talking about the the hierarchy of crazy vocal levels.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was like, you know, there's like, there's rock vocals, there's pop vocals, there's
[SPEAKER_00]: country vocals and then there's hip-hop vocals.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's like the, you know, the hip-hop vocals are the la, are the far and the way the loud.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, so that was in ascending or, yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you said that in some ways working in that medium was in direct opposition to how you started, kind of like a more steely Dan, let's, let's do overdubbs for, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: eight long now, we were teenagers with like a T.A.
[SPEAKER_00]: K.A.
[SPEAKER_00]: K.A
[SPEAKER_01]: sure but i mean that looks a lot different in the early 1980s and it looks now i mean you get a MacBook off the shelf these days and you have basically a recording studio in it with pre-amps and everything digital uh back then very different deal i don't think a lot of people were necessarily trying to record themselves what what drove you guys to say hey we can do this all ourselves we can figure it out
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, I think we were kind of self-selected.
[SPEAKER_00]: John John is like this amazing musical force unto himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he's, he's not an auto-diadact, but there's something going on there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like he, you know, John can play the drums really pretty well.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, at least for like 10 minutes, he can play the drums pretty well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he can play a lot of instruments
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of a serviceable way, and I, you know, I owned a tape recorder before I owned any musical instruments.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was really obsessed with recorded sound and really obsessed with audio and from a very early age.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think both of us had these, you know, personal obsessions that were very much in play right from the jump.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I had a TAC for track tape recorder in the 70s and when nobody, some people, I mean, they were being manufactured and people were buying them, and I think they were using them to make bootleg recordings of various kinds, record things off the radio, and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't think a lot of people were thinking in terms of doing sound sounds,
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, recording to make demos, I think that was kind of not, not the general direction people went in.
[SPEAKER_01]: When do you remember, do you remember a first moment when the two of you realized that you had very complimentary creative pallets to work from?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we just had a lot of fun, I think, you know, tuberically honest.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think we,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, when we the early times that we got together and made recordings, it was just it was just goofing off in the most extreme way.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I remember we made a recording.
[SPEAKER_00]: We did a cover version of, don't worry, Kiko.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye, Yoko Ono.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I have no idea where this is a recording so exists, but we were doing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We kind of put a musical track together that was like our version of the bed track that was the Yoko Anosong, and then we did the vocal.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very extreme song.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a Yoko on a song, so it's already kind of nuts in the first place.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we were doing rod surling voices doing the vocals.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was just something that we did when we were like 15 or 16 years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that kind of, it was just goofing off.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think, you know, the opportunity to, you know, goof off in a, you know, as young adults seem kind of interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we started the project kind of in the shadow of John's more professional band, John was the keyboard player in like what we sort of what I sort of perceived as a as a real band and so we were just doing they might be giants.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it was very unclear how, you know, how much acceptance the band could ever get.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we just with the material we were doing seem kind of extreme, and it didn't seem particularly in tune with what was on the radio or what was popular, just it was kind of our own.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just the stuff that we liked.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's funny.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hear so many stories on this podcast of people saying, well, I had this thing that was my real thing and the real thing was just going on right then this thing that I was doing on the side that, you know, I want to say that you took less seriously, but that you just never expected anyone to key into, that's the thing that has legs for 30 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: for you like what do you think what what's the what is the disconnect there yeah what's the deal well i think you know i think audiences do key in on what is uh sort of authentic in a in a more abstract sense i think you know a lot of times people throw around the word authenticity like they're talking about uh you know sincerity or or uh the bearing of emotion in a song like that's community trying to communicate directly to an audience but i think
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, authenticity is one of those terms like, you know, selling out, that it doesn't really, there's no such thing as authenticity.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a, you know, seeing a song is like, is not an authentic thing to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a performance.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, I'm not saying that,
[SPEAKER_00]: musicians are the same as actors, but there's something it's presentation all and it's not it's not it's not real life, but I think when when musicians figure, you know, actually the closer musicians get to doing exactly the thing that they
[SPEAKER_00]: are best at and enjoy the most and those can be those that's a venn diagram doesn't always overlap.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know I think that's that's when you really run the risk of really communicating with an audience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why do you say run the risk of communicating with an audience?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well I mean you know it's interesting is that like
[SPEAKER_00]: When we started, I do remember our very first show in the MIP Giants.
