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In Set List, we talk to veteran musicians about some of their most famous songs, learning about their lives and careers in the process, and maybe hearing a good backstage anecdote or two. This is part two of our interview with They Might Be Giants; you can read part one here.

“Dog On Fire” (2000)

“Boss Of Me” (from 2001’s Mink Car)

AVC: “Boss Of Me” is best known as the theme song for Malcolm In The Middle. Was that something you already had in your quiver around that time?

John Flansburgh: It was a weird story. I remember I was here in Sullivan County in the Catskill Mountains when we got the call. My wife and I must have just gotten this house when it happened. The phone call came in, and it was co*pletely speculative. Fox was doing a pilot and they wanted us to write an original theme song to help sell the pilot. And the guy who was the creator of the show was Linwood Boomer, which was such an unusual name that I sort of took note of it. I told my wife and she pointed out that he had been a child actor and was the blind boyfriend on Little House On The Prairie in the ’70s. He was kind of a heartthrob then and she knew exactly who he was, so that was kind of surprising.

We had just been liberated from our Elektra deal and it just seemed like, all of a sudden when we started answering our own phones and not having the people from Elektra answer on our behalf, an incredible number of opportunities became available to us. This was the exact same time as The Daily Show theme and all this advertising stuff we did—all that stuff was brand new to us. And it was really interesting and exciting. 

Basically, John and I always have stacked unfinished, half-baked ideas. Some of which suggest further baking, and others are just kind of impossible-to-finish things. And the theme that is “Boss Of Me” is literally something that was sitting around half-finished and I couldn’t pry [it] open and get a full song out of it. So I thought, “This would be perfect for a TV theme, because it’s got a lot of energy, it kind of fits.” The show is about three boys, so it has this sort of boy energy. And I don’t know how many themes we submitted, but they definitely jumped for that. And they loved it.

What was interesting was they loved the demo. And the demo was very hairy sounding. It was hard to even sort of settle it down enough to sound like a finished product. It had this kind of homebrewed quality to it. But they were just adamant—they didn’t want to change the vocal performance, they didn’t want to change anything. But then the show came on the air, and all of a sudden the Fox Network people, still very high on the success of [the theme to] Friends as a breakthrough single, were [thinking], “We have to make the most of this and figure out how to make it a full-length song and we want to re-record it.” 

I remember being on a conference call with I don’t how many people, but somebody was in a limousine going to an airport, I remember that. But the people on the conference call knew I was doing the establishing music for the show, but I don’t think they realized it was our voice and our song, so they were speaking very freely. Like, “Well, this vocal—we can’t sit with this. This is terrible! Who can we get to replace this?”  And that felt incredibly disrespectful to me, but obviously they had no idea that I was a participant in the actual making of [the song]. But then again, I have to stick up for Linwood; he was really the one who [said], “Nah, it’s great! Admit it, it’s great, we’re fine! We’re sticking with this.” Because it was really his deal, it was his show and he just wasn’t going to get pushed around.

John Linnell: You should also point out the line, “Life is unfair” came from Linwood. That was his capsule description of the entire show.

JF: Yeah, when we’re doing themes, I often ask people, “Is there a bullet phrase [or] what sums up the energy of this project?” and that’s exactly what he said. Which is kind of a jaw-dropping thing, I mean, “life is unfair” is a very weird idea. 

AVC: You kind of mentioned it off-handedly, but how did The Daily Show theme co*e to be? Was that from Jon Stewart or someone else?

JF: That was actually before Jon Stewart’s tenure.

JL: It was Madeleine Smithberg; she had booked us on [Late Night With David Letterman]. She was the talent coordinator there. She was someone we knew, and it didn’t seem like this high-stakes thing at the time. It was, “There’s this news show, Jon Stewart is taking over from this other guy, and we’ll just be redoing the package.” But we were just covering the theme music, which was Bob Mould’s original recording, and we were just jazzing it up which felt like what we were supposed to do.

JF: Well, we might have been the beneficiaries of the same kind of conversation that was happening with Malcolm In The Middle, which was that they were changing the format to be more like fake news, more like a faux news broadcast. So they didn’t want the music package to feel too contemporary.

