They Might Be Giants

They Might Be Giants

John Linnell of They Might Be Giants says one of the group’s key goals has always been to not repeat themselves and bring something new to virtually every song he and his partner in the band, John Flansburgh, write and record.

But he admits that 35-plus years into the group’s career, it gets harder and harder to meet that goal.

“I mean, it’s easier said than done, obviously,” Linnell said in a late-December phone interview. “It’s a big challenge. But we take it seriously. We’re not just blowing smoke. I think we feel like in a way that is the job, say something new. We’ve already written all these songs. There’s absolutely no call to write the same songs over again. One of the reasons it gets harder and harder is we’ve written so many songs. And then the other reason is it’s always been hard and we’re getting older, so we maybe have to work harder to reach the same goal…I’m not making any claims about whether or not we’re successful. But that is something we do take seriously and we feel that’s our job, to try to come up with a new thing to say, a new idea.”

The challenge to stay fresh musically isn’t stopping the two Johns in their quest to create new material. In fact, they’re about to relaunch their signature Dial-A-Song programming. This will entail posting a new song every week as part of each weekly segment of the show.

What’s more, on Jan. 19, fans got 15 new songs via the new studio album, “I Like Fun.”

Linnell hopes he and Flansburgh have built up enough of a backlog of songs to keep Dial-A-Song up and running for the first part of 2018.

Some of the initial Dial-A-Song material figures to come from a project Linnell and Flansburgh have undertaken with noted illustrator David Cowles.

“I don’t know if you’re familiar with “Big Daddy” Roth (Ed Roth), this 1950s illustrator who did monsters driving hot (cars). He invented a character named Rat Fink, who was hugely popular in the ‘60s,” Linnell explained. “That was his thing. It was all very Southern California car culture and monsters and he would mash, like combine all this into a style of illustration. So our guy, David Cowles, partly inspired by this guy, has come up with these characters, and what we’ve done is written back stories for the characters and then written songs for each one.

“So that will be part of the project for next year, these sort of monster characters,” he said. “We’ll see how that goes. But it was a good impetus for writing more songs. We had all these stories, and we kind of let our imaginations go wild on them.”

Those songs won’t cover all of the needs of Dial-A Song.

“We don’t have enough (songs) yet to fill the whole year,” Linnell said. “But the idea is we’re going to keep feeding the pile and keep the quality as high as possible.”

Chances are Linnell and Flansburgh will succeed just fine in meeting the weekly song demands of Dial-A-Song. Over their history in They Might Be Giants, they have been one of the more prolific acts going.

“I Like Fun” will mark the 20th studio album (including several childrens albums) since Linnell and Flansburgh started They Might Be Giants as a duo in 1982. Theybrought on additional band members in 1992. Guitarist Dan Miller and bassist Danny Weinkauf have been on board since 1998, while drummer Marty Beller joined in 2004.

Along with the albums, Linnell and Flansburgh have contributed many songs to television, film and other projects, while a good number of other songs have been used only on Dial-A-Song, which debuted in 1985, ran until 2008, was reactivated in 2015 and early 2016 before shutting down again, and is being re-launched to coincide with the new album.

That second run of Dial-A-Song from 2015 until early 2016 produced enough material to fill three albums – “Glean” (2015), “Why? (2015) and “Phone Power” (2016).

They Might Be Giants enjoyed a few brushes with mainstream success in their first decade. “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” from the group’s platinum-certified third album, 1989’s “Flood,” was a top 5 modern rock hit, while “Ana Ng” “Twisting” and “The Statue Got Me High” also charted in the modern rock top 25.

“Flood” was the first of four albums They Might Be Giants released on major label Elektra. Since then, the group has released its albums independently, building a solid fan base along the way for its adult-themed albums, and finding even greater popularity with children’s music, beginning with the 2004 album “No!” Three of the children’s albums have gone gold.

The group’s music has been distinctive from the start – a catchy and at times quirky brand of wide-ranging pop accompanied by clever and sometimes brainy lyrics. That general blueprint remains intact on “I Like Fun,” an excellent effort that evokes both the early and more recent They Might Be Giants sound.

“McCafferty’s Bib,” “The Greatest” and “I Like Fun” – three of the album’s quirkier tunes — found Linnell and Flansburgh returning to their early mode of recording, where songs were mainly studio creations using a variety interesting instruments and sonics. (The song “I Like Fun,” in fact, even features samples of Cream vocalist Jack Bruce singing wordless notes.) On other songs, such as the bouncy piano-driven “I Left My Body,” the ultra-hooky surfy rocker “An Insult to the Fact Checkers” and the punchy power pop-ish “All Time What,” the approach is more in line with the post-1992 full band-oriented albums, which gives these songs a more muscular sound that is entirely suitable for these tunes.

But if “I Like Fun” is immediately recognizable as a They Might Be Giants album, Linnell feels he, Flansburgh and the other band members – met the goal of not repeating themselves musically.

“I would say most of the songs on the album are, they don’t to me sound like retreads of stuff we’ve already done,” Linnell said. “Somebody who’s farther away from the project might say that, and I wouldn’t even know exactly which song they’d point to, but I’m sure people hear our new stuff and say ‘Oh yeah, that’s them.’ They recognize that it’s us. So there is some thread in common with stuff we’ve already done. But I don’t know. We are inside of this project and we don’t think about it, we can’t think about it from the perspective of someone who’s not inside it. We are deeply immersed in what we’re doing and that’s the only way we can approach it.”

For the tour in support of the new album, the five members of They Might Be Giants will be joined by trumpeter/multi-instrumentalist Curt Ramm. The show will feature fan favorites, some deep tracks that haven’t been played much on earlier tours and a healthy selection of songs from “I Like Fun.” Linnell knows emphasizing the new material is a bit of a risk, but he hopes the show will please hardcore and casual fans alike.

“It’s a challenge for people to go see their favorite band and be subjected to a whole bunch of new material that maybe they’re not that into,” he said. “So we have to make the case, basically. We’re trying to make the argument that the new stuff is good.”