[SPEAKER_00]: We played it a place, before we called the MIP Giants, we played outside at a political rally.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was just, that was sort of a UFO.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't really have any take away from what that meant to anybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the first time we actually played in a nightclub, it was me and John and a tape recorder with the drum track.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we sort of set it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that the song's kind of ran into one another because we were nervous that people weren't going to applaud.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were doing a lot of material that was half of material was kind of history on it, like a little bit art rocky, like it was not so song bass.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a little bit of screaming and a little, it was just not the most massive appeal kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a band that we love that John and I both saw live a couple times and we had their records a span out of Ohio called Perubu who were one of the very first kind of new wave punk rock bands and they were very singular band of kind of artsy, a lot of yelling, a lot of like there's like things being glass being broken on their records and there's really
[SPEAKER_00]: hard to listen to synthesizers and all sorts of things going on that are just kind of kept keeps a lot of listeners at arm's length.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we kind of fashioned ourselves as being in that kind of tradition, like we thought, like we would just be understood to be, you know, some vaguely pretentious art rock kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And really from the jump, I mean from the minute we started playing songs in this club, it was clear that people just were kind of getting like
[SPEAKER_00]: a chuckle out of what we're doing like we were just making people smile like they and I don't you know nobody nobody declares that they're a snob and you know like you know or that there nobody says like my band's pretentious but I think our band was a little bit I think we were approaching it with the idea that we're doing something that was a little bit artsy and
[SPEAKER_00]: But it didn't go down that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't perceived that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think people really just saw this performing and they thought, like, these guys are fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's just, and really from that moment on, that audience perception of the band has kind of reframed just my essential take on what we were doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think in a strange way, I still think of what we were doing as,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, before I was aware of how the audience was taking it in, I think a lot of artists though, when faced with that conundrum in front of them, they would feel some sort of responsibility or some sort of desire to kind of grab the audience by the lapels and say, no, that's not what this is about.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me tell you what this is about.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a snobby art rock project.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you think it is about your personality or John's that or your character that allowed you to almost let go of how the art was being perceived and almost in some ways allow how the art was being perceived to shape how the project went forward?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a really good question.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd like the idea of when you said character, I was like, you mean the character I play on in life?
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe.
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, this reminds me of conversations I've sort of overheard and sometimes participated in with like, when you talk to people who are stand up comedians or comedy writers, a lot of times, the little end up talking about,
[SPEAKER_00]: people laughing the wrong way, and which is such a strange thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, you know, if your job is to make people laugh, like, how can people laugh the wrong way?
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that's just the nature of like creative enterprises.
[SPEAKER_00]: If people want it all, you know, people want to be, people want to be totally understood on their terms.
[SPEAKER_00]: They want,
[SPEAKER_00]: complete success and they want critical adoration you know people want i think i think it's it's that's just the the strange uh fate of of uh and sometimes it's pretty cruel i mean i i feel like we've been lucky
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, they might be giants.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like the best reviewed act in at least, you know, since since the 90s, I guess.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think part of that is like, you know, the way reviewers work is like the less an act needs good reviews, the less good reviews they will generate.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if you, if you're, if you're very mental, like it doesn't matter if very mental gets bad reviews, like,
[SPEAKER_00]: people love very you know very mental has a huge audience that he has found and whether you like it you know whether a crocratic likes it or not very mental is still going to be working or bands like like kiss i think is a great example kiss doesn't actually yeah
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's the whole, there's so many, there's like, I think, you know, half the musical horizon is filled with critic proof acts that just are exists.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, I do cherish those early reviews that we got and, you know, as we become less,
[SPEAKER_00]: zeitgeisty and less culturally relevant as an act you know we once again we're getting glowing critical reviews which is very pleasant you know i i tend to believe those reviews i never believe the bad ones but uh um i think i think uh
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think performers really are unreasonable in a sense that they really do expect everything to work.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember when we first started doing stuff for kids, one of the things that's really weird, doing kids music is really interesting in a lot of different ways because it's just so much the opposite of writing in a rock band.