JL: That’s right. We were the go-to, non-contemporary guys. We knew how to do a certain amount of retro-ish stuff. The thing I remember about Madeleine Smithberg was that she was really, really trying to get us to sound like big, national news show music, and we kept saying, “We need more money.” [Laughs]

“Man, It’s So Loud In Here” (from 2001’s Mink Car)

AVC: How was the experience of working with Adam Schlesinger?

JL: Yeah, well, that was really wonderful! John and I both had the opportunity to do sessions with Adam in our project studios. He was a very, very simpatico guy. He just loved doing kind of interesting music, but also shiny pop music. It felt like we were very much on the same page as Adam with all that stuff.

But with “Man, It’s So Loud In Here,” we had done an original version with The Butcher Brothers. We actually spent time down in their studio in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, which is where they had their record label and recording studio. So we’re driving down there for a number of weeks doing demos with them. And then Adam took a co*pletely different approach to [the song], in that he and John Flansburgh took the song away from me and went off and made a co*plete but very radically different-sounding recording which I loved.

JF: Yeah, Adam just had so much enthusiasm for every kind of musical process and recording. We essentially approached “Man, It’s So Loud In Here” like it was a remix. I remember we had a conversation and… I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but as we were doing this, he kept referencing hip-hop culture and dancefloor culture and saying he wanted to start his production career as an electronic artist. And he wanted to be called “Bill Gatez.”

He had such—I’m trying to think of a different word than “catholic”—tastes. He really liked music in general. which is such an interesting thing. I think that most people who like music are very passionate about a specific kind of music and that really gets them going. And some people like a lot of different kinds of music and you kind of see a bigger picture. But I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody who liked every kind of music, and he was really that guy. He was just animated by the whole thing.

JL: Yeah, having said that, Adam was very unco*promising about his belief about—well, this is the example that has co*e up a lot, because the other guys in our band knew Adam very well, having played with him. Our bass player [Danny Weinkauf] played with him in Fountains Of Wayne, so we’ve traded a lot of stories about Adam. One of them was that he thought movies were ridiculous. Like, the idea of people getting up and acting and pretending to be someone else was the silliest thing anyone’s ever co*e up with. “I don’t understand. Why would you do that?

Another personal thing is that, during that period, John and I were latching on to this weird thing in the British tabloid tradition, which is that they came up with a particular kind of abbreviated nickname for public figures. Michael Jackson was known as “Jacko” and Paul McCartney was “Macca.” So we came up with names for ourselves, which we freely used; Flans was “Flansa” and I was “Nello.” I still have this DVD of the projects that we did in the project studio with Adam, and it just says “Schlesa.” That was our name for Adam: “Schlesa.”

“No!” (from 2002’s No!)

AVC: What led you down the path of doing children’s albums?

JF: The first thing we did was with Rounder. The people from Rounder had approached us to do a kids’ project years before, and I think our manager was very intrigued by the idea of having two label deals at the same time. I think we were a little concerned about our reputation changing. Although, in retrospect, I realize one of the things that’s odd about doing kids’ music is if you’re doing kids’ music, you’re never going to co*e back to doing adult music, which was never our intention. But I think we realize better now how people get that impression.

But it was just something that was available to us. I suppose we could have just as easily done a Halloween record or a Christmas record, but from a writing point of view, it just seemed like an interesting open-ended assignment. And we were doing so much studio stuff back then, we were just working around the clock. We’re doing the Malcolm In The Middle incidental music, and the first children’s album, No!, and making Mink Car. All those things were kind of happening at the same time, so it was really like a full-time gig. And John was a new father, so it was a very jammed-up period. 

But the first album was kind of like the Amnesty Day album. It was like the “real work” session, whether it was for some advertising agency, or Malcolm In The Middle, or The Daily Show, or whatever gig we were doing, those were like the “real” gigs, and doing the kids’ songs was just kind of for fun. And I feel like any job, any creative enterprise, that’s the thing you do after the “chore”—you know there’s the thing that’s paying the rent and there’s the thing that just for kicks —those kinds of jobs always have a spirit to them that’s ineffable. It’s just a great, spirited way to work, and you’re just having fun. You can sense it. So our very first kids’ record kind of set the tone and set the bar, which I think was pretty high, and we’ve just been trying to get back to that ever since.

