It’s They Might Be Giants official and totally free song app. Like TMBGs original Dial-A-Song, the app has a different song every day. The app holds five of the freshest posted tracks at all times. From Don’t Let’s Start to Nanobots!
Get it for FREE at iTunes for iphones and ipads here
http://bit.ly/Wl9fGw
Get it for FREE for android-based stuff at
http://bit.ly/101jdiF
Why is it free? Because we are putting into the world that way.
CELEBRATE BROOKLYN!
Join TMBG as they headline a full length FREE CONCERT under the stars closing the 35th season of Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park. Mark your calendars–it’s August 10th
TWO SHOWS at ROYCE HALL in LOS ANGELES!
A big adult concert, and a special day-time show for families. Tickets for the Oct. 26 shows go on sale July 11th. Watch this space for more information
5/30 Indianapolis, IN http://ticketf.ly/WJEgUg
5/31 Milwaukee, WI http://bit.ly/ZTq1hx
6/1 Minneapolis, MN http://bit.ly/U4vzW8
6/2 Iowa City, IA http://bit.ly/UosVe5
6/4 Des Moines, IA http://ticketf.ly/U4zUIO
6/5 Omaha, NE http://bit.ly/Xxmlke
6/6 Kansas City, MO http://bit.ly/VaZDAF
6/7 Denver, CO http://bit.ly/Y5TbP4
6/8 Salt Lake City, UT Graywhale In-Store http://on.fb.me/143NFM5
6/8 Salt Lake City, UT http://bit.ly/10iXQyw
6/9 Boise, ID The Record Exchange In-Store http://bit.ly/ZHGm9D
6/9 Boise, ID http://bit.ly/V8EXvG
6/11 Vancouver, BC http://tktwb.tw/13lwIMU
6/12 Seattle, WA http://bit.ly/Y5TgCk
6/13 Portland, OR http://bit.ly/W3K7F8
6/14 San Francisco, CA http://bit.ly/ZfKMVa
6/15 Anaheim, CA http://bit.ly/V68R3Z
6/16 San Diego, CA http://bit.ly/RTweuZ
Hine’s Mr. Tick’s Computer Bug Collection from the TMBG video “Incest Hospital” has made it into MAKEs Flickr Pool Weekly Roundup!
Featured here: http://blog.makezine.com/2013/05/12/make…
The whole video!
Tickets on sale now–go to links and get ‘em
5/30 Indianapolis, IN http://ticketf.ly/WJEgUg
5/31 Milwaukee, WI http://bit.ly/ZTq1hx
6/1 Minneapolis, MN http://bit.ly/U4vzW8
6/2 Iowa City, IA http://bit.ly/UosVe5
6/4 Des Moines, IA http://ticketf.ly/U4zUIO
6/5 Omaha, NE http://bit.ly/Xxmlke
6/6 Kansas City, MO http://bit.ly/VaZDAF
6/7 Denver, CO http://bit.ly/Y5TbP4
6/8 Salt Lake City, UT http://bit.ly/10iXQyw
6/9 Boise, ID http://bit.ly/V8EXvG
6/11 Vancouver, BC http://tktwb.tw/13lwIMU
6/12 Seattle, WA http://bit.ly/Y5TgCk
6/13 Portland, OR http://bit.ly/W3K7F8
6/14 San Francisco, CA http://bit.ly/ZfKMVa
6/15 Anaheim, CA http://bit.ly/V68R3Z
6/16 San Diego, CA http://bit.ly/RTweuZ
then on August 10th we are performing a FREE CONCERT in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York. We’re closing the 35th season of CELEBRATE BROOKLYN! It’s a full length concert with our favorite opener Moon Hooch!
Go to http://tmbgareok.tumblr.com/ and check it out.
TMBG are playing the FINAL FREE CONCERT of the 35th season with CELEBRATE BROOKLYN! On the evening of Saturday Aug. 10th, we’re doing a full length show in Prospect Park.
Mark your calendar! Bring your pals! Share this announcement! See you there!
These days, on-line journalists often just had you a bunch of questions, let you do the typing, and then the typing marches into oblivion. While on my three hour plan flight (a trifecta of misery in the direct vicinity of a crying infant, and inconsolable teenage girl crying on her boyfriends shoulder and a five foot six man kicking the back of my seat like he was Larry Bird) this morning I found three such documents in my computer, and I dusted them off for your entertainment. Enjoy!
If you had to sum up your life to date in 3 words what would they be?
Rock, rinse, repeat.
You’re so prolific – is it ever a challenge coming up with new ideas? How do you avoid repeating yourselves?
We have discussed how we’re running out of nouns. Probably time to move our focus to adverbs.
