No Wit’s End

by Chris Parker

For a quarter-century they’ve been making infectious, idiosyncratic pop fueled by whimsical wit and winsome melodies. They were among the first to capitalize on MTV, thanks to singer/guitarist John Flansburgh’s video talents, which helped them score a college radio hit with “Don’t Let’s Start” off their ’86 debut. Later, he directed the videos for their hits “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” off their 1990 gold-selling album, Flood. The title was prescient of the coming grunge tide, which washed away almost everything not clad in flannel or crowned in distortion.

Fifteen years later, They Might Be Giants scored another gold album, with their second release geared for children, 2005’s Here Come the ABCs. Over the years, they’ve continued to make great music and operate (until recently) Flansburgh’s famous dial-a-song answering machine. (Now it’s morphed to the podcast site, dialasong.com.) They scored a Grammy for the Malcom in the Middle theme song, and even inspired a documentary, Gigantic: The Tale of Two Johns. If that’s not ubiquitous enough, you can also hear them every night on The Daily Show, whose theme song they composed. Yet despite all the accolades and attention, they feel underexposed and -appreciated, marginalized like many acts with a sense of humor, such as Ween or David Lowery.

“There’s some things that are really problematic about humor in music,” Flansburgh offers from a tour stop in Richmond, Va. “To be perfectly honest with you, it’s a delicate balance for us, and I’m not sure I’m even a general endorser of the idea.”

Of course, that doesn’t stop them from trying. Witness the goofy song “Working Undercover for the Man,” from 2001’s Mink Car, where Flansburgh confesses to being a spy (“Planning midnight raids on our fans / While the roadies rig the video-surveillance van”). Or the buoyant, jangly “Climbing the Walls,” off their new album, The Else, in which he darkly hints that people talk a lot about the deep end, but “don’t really know how deep it goes.” Still, Flansburgh suggests rock’s earnestness is often at odds with a comic temperament.

“Look, rock music resides firmly in the world of adolescent artistic expression, and humor is largely for kids and adults,” he says. “Adolescents are a lot more honest than adults. Adults live compromised, complicated lives, and that’s why a lot of the expression coming from adolescents is so refreshing. But adolescents are also really preoccupied with appearing cool, and sometimes, in the effort to create something authentic to yourself as a writer, it’s more important to get the idea out than it is to appear cool.”

The two aren’t necessarily exclusive, as their new album demonstrates. The Else was created in collaboration with the Dust Brothers. Flansburgh and his TMBG partner John Linnell traded tapes and ideas with them throughout the process, treating them like band members rather than producers.

“[Often] as a musician and a songwriter, you can feel like the producer is just an editor and you’re performing for them rather than collaborating with them,” Flansburgh says. “Some producers will allow you to veto their editing process but then it turns into this negotiated thing. Whereas working with the Dust Brothers there was enough back and forth, and everybody was putting their stuff way out there...[without] very much posturing.”

The resulting album is solid front to back and top to bottom, from the odd, skittering funk of “Withered Hope” to the groovy, British Invasion stomp of “Take Out the Trash” and the classic surreal TMBG wordplay of “The Bee of the Bird of the Moth.” Flansburgh says he was a little intimidated at first by the Dust Brothers’ reputation—they’ve worked with Beck and the Beasties Boys—but soon warmed to Michael Simpson and his partner John King. King in particular says Flansburgh “has this mad genius quality that is very exciting to be around.”

While working on the wistful indie-pop track “Upside Down Frown,” guitarist Dan Miller was playing an unplugged electric when King bolted from his seat.

“He said ‘that’s the sound,’ ” Flansburgh says. “We’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s a great part, Dan’s really good at that pretty, Byrds-like chimy guitar playing. Let’s plug it into the amp and do it.’ And he’s like, ‘No, that’s the sound. That, that’s the sound. Put a mic on that guitar,’ ” Flansburgh recalls. “We’ve recorded about 350 to 400 songs over our career, and we’ve approached recording a lot of different ways, but we’ve never done that.”

In between touring, the Giants remain busy, working on a follow-up to their last children’s album, entitled Here Come the 123s, updating their podcast and MP3 clubs with new material, as well as putting together videos for The Else and penning music for the next “adult” album.