AVC: Well, No! was definitely the soundtrack to my daughter’s first few years. 

JF: Oh, great!

JL: The other thing I would say about No! is that we were not feeling any pressure to make it be anything in particular, unlike all the things for Elektra, where there was a sense of, “Okay, this is the big project. Let’s knuckle down!” The thing with No! was that we didn’t know if it would just disappear into thin air, so, really, it was just fun. And that’s something that kind of rejuvenated our whole [band] in a way. And the album was hugely popular, I think, because it had that vibe of the stakes not seeming particularly high; it was just a very fun project.

JF: And just to finish the thought, we also were sort of repelled by the general state of kids’ music as we understood it, and it’s always good to work with negative energy like that. [Laughs.]

“Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Theme” (from 2008’s Here co*e The 123s)

“Hot Dog!” (from 2008’s Here co*e The 123s)

AVC: How did the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse gig co*e about?

JF: Well, when we hooked up with Disney, I think we kind of became–they just have a way of weaving everything together. The Disney records were, in many ways, just as much for the Disney Channel as they were for retail or selling CDs or DVDs. There’s no advertising in the Disney Channel—they can’t advertise products to kids—but to give the network the shape of a broadcast, they play incidental videos in the breaks. So all the videos we made on the DVDs were played, for the most part, in the broadcast. 

We were just doing this stuff and doing a lot of things that were showing up on the Disney Channel, so they were very aware of our output. And like a lot of things with work-for-hire [jobs], somebody else had gotten the gig and they had built the animation and built the whole show that is on the air now around another music package. Then, at the last minute, they decided they didn’t like it. I got the call on a Friday, or a Thursday, something like that, and they said, “Can you do an intro song and an outro song for this show? It’s going to be the new Mickey Mouse Clubhouse thing, and chances are it will run for 25 years. No pressure! And can we have the finished product by Monday?”

It was wild. We had this weekender house and I had a little project studio in the house, but we had invited guests to co*e for the weekend and, fortunately, they weren’t musicians, but my friend Amy Miles, my wife Robin [Goldwasser], and I think Amy’s husband, Mike, might even be singing on the theme. So I just had to cook up these two quick songs: the “Hot Dog!” song and the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse theme. And what’s odd is the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse theme song is now the first part of a two-part TikTok meme and it’s like the before and after “when times were simpler” music. I don’t know what Scandinavian death metal band is in the second act, but it’s got a lot of legs.

JL: It’s funny to think of that project as representing “the simpler times” because we did a lot of shows at the House Of Blues in Disneyland, and there was always this running joke where somebody in the band was going… [Affects a Mickey Mouse voice.] “All right, you guys! Don’t fuck this one up! This is an important gig!” 

The other story about Disney I remember is that John and I went to the Disney lot to do a bunch of promotional stuff—this is just when we were getting inducted into their whole scene—and we got picked up in a van with co*pletely blackened windows. Like, we got in and they slammed the door shut. And John looked at me and said, “Do you think this is the van they picked up Hannah Montana in just before they chloroformed her?” It really felt like, “Wow, we’re going in the dark passage.”

JF: “We’re going into the Death Star!”

“Experimental Film” (from 2004’s The Spine)

JL: That was, of course, a collaboration video with the Homestar Runner guys, which was great—a really fun period for us, because they were just up for whatever. Again, it was a very different kind of song from other ones. It’s funny to think [about, because] obviously we don’t have a huge amount of perspective about what we’re doing because we’re co*pletely encased in the project. But I always felt like the important thing was to keep trying to co*e up with a different perspective. 

“Experimental Film” is another entirely different kind of narrative for us—it’s a pop song, but it’s about that kind of wide-open love for something that’s purely artistic. And not necessarily something everyone can relate to, but that’s the thing it was kind of expressing: “I love 8 mm weird film that’s non-narrative and of something really minimal.” Like an Andy Warhol-ish project or something. It just felt like there should be a song about that.