[SPEAKER_00]: But,
[SPEAKER_00]: when you're doing kids' shows, like kids just, it's very hard to hold on to kids' attention.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like they'll just all of a sudden, half the audience isn't even looking in your direction.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're just like, hey man, I'm up here, you know, playing for you kids, like, pay attention.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just all of sudden all your all your sympathies for public school teachers, you know comes out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I got a five-year-old a three-year-old in a baby and my wife is public school.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and my wife's a public school teacher.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there you go.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, I feel all your people are in the barrel, my friend.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you, are you, are you, are you, Mr.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mom?
[SPEAKER_00]: Pretty much, are you, are you tending to these?
[SPEAKER_01]: Pretty much, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: My wife's on maternity leave now, but I've taken a big step back from the road, and I do a lot of, I do a lot of Mr. Momen at home.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you'll have four children.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's three, a five-year-old, a three-old, and a baby.
[SPEAKER_00]: But she's, oh, oh, the baby, as you have an infant.
[SPEAKER_01]: We got an infant out at home, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I hope we're not gonna have four children.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll see.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't think we'd have three, so here, but here we are.
[SPEAKER_01]: There you go.
[SPEAKER_01]: So take one step back from me here from from that chapter of your career because I kind of want to dive into this moment where you have in some ways you described it, you know, we have this almost zeitgeisty band that's coming out of this this art scene in Brooklyn and then
[SPEAKER_01]: early nineties i think it was with your album flood your signed by electra and this is yet this is a major label at a time when like man early nineties like that is when it really really mattered to be on a major label i mean they had so much power and influence how did that signing and how did that change to your business first of all how did it change your business but then also had it change your the creative arc of the band
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think, you know, as I said, like when we started, I think we had a lot of sort of abstract ambitions for what we were doing that we kind of held onto.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we realized that the things we were interested in were kind of fragile and we really wanted to protect those things and control our output and control our image.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were just,
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, just ambitious in that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in a lot of ways, starting as an indie band really helped kind of slow things down for us to enough to kind of control the ball a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: We knew how to do a lot of things before we got signed to a major label, which was really helpful.
[SPEAKER_00]: We really had a very clear idea of how things worked and the things we didn't want to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I'll tell you, one big decision we made very early on when we started working with our booking agent is we decided not to open for anybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, which in retrospect,
[SPEAKER_00]: part of me wonders if that was just a really dumb idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know a lot more about the ways of the world now and one of the things, one of the things that I think is there's something
[SPEAKER_00]: 10 dollar word about being in a band which is like you think that you know your actions kind of happen in a vacuum and you don't realize that like your booking agent is constantly kind of working all his spheres of influence to make things
[SPEAKER_00]: happen for you and make things happen for the other axes representing and there's all sorts of horse trading going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Any time artists you hear in interviews with us all the time, you hear people saying like, oh, I realize my manager was just like working to get some other thing happening for some other act.