I wouldn’t want to assume that listeners wouldn’t detect a certain amount of repeating, but it’s probably not a bad idea for a creative person—especially songwriters—to give yourself permission to at least repeat some topics and some aspects of how you work best. Good songs are often bold and simple. It would be a mistake to say “I’ve already done bold and simple. Gotta move on to fragile and fussy!”
Where do you come up with some of these unusual subjects that form the core of your songs?
When we started we had a lot of big notions about avoiding stock ideas. No solos, just arranged breaks. Short intros. No fade outs. We weren’t too big on writing about love, but we were also probably pretty shy about the topic too. Just staying away from cliches was the main thing, and while we have given in to the pleasures of intros, solos and an occasional fade out it’s still the goal. When we started we weren’t that far past the new wave moment and short, sharply structured songs of any kind—from the Residents or Elvis Costello—were infinitely more appealing to us than the baggy jammy songs of progressive rock.
When it comes to the songs, how closely do you guys collaborate in their composition? Can you give any insight into the way the material is conceived and how the arrangements originate?
We both have home production set ups and write separately for the most part, but we are the first audience for the other. The collaboration kind of expands and contracts around the individual songs and the where we’re at as a band. We’ll hand things off to the other. We have written various things in the traditional music dude/lyric dude way, but we’ve done things a lot of other ways too. I seriously don’t want to speak for John here, but personally I’ve always sensed that there is an abstract idea of this band They Might Be Giants—and after years of talking about what we want and don’t want that band to be about musically—we’re still essentially writing for that concept.
How challenging is it to replicate your songs on stage, given the unlikely instrumentation and unusual arrangements that grace the studio versions?
For the most part, I feel what we gain is always more than what we lose playing songs live. Only arrangements that really depend on horns seem diminished, and there are even some examples there where figuring out how to take those songs to the stage brought another level of interest. But while we put a lot of energy and thought in to how we put songs together live, I’m not certain we always actually have such insight in to how any given arrangement actually lands. I mean, audiences clap at the end of most songs—and we all know that can be deceiving!
One song we have talked about over the years is Ana Ng. It was a popular early track for us, and when we recorded it we had probably had seven cups of coffee apiece and were jazzed at being in the studio and working with a new drum machine. We just kept pushing the tempo up and up and ended up recording the song at a bit fast. I don’t want to say too fast because it’s a very successful recording sonically. But needless to say, in the fullness of time as we have performed the song hundreds of times, and we came to the conclusion that at a more moderate tempo Ana Ng actually FEELS much groovier. Now here’s where I can’t help but wonder—if you see a bunch of old dudes playing their old songs at a slower tempo—doesn’t it seem likely that as an audience member you’re gonna think—they’re tired! Either bored of this song, or just too damn old to play it at full speed? Now of course at any given moment we are all that too—but what we’re doing in our performance in Ana Ng entirely for musical reasons I suspect could scan in an entirely different way to an audience member. But who knows?
Early on, you built up a tremendous cult and college following and with your signing to Elektra. Yet, afterwards, it seemed like your possibilities for broader success never really reached full potential. Any thoughts about what transpired?
Well, that really defines a half empty/half full way of looking at your career. Most bands don’t last five years even with hits, and I could name two dozen bands that had much bigger hits than us back then who are now 100% married to that time, and in a sense are forever cast as an oldies act. We could have definitely worked harder at some key points, but we could have also broken up. We toured for a solid year behind Flood, and that certainly made some registers ring, but we were aging like presidents.
Your songs have always been both quirky and yet so accessible. How do you maintain that balance? Had you opted to write straight pop songs, you might have been fixtures on the pop charts.
It might be too generous to us to assume we’re just holding back on being a more mainstream band out of restraint or artistic choice. What we do IS our mainstream stuff. I suspect it’s because TMBG songs are often melody-driven that people feel like we’re hiding some kind of musical WMDs. But that final layer of a super-sincere lyric or the chant-along chorus really does elude our best efforts.
After signing to major labels, was there ever any pressure to downplay the quirkier subject matter and focus on becoming more commercially viable?
I think it really would be a mistake to categorized Elektra’s goals to market the band were to make us “straighter” than we were. There were many different kinds of people with quite divergent tastes and opinions, and lot of acts far crazier than us who through charisma or just musical talent found a way to be super-famous.
For the publicity folks, I suspect it would have been bigger gestures and bolder quirkiness that would have made them happier with us. I think they actually found us a bit safe and probably thought we were too worried about being taken seriously on some abstract plane. The radio people just wanted catchy songs solid enough to seem like hits—and that’s a big challenge for any band, and while we came close, our music wasn’t persuasive to take the world off its axis. If you quizzed the smartest folks there I suspect they would’ve said They Might Be Giants really needed to be more directly about carefree fun— less art-school, less deadpan, more contemporary package: dress in a more costume-y way, be more outspoken and outrageous, maybe have songs with repeatable up-feeling catch phrases in them—that is the way to shape an act like ours into something more universal.