AVC: And definitely from an album that proved you were not just limited solely to kids’ music at the time, since this was between two kids’ albums.

JL: Yeah, I think there was a period where we were making the kids’ records where we needed to assert our grown-up status as well. So we were doing stuff that was probably some of the darkest material we’ve ever done between the kids’ records.

“The Mesopotamians” (from 2007’s The Else)

JL: Where that grew out of was, John and I had a contract to write a book, so we were throwing back and forth ideas. I think John wanted to do…was it a history of crooks? Is that right, John?

JF: Oh, yeah! 

JL: Yeah, so that was one idea. And another idea I had, which led to “The Mesopotamians,” was that it would be all these characters from ancient Middle-Eastern mythology who would all be in a band together. So that was the idea, just a book that has a bunch of songs that was like, I don’t know if you’re familiar with The Turtles Present The Battle Of The Bands, but that was one that John and I loved that actually spawned some hit singles. This was a kind of similar thing: “Oh yeah, let’s have this band. They’re called The Mesopotamians.” There was going to be a bunch of songs about each character. But that didn’t co*e to pass, the book was never made. I eventually picked up the demo and kind of reworked it into the version that we ended up with, which I think was really enhanced by…was that David Cowles who did the animations [in the music video]?

JF: Yeah, David Cowles is a huge Monkees fan, but he’s also a huge Beatles fan, so it’s all riffing on those references, A Hard Day’s Night and Help! and The Monkees’ stuff.

JL: Yeah, it’s really such a loaded and wonderful video. It took the song so much farther. I was really happy with what David came up with. And he had sent us a bunch of cool drawings that were sort of the Ed “Big Daddy” Roth vibe. 

JF: Oh yeah, those are in there, for sure. I love the way that video works, too; it’s just so rough and scrumbly. 

“Other Father Song” (from 2009’s Coraline: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

JL: We were approached by Henry Selick, and–e’ve told the story many times, but we wrote a lot of songs for Coraline. We went to Portland, Oregon, and spent a lot of time meeting with Henry, and we made a co*plete soundtrack for a short film he made before that [Moongirl, released in 2005] as sort of a practice run. We felt like we were pretty ensconced in the Laika world, and they seemed happy working with us. 

Henry would send us the scripts and we would go through them. We were going to do this very musical project with him—that was the original idea. John wrote this song called “Careful What You Pack,” which eventually got released [on The Else]. But we wrote a bunch of other songs, some of which have never seen the light of day. And, sadly, I think the “Other Father Song” was the only one that made the cut. He decided he didn’t want to do a full musical thing, so it basically got reduced to that one song. It was originally going to be John Hodgman singing, because he was the speaking voice of the Other Father for Coraline. I’m not sure what happened, but I think Hodgman did a version, and they liked the original better, so they used that. So I’m the singing voice of John Hodgman, which was fine, as far as I’m concerned.

AVC: I interviewed Selick when Coraline came out on DVD, and I’ll quote directly from it: “I love They Might Be Giants, they’re one of my favorite bands or duos of all time, and I think they’re some of the most brilliant songwriters of all time.”

JF: “But…” [Laughs.]

JL: That’s it? Where’s the co*pliment sandwich?

AVC: He said, “The demos they did are beautiful and they’re really great songs, but the music just wasn’t fitting.”

JL: “Wasn’t fitting.” Yeah, Henry was very true blue. I think he was absolutely unco*promising. He really had a specific vision, which of course changed over time, unfortunately. But he really knew what he wanted and that’s, ultimately, what made him a good artist. It was sad for us, because he’d done the same thing with [Andy Partridge] on James And The Giant Peach. John spoke to [Andy] afterwards, and we got the whole story, that the exact same thing had happened—he’d written a whole bunch of songs and they all got cut and replaced by Randy Newman songs. So there must be a whole Andy Partridge album’s worth of songs from James And The Giant Peach. 

AVC: He released a bunch of them. He released some demo collections that had them on it. I do remember that Selick pointedly said with your stuff, he didn’t replace it with anything else.