[SPEAKER_00]: As if that's some huge betrayal.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's like that is actually the way the world works in those spheres.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like if your manager isn't just
[SPEAKER_00]: working all the angles in all the ways that they can.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're probably a pretty ineffective manager.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we were such a sort of, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, part of it was like, we were so idealistic on one hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were also in some ways kind of unwirledly about that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we just, we had done some opening gigs, and they were kind of unpleasant experiences in certain ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we just didn't want to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we just said, like, we don't want to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we just pushed that out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is, I don't know how much that held us back, but it probably held us back a fair amount.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it didn't, ultimately, and we just had the career that we had.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it also, I can't see where you're coming from on that because I think one of the drawbacks sometimes of doing opening shows.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I did a fair amount of those in the first four or five years of my career.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of them were good, some of them weren't.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the ones that weren't, it's because,
[SPEAKER_01]: You're putting form of an audience in a way where you're not as you said earlier, controlling the ball.
[SPEAKER_01]: The stage doesn't look the way that it should, maybe the sound isn't right, and to someone who's just coming to see your show, who's just a random puncher at the show, they don't give a shit about any of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're just like, yeah, I went to go see Joe Pug and it wasn't good.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or I went to go see the NYP Giants and they're not going to tell you what was wrong about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're just going to say, I didn't like it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think in some ways it was very smart of you to control the ball in that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, part of it was like because we were working with a drama machine, there was this technical side of what we were doing that was like very fussy like if it just had to be it had to be said we couldn't just jump on a stage and play which I mean I'm permanently jealous of people who have such a bulletproof live setup that they can just you know hit it and and those those people you know there and there also people are just brave that way I think I think when we started we just weren't
[SPEAKER_00]: We really liked what we did, but I don't think we were that confident about what we did.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we had it, we often, we could have figured it out.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we had thought it through, I'm sure we could have come up with some, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've seen bands do like sort of this very smart live.
[SPEAKER_00]: for song sound check thing and it can be pretty winning like there's no particular reason you can't do that and and people do do it successfully but but I think we just felt like it was there was just too much going on but
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like I didn't answer your flood question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, what other ways were you kind of, you very much did?
[SPEAKER_01]: What other ways were you controlling the ball to use your own phrase with Electra and that major label system?
[SPEAKER_01]: What other ways, it seems like you said that you guys had certain skills.
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of Liam Neeson and Taken there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a certain set of skills here that I can use.
[SPEAKER_01]: What other skills were you bringing to bear that put you in a kind of in the driver's seat with that imbalanced relationship?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think we had sort of an intuitive sense of like what now people on the internet refer to as the gift economy, having done dial a song and done that the things that we were doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were just a very DIY act.
[SPEAKER_00]: We did a lot of stuff that was kind of, I guess part of the thing that made, we had sold a lot of records before we got on the lecture.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was not something that they were used to.
[SPEAKER_00]: And
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think anybody particularly likes going to work and having somebody say, I disagree.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the record companies often just present schedules to you and your job is just to say yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: We just, we wanted to work our projects longer than they did and that I think was tedious and that, you know, so because a lot of times you kind of get, you climb onto the promo machine and then you're, then your time is over and you go away and we were just like, oh, we were just kind of working our cookie hustle all the time, so that, I think that seemed
[SPEAKER_00]: full sum to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you stuck in a rut?
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you tired of listening to that Jimmy Buffett 20th century master CD over and over again and need some new music?
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[SPEAKER_01]: What you were looking for, my friends, is the enthusiast digest.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One of the things that struck me the most while speaking with John was the sense of humility that he still brings to creative work.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's four decades in to a wildly successful and acclaimed creative pursuit, and yet, he's still asking questions about making music, still wondering aloud.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not making pronouncements from on high, and of all the guests that we've had on this program, he would be one of the most qualified to have done so.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it seems every artist who continues to create vital work long into their career shares this quality.
[SPEAKER_01]: A genuine humility about how art is inspired, made, and consumed, a lifelong learning process.
[SPEAKER_01]: My favorite poet, Steve Scaffidi, has a poem about humility in the face of self-satisfied certainty.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's called, for my friend Todd Hardy,
[SPEAKER_01]: And Jimmy Hendrix, who seems to say the opposite every day with his guitar.