There was really only one person at Elektra who found us too weird—the first video commissioner. She expressed a real need for a make-over at our first meeting. Fortunately we were secure enough in ourselves to tell our A&R person we weren’t going to cooperate on that front. The fact that our videos were already more successful than the safe and uninspired corporate fluff they were generally turning out certainly helped our argument.
Of all the many wonderful albums in your catalog, which do you have the most fondness for?
As we were making The Spine in 2004 there was a real overabundance of spiderwebby Halloweeny kind of songs. Some were manic, and some were more pastoral—but as a group it seemed like a bit much to put them all on the album, so we left a lot off, and the overflow became the EP The Spine Surfs Alone. When I listen to it now the EP is wonderfully, if unintentionally, cohesive and so damn paranoid—it’s a real song cycle.
What inspired the detour into children’s music?
John and I had both done side project albums, the movie Gigantic was getting made and a box set of our first twenty years was coming out on Rhino, so it seemed as if TMBG was really finally established in the culture. It seemed like we were safe to do a “one-off ” without people thinking the band was changing course in any fundamental way. So we made the album No! (our first kids album) during the off hours of doing incidental music for Malcolm in the Middle and the Daily Show, and the process was a very low key, pleasant diversion compared those more pressurized television jobs.
Of course the success of No! was the part we hadn’t anticipated.
Did you ever consider making the kid’s music your path entirely and abandoning the adult audience altogether?
No, although it certainly was available to us. We’ve been pretty upfront about our reluctance to be entertainers of kids—always kind of hidden behind puppets or animated avatars of ourselves. Making the leap into television and being a full on children’s act somehow always loomed in the back of our conversations with Disney, but that was never serious to us. But you can’t blame ‘em—kids music is typically personality or character driven. The idea of a faceless kids act is really quite unusual.
Will you continue to make children’s albums?
Probably, but who knows? We have done enough kids albums to do a pretty compelling kids show, and it seems the existing albums just go and go with new generations of kids. If we were to go right back to it, it would be nice to get away from the education part of it. As efficient as it is to write on a topic, it’s fun just to write songs in a more wide open way.
Do you have any soundtrack projects in the works? Is that still a lucrative area for you?
Most of the incidental music we’ve done has been for television and advertising. Movie stuff sounds more interesting but being based out of New York we don’t get a lot of offers. It’s okay money and I think we’re actually pretty good at it, but often it’s just a huge volume of work and typically delivered on very hard deadlines, so it’s really just a high-pressure, well compensated job.
You seem unlikely rock stars – in both your image and your approach. And yet that became your hook of sorts. Any thoughts about what it was like to evolve as sort of ‘anti-rock stars’
We are in fact very often rock-star-style unreasonable. We are complicated and, by standard measures, our goals are often very abstract and might seem quite particular and even ridiculous to an outside observer. We can be very “just so” about how we’re presented. While I wouldn’t say we are self-destructive in that typical rock star way, there are many things—like money for instance—that simply will not be enough to motivate us to do something we don’t want to do.
I particularly love the Dial-A-Song story. What on Earth made you think of that?
The phone machine was actually emerging technology at the time, so thinking about what you could do with it beyond it’s obvious purpose-built use came naturally to us.
You’re an inspiration to younger artists proving what can be achieved with hard work and self promotion. Do you have any advice?
According to many of the folks we work with, we don’t work that hard or spend nearly enough time promoting ourselves so we might not be the role models you’re looking for. I think sticking to melody might be the best advice we can give.
Do you think there might be any more Grammy’s up for grabs?
I hope so—there are definitely some odd categories most people would never expect. Maybe some spoken word projects!
Do you have a most memorable show for good or bad reasons or both?
You tend to remember the bad shows. That’s why old musicians are so unbearable.
What are you listening to at the moment?
I just bought I have an album of French chanson from 1966. It’s a compilation and very odd. This is the stack of albums I need to put back in their sleeves—David Bowie/Pin Ups, Drummer Man/Gene Krupa with Anita O’Day and Roy Eldridge, .
How challenging is it to replicate your songs on stage, given the unlikely instrumentation and unusual arrangements that grace the studio versions?
I feel like what we gain is always more than what we lose playing songs live. But while we put a lot of energy and though in to how we put songs together live, I’m not certain we always actually have such profound insight in to how any given arrangement really lands. I mean, audiences clap at the end of most songs—and we all know that can be deceiving!
