Photo credit: Jayme Thornton
John Linnell, one-half of the Grammy-winning musical duo They Might Be Giants, sat down with The Settler recently to talk festivals, favorites and Coraline.
The Settler: What are some of the advantages and disadvantages to performing at music festivals?
John Linnell: The one constant advantage is that you get to play for people who have never heard of you.
That's great for trying to expand your audience.
There are going to be people there who might, for example, know somebody who is a fan, but they themselves have never heard us, or don't know anything about us.
So it's an easy thing to get dragged to our show, like just across the field.
The biggest disadvantage would be that there are people there who are not fans, so there are people watching us who are kind of skeptical or not into it.
The Settler: What is your first memory of attending a music festival?
John Linnell: I have this vague memory, it wasn't really a festival, but it was this outdoor concert.
I mean, I was pretty young, but it was the bicentennial concert in Concord, Mass., in 1976.
They had a whole range of performers. It was like a festival.
So it was like The Persuasions I can remember, and I think Arlo Guthrie or someone like that was there.
It was really kind of a weird grab bag of performers.
The vibe that I remember as being a kid was that it was kind of non-committal.
People obviously were not there to see every single thing on the bill.
The Settler: What about the first festival They Might Be Giants performed?
John Linnell: Early on we did these festivals in Europe.
There's one in Denmark called Roskilde, and we must have done the Reading Festival at some point, and I think there's one in Scotland which I'm spacing out the name of at the moment.
They all had that exact quality that everybody thinks of a music festival in Europe.
It's always like this; it was raining for part of the time, and the ground was really soggy, so everybody was tromping around in the mud, and you can't really lie down or sit down anywhere, because the ground is too wet.
Well, some people I guess didn't have a problem with that.
I remember at one of those, I think it was probably at Roskilde, we saw Bob Dylan perform, and it was during that time when he was singing in a way that you could barely understand him.
You could barely get which famous Bob Dylan song the band was playing because they did these very mangled versions of the songs.
So we sat through like a minute of "All Along the Watchtower" before we even realized what song he was
playing.
The Settler: What are some of the best live shows you've ever seen?
John Linnell: I can remember seeing The Ramones a few times where it was just really, really exciting.
I remember seeing the band The Residents perform in New York in the 80's.
They came to New York a couple times and did these really interesting and kind of bizarre, almost like music-theater productions, you know, where they have costumes and all these interesting, elaborate productions.
The Residents were a really singularly weird act.
You know, their music was very personal and very much an acquired taste.
Yet, there was something wonderfully generous about the way they put on their show.
They were really paying attention to the production aspect, like they were putting on a real show, with staging and interesting lighting, and really insane costumes and stuff. They were great.
For one of their costumes, they all came out wearing tuxedos, and they had eyeballs for heads.
That was kind of the way everybody knew them. But you never really see their faces.
The Settler: They Might Be Giants has collaborated with the creators of the popular animation website, homestarrunner.com.
How did that get started?
John Linnell: I guess we got in touch because we had some kind of mutual friend who suggested that we should get together, that one or the other of us had said, "Oh yeah, I like those guys."
It very quickly turned into a lot of different kinds of collaborations.
Those guys came to New York, and we filmed a day of making up songs in front of a video camera with the Homestar puppet.
We did a lot of long-distance collaborating as well, where we would send materials back and forth.
They'd send us some lyrics and we'd send the mp3 and the music.
We really did a lot of different kinds of things with those guys. It's all been really fun.
The Settler: Any chance of more Homestar collaborations in the future?
John Linnell: Sure, absolutely. We're always in for more hijinks.
When we play in Atlanta, they usually pull the puppets out, actually more often than not, and they will have the puppets up on stage with us.
The Settler: They Might Be Giants wrote music for Henry Selick's 2009 film, Coraline. How many songs did you write for that?
John Linnell: We lost count; there were a lot.
We also kept revising the songs that we were writing, so we had songs that were kind of pieces for certain scenes.
I don't know if you've seen the film, but there are these three ghost children who are trapped in this kind of limbo, and they have to explain to Coraline what's happened to them.
So the original idea was to write a song where they each tell their story.
That one went through a number of revisions before it finally got chopped out.
Then [John] Flansburgh wrote this great song, and the original idea was for it to go over the credits, and it wound up being one of the tracks on our last CD, The Else, called "Carefully You Pack."
The Settler: Is there any chance the unused songs will ever be released?
John Linnell: I don't know. I kind of doubt it, but probably a more likely scenario is that we'll take some of that material and just completely remake it into something else.
That would be a typical move for us.
The Settler: Your 2008 children's album, Here Come the 123s, won the 2009 Grammy Award for "Best Musical Album for Children."
What are the differences in your approach to writing music for children rather than for adults?
John Linnell: In some ways we try not to emphasize the differences, because I think what we're good at, with both kinds of material, is just coming up with something that we like, and not trying to worry too much about the audience.
I think we've never been that good at figuring out what other people like.
We mostly just try and satisfy ourselves.
In that way, I think we kind of feel like we really know what we're doing.
Obviously with the science songs and with the ABCs and 123s, we've got a very specific topic that we're trying to cover, but then how we actually do that, I think, is maybe not that different from the way that we write songs for grown-ups.
We're really just trying to do something we think is good, and trying not to imply too many other restrictions on it.
Obviously for kids' music, you can't do any situation that's too dark, or too obscene.
The Settler: What's next for They Might Be Giants?
John Linnell: We are writing more songs.
We're just doing our next project that we don't have much more to say about than that.
We want to make it sound new, you know, but how that's going to happen is sort of anybody's guess at this point.
We're still cooking up some material.
The Settler: Lastly, I've heard a little about the Avatars of They. Who are they?
John Linnell: Who are they? That's a good question!
Well, I don't think I'd be giving anything away if I said they are sock puppets.
But you kind of have to see it to fully appreciate it.
It's a part of the show where the puppets come out and sing some songs.
For many people this is the most exciting part of the whole show, believe it or not.
We're talking about adults.