[SPEAKER_01]: I dedicate these words written in May 2005 to mark the end of the arguments we have about the meaning of life and what happens to us after we die.
[SPEAKER_01]: For you'd think it would be enough to carry your body, slung loose and broken at your side and go down to the door and walk through, but no.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thousands of years continue, Dodd says, without you, and it is not enough to die.
[SPEAKER_01]: You must disappear completely, and all signs be obliterated, and the mind tries to protect us from knowing this, and well, thank you, but it's easy to see through the white veil of invention and imagination to the sad grave, heaving of nothing that is waiting, and my friend Todd Hardy says we die, and that's it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'd like to argue some dark spooling out of fabric with an embroidered bear walking along the mountain pass between this life and some other.
[SPEAKER_01]: And point out the birds, matted there in the bear's fur, and the beehive full of honey in the green pine she is about to climb, but the mind knows.
[SPEAKER_01]: It knows about death, and how all faith is our commitment to a guess.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my friend Todd Hardy, who collects eight track cassettes of Jimmy Hendrix and the rectus psychedelia of heroic guitars ruins my hope that we might live on somehow in the spinning of an atom or a compact disc with a dusty fur of a bear.
[SPEAKER_01]: My friends you win.
[SPEAKER_01]: Soon, we will not even have been the dust of dust disappearing, and in 10,000 years, even that dust will enter the mall of an oblivion I cannot put my faith in.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, let the sacred guess work begin.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you have a day to work, what does a creative day look like to you?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, I mean, I do a lot of things that are just like sort of, you know, ordinary performer things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I actually do vocal warm-ups, which is, you know, like exactly as exciting as it sounds for my wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, I'll do guitar stuff, guitar warm-up stuff, and then, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: the sort of research and development part of my job is just working with on the computer on rhythm tracks and kind of cooking up different drum machine stuff and you know maybe working on a vocal or some kind of lyric for a song.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's no set way of working.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't
[SPEAKER_00]: I wish I had a better plan of how to do stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes I'll just grab, I have a bunch of old cassette recorders that I'll just grab and drag into the basement and I'll just put a timer on my phone and try to come up with some song idea within 20 minutes and then I'll do that again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Periodically, if we've done like works for a higher, if we've got a new album, project coming up, or if we're doing anything that requires just a lot of songwriting, I might try to do these sort of speed rounds of songwriting, and usually only one or two good things will come out of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: But
[SPEAKER_00]: It only takes a few hours to do that kind of thing, like if you just chain yourself to the all you can rock buffet, you can cook up a song in relatively short order.
[SPEAKER_01]: it sounds like it, when you say chain yourself to that buff, that's just you sit in front of your, well actually here's a better question, I think.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it sounds like even when you don't have a specific project that you're writing for or towards that you're just in,
[SPEAKER_00]: writing mode just kind of generating material or just kind of keeping yourself interest or just yeah in production mode a little bit you know like we John and I collaborate long distance on a lot of things so I'll send him you know rhythm tracks that are just drums and like trying to write like a drum sequence that's compelling enough for somebody else to write a song on top of is it's own
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of odd challenge because it you can't you can't take the idea that much farther like I'm not trying to crowd out his creativity I'm just trying to spark it so that's you know that's one mode of working but you know there have been times in our career where
[SPEAKER_00]: we have been tasked to to finish a lot of musical work in relatively short order.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we've done kids albums that had deadlines, hard deadlines of, you know, two months or something like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it'll be the better part of an hour's worth of music or working on a television show where you're doing all the incidental music.
[SPEAKER_00]: That'll every week they'll be 20 cues of music.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what you're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, actually, when we were doing the instant music for Malcolm in the middle and doing the instant music for the Daily Show and stuff like that, I think the whole band learned a lot about just how to speed up all the creative processes involved in writing songs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was really useful.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you really just, it was just
[SPEAKER_00]: Not just how to make recordings that sounded real, but also how to have, you know, how to just generate ideas and it really helped our confidence.