One song we have talked about over the years is Ana Ng. It was a popular early track for us, and when we recorded it we had probably had seven cups of coffee apiece and were jazzed at being in the studio and working with a new drum machine. We just kept pushing the tempo up and up and ended up recording the song at a bit fast. I don’t want to say too fast because it’s a very successful recording sonically. But needless to say, in the fullness of time as we have performed the song hundreds of times, and we came to the conclusion that at a more moderate tempo Ana Ng actually FEELS much groovier. Now here’s where I can’t help but wonder—if you see a bunch of old dudes playing their old songs at a slower tempo—doesn’t it seem likely that as an audience member you’re gonna think—they’re tired! Either bored of this song, or just too damn old to play it at full speed? Now of course at any given moment we are all that too—but what we’re doing in our performance in Ana Ng for musical reasons I suspect could scan in an entirely different way to an audience member. But who knows?
Early on, you built up a tremendous cult and college following and with your signing to Elektra. Yet, afterwards, it seemed like your possibilities for broader success never really reached full potential. Any thoughts about what transpired?
Well, that really defines a half empty/half full way of looking at your career. Most bands don’t last five years even with hits, and I could name two dozen bands that had much bigger hits than us back then who are now 100% married to that time, and in a sense are forever cast as an oldies act. We could have definitely worked harder at some key points, but we could have also broken up. We toured for a solid year behind Flood, and that certainly made some registers ring, but we were aging like presidents.
What’s your favorite time of the day and why?
In my decrepitude I find myself become a morning person, working at the crack of dawn before I start feeling self-conscious. As a novelist once said it’s good to work “before the editor wakes up.”
What if anything do you never leave the house without?
The big three: keys, phone, wallet.
Best advice you ever received?
John Lennon suggested that all songwriters should try to finish any song they start as fully as possible when the idea strikes, because it might be hard to get back to it later—and that seems smart to me. We have gotten so much bad advice and odd advice over the years—I think some more professionally-minded music folk felt like we needed saving from ourselves, but being so many years into it and, by casual observation, about a thousand times happier than your average veteran musician, I can’t say we’ve done badly. I had a guitar teacher who said there isn’t a gig in New York City that isn’t worth doing. I’m not sure that is really true—we’ve certain played some odd places—but for a musical outfit getting out into the world, going at that goal in an uncalculated way is probably smart.
A lot of musicians are also collectors. Do you have rare or notable instruments?
We’re not collectors. but we have a fair bit of semi-worthless electronic gear from the 80s and 90s. Some stuff—like the original Boss Dr. Rhythm, the Yamaha Rx11 (drum machine on the pink alum) or the Casio MT-10 still make great sounds and get used routinely on demos and at sessions, but others are essentially souvenirs/doorstops—specifically the Alesis drum machine from the Lincoln and the Casio FZ1 (which was THE sound-making device of Apollo 18)
I love guitars but I’m left handed so there is not much to collect! I have had been lucky enough to convince Dennis Galuszka at Fender’s Custom Shop to build a couple of instruments for me—a Telecaster and a Jazzmaster. I use a big red Gibson ES-335 when the electricity in the venue is just too shitty. When I started playing I had a great Gibson ES-330 (very similar to the Beatles large electric Epiphones) and for years i never wanted for another instrument. Unfortunately it was lost when my apartment was robbed in the early 80s. From that point on it was a parade of cheap instruments which caused no end of problems for recordings and on stage. Getting a proper lefty Telecaster (even though it was made in Japan with lesser parts) in 1988 was a huge step up. Eventually I got other stringed instruments as spares and for sonic variety. I have a 12 string, a bass, a tipple (which is a Latin American stringed instrument that I have strung to function like an octave 12 string or a super mandolin—it’s on the beginning of With the Dark, I think on Unrelated Thing and other songs. But I’m kind of a “one guitar” guy on stage.
Any final thoughts?
I recently flew to do a show in Toronto and had to take my guitar on the plane. The car service driver was as chatty as I was exhausted. He couldn’t stop talking about Santana and Jimi Hendrix and guitars, guitars, guitars. He asked me what band I was in, and I begged him off. “You don’t know my band” I said. I just couldn’t get the energy up to describe the band to a stranger one more time. But he wouldn’t let me off the hook. As he went on and on, I thought—what would other guys do?—and my mind drifted to Jody in Fountains of Wayne. Jody is a great practical joker and notorious fibber. So I broke down and told the guy I was a sideman—the ringing lead guitarist—in Fountains of Wayne. He hadn’t heard of us! But he wanted to know more! I told him about Stacy’s Mom. Told him how we got our name. Told him I do all the recordings too “to keep ‘em tight—but I’m not in the pictures.”
It was so liberating not having to tell the truth, and so pleasant pretending to be someone else. I think next time another interview like this comes up I’m going to do it as a sideman in Fountains.