[SPEAKER_01]: What are some of the skills that you had to level up with to be able to kind of create at that volume?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, what have you gotten much better at?
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to be modest here at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm asking you to be modest.
[SPEAKER_01]: What have you gotten much better at over the last 25 years because of those work obligations and deadlines that you had?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, there's that old cliche, like if it sounds good, it is good.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's like sort of, it might be, it might be a pockful, but I think people associate with Duke Alanton.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that's, it's really hard to trust that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's nothing wrong with simple ideas, there's nothing wrong with, just
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's hard to say, I mean, you know, part of it also was just, you know, you're just kind of just working with an eye to efficiency.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't need to try out every possibility.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, this is, it might be the opposite of hitmaking.
[SPEAKER_00]: processes because I when I've worked with with hitmaker producers and the way they work is almost the opposite of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like well like we've worked with the dust brothers who you know did big hits with back and and Hanson and lots of other acts and we worked with Clive Langorn Allen and Stanley who did all the madness tracks in England and did
[SPEAKER_00]: Morrissey records and I'm trying to think of other big hit right they've had a ton of hit records They did the you know come on on lean with the excess midnight runners and
[SPEAKER_00]: But even though those production teams have very little in common with one another in terms of like their aesthetics and the way they approach putting tracks together, one thing that was interesting to me is that they had unlimited patience for working on a vocal, they, you know, but they, they both of them as as production teams would just be like,
[SPEAKER_00]: What if you take two days to get this vocal?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just relax.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to be working on this for a really long time You will be shocked at how boring it gets.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all, you know, we're just doing this thing just just You know, make have another cup of tea and and just Chill out because this is and buckle up because this is going to take a really long time
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, and now we're back where we kind of started talking about where those vocals ended up in the mix.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now here, you know, how long is spent on them?
[SPEAKER_01]: You've managed to carry on a creative partnership for many decades.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, most people can't even remain decent to one another after, you know, decades.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here you are still working together and the relationship from the outside looking in is still really fruitful as fruitful as it's ever been it seems like to me How have you guys managed to do that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think, in a sense, we both keep each other kind of ambitious, you know, and that's good.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like, it's not really a competition in any traditional sense, but I think, you know, we're both active and when the other person cooks up something that's impressive, I think it just naturally falls right back to the other, the other to kind of, you know, keep up
[SPEAKER_00]: It's, you know, I feel very lucky that, you know, we have each other, you know, just to also just have the conversation, you know, sort of the inside conversations and just be like the first audience for the other person because it's just incredibly useful to just to not do it by yourself, you know, it's, you know, it's, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: I would imagine just being completely on your own would be very hard not to end up chasing your own tail.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are there sacrifices that you have to make creatively to be a part of a partnership like that?
[SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't call it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't characterize it as sacrifices.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's, uh, you just, it's, uh, no, no.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't, I can't, I don't think it's, it's all kind of a, a win-win.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the one thing that sort of makes me sad is like when we started the band John and I were
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, really good friends and we were just hanging out all the time in the casual ways and it was very easy, breezy friendship and that was super, you know, it was just a great, you know, it's nice to have a close friend and, you know, as a years have gone on, we've been.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we've flown around the world, sitting next to each other dozens of times.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've spent years of our lives in vans and tour buses just waiting for the next thing to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it kind of undoes the, you know, the easy friendship part of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we're still friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's absolutely
[SPEAKER_00]: fine, but the impulse to just spend our spare time chilling out together has definitely been dampened enough time in a 15 passenger van.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, I'll do that to the best of us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I get that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, your partnership has culminated in this latest work that you guys are putting out book is a total multimedia experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: This kind of goes to the
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, to the start of our conversation here, because there's a lot of mediums at play here in this new project.
[SPEAKER_01]: You said something funny, I was reading in the promo materials for this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to paraphrase you here, but basically something along the lines of like, it's kind of boring to just put out an album these days.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's point for us, which point for the audience.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know how exactly you put it, but you wanted to do something different here.
[SPEAKER_01]: How did you conceptualize this project?
[SPEAKER_01]: and how did the final version of it compare to the conception that you had when you began?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, at the risk of sounding like a complete baby boomer, I really like the album experience, like the vinyl experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: But maybe for sort of a slightly different reasons, it's not like some audio file thing for me, because all my records are all scratched up.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I really enjoy album covers, and I really enjoy line of notes, and I really enjoy just that tactile physical thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I guess in some ultimate way,
[SPEAKER_00]: putting book together.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was thinking this experience is kind of like the ultimate album experience because instead of just having an interesting cover that you can contemplate as you listen to the music, it has a whole book attached to it and with all this art photography and all
[SPEAKER_00]: So it really was about just kind of making a bigger experience out of the whole music listening part of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I can't I can't say that, uh,
[SPEAKER_00]: It isn't sort of a psychedelic impulse.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a lot of times when people hear about the project, they think it's going to be a concept album.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it really isn't that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a collection of songs that are all quite different from one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like any other, they might be giant's record.
[SPEAKER_00]: But having the book component, I think, makes it, it just expands the experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: looking out onto the horizon going forward.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've always been so forward thinking, I think I read that you guys put up the first major label record on MP3, like in the early 90s.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one even knew what that was.
[SPEAKER_01]: So in your opinion, looking forward, you seem to be very inspired and kind of up to the moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: So about NFTs, man.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I want to ask, like, what is there on the horizon that technologically that you're interested in working with?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it NFTs?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it something else?
[SPEAKER_00]: We, the first week I heard of NFTs, it was like,
[SPEAKER_00]: on the horizon line there were like a half dozen people coming at us going like you guys must want to get in on this and then pretty much at the same time they're all the I got all these emails that were like I'm really suspicious of what this means right um I don't at this point I don't even feel like I fully understand what what and if what defines an NFT because they're
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, what it means non, non-fungible, a non-fungible transfer is the definition of NFT, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Non-fungible token, I think.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, non-fungible token.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I know, the token is the art object, but the non-fungible part seems to be kind of open-ended.
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems like a lot of things seem pretty fungible to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, as far as my understanding of the word
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I guess how can you make an addition of 10,000 non-fungible things?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's the point is that you can't, and I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not NFT NFTs.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know NFT apologists here at all, and I've got a new album coming out next year, it's not going to be on an NFT, but... No, NFT 3.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think it has to do with the idea that you can source the provenance of a digital file, so that you could say, hey...
[SPEAKER_01]: I have, you know, whenever Jay-Z's 99 problems came out, if you could say, I have the original MP3 of this and it can be proved the provenance can be proved through blockchain, would that be valuable.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I guess we'll see.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope they can find those original Napster bootleg MP3s and turn those into NFTs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the original 99, there were two songs that were on Napster that were, that were
[SPEAKER_00]: titled as they might be giants tracks, but they're actually the song Fishheads by Barnes and Barnes was mislabeled as they might be giants song.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that would be a good NFT.
[SPEAKER_00]: The original fishheads by they might be giants.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it'll either make no money or make so much money that you won't know where to park your yacht afterwards.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, look forward to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well listen, this has been a real honor to have you on the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for coming on to the working song.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really
[SPEAKER_01]: This week's show is brought to you by Bandzougle.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They might be giants, forthcoming release, is an art book simply titled Book, available next week on November 12th.
[SPEAKER_01]: Head to they might be giants.com for more info.
[SPEAKER_01]: If before we meet again, you sit down to write, please remember, an expensive drug habit is not a song, a compelling Instagram account is not a song, and most importantly, reverb is not a song.
[SPEAKER_01]: So let all that take care of itself, and for you, just keep your eye on the song.