JL: That’s true! We didn’t get the Stanley Kubrick treatment where the whole soundtrack got replaced.

AVC: You weren’t Newman-ed.

JL: That’s right!

“Can’t Keep Johnny Down” (from 2011’s Join Us)

JL: I suppose the interesting thing about that song was the contest we had which also involved John Hodgman. John Hodgman was the judge of an enormous blizzard of [fan-made] videos for that track. And there were so many good ones; that was the thing. We made one official video, which was one of the less interesting videos, because so many of the contest entries were just amazing, particularly the winner, which I can’t even do it justice to describe it. But it’s such a good video and I’d reco*mend it to anybody. It’s all filmed in reverse, which John and I are in love with anything that’s backwards. It’s just irresistible.

AVC: And I’ve been assured by Wikipedia that it is not autobiographical.

JL: Oh, I hope not. There’s a couple of lines in the song that were based on incidents. My wife, actually, was driving and she saw someone with their gas cap dangling on the side of the car. And she had this horrible experience where she was trying to get their attention. She pulled up alongside them and said, “You know your gas cap isn’t attached?” and the response she got was so hostile and obscene from the person driving. And, in fact, I think both people in the car were, like, “Fuck you, bitch!” It was this really shocking and weird inappropriate response. But maybe that fed into “Can’t Keep Johnny Down.”

JF: Well, maybe she should mind her own business! [Laughs.]

JL: Yeah, I think that was their feeling.

JF: “We want our gas cap hanging out!”

“Tubthumping,” featuring the Onion A.V. Club Choir (from 2011’s Album Raises New and Troubling Questions)

AVC: I’m just reasonably guessing that this was not a song you’d planned to cover until you were invited to participate in A.V. Undercover.

JL: You wanna tackle this, John?

JF: Well, I feel like you were the one that had the idea to do “Tubthumping.” I remember looking at the list and thinking, “Oh, no, there’s nothing here at all.” 

JL: Yeah, we had that experience twice because we did a subsequent one, which was the Destiny’s Child cover [“Bills, Bills, Bills”]. And, again, it was like a lot of the choice ones had already been picked, so we were, like, “Okay, what are we left with?” 

But the thing with “Tubthumping” was—I think I was even saying this when we taped the session—that it might have actually been the closest thing to a They Might Be Giants song, because structurally it was so unusual, because it was not like a pop song. And I think the reason for that was that it was written by a co*mittee. 

JF: Yeah, it’s really linear; it’s a really linear song. We were on tour and were going to be doing Chicago again, and I was talking to Marty [Beller] and I said, “Yeah, it’s too bad we can’t get those people together again.” And he said, “It doesn’t matter if we have background singers onstage.” The entire audience was screaming as loud as anything. Currently, we’ve been doing “Bills, Bills, Bills” every couple of shows, but I think bringing “Tubthumping” back would be a huge highlight to the live show. It really rallies the audience in this crazy way. They’d probably be screaming louder than for any of our songs. We should definitely put it on the blocks. I enjoy singing in falsetto. Definitely stepping out.

AVC: Did you ever, in fact, hear from Chumbawamba after you covered it?

Both: No…

JF: I did hear from an old friend of ours, Mark Lerner, who plays in a band Flat Old World with my wife Robin. He is a Chumbawamba fan, and it made me think, “I’ve never examined their output at all. I know nothing of Chumbawamba except for that song.” But I guess they have a whole career of top quality records. And he is definitely a music connoisseur, so I am intrigued by his interest in these British co*munists.

JL: Yeah, well, we can do a whole album of Chumbawamba covers.

JF: So does Chumbawamba live together co*munally? It sounds slightly culty, right?

AVC: I don’t think they’re together anymore, but I’ve always gotten the impression that they were more of a musical collective than a band. But I do not consider myself a Chumbawamba authority, so I could not say what their living conditions are.

JF: I don’t know. I’m suspicious of the cultiness.

JL: Well, our friend Brian Dewan worked with Blue Man Group back when they were just a cult, and what he used to co*plain about–what that meant was that he was not only contributing his artistic work, but he also had to mop up the blue shit off the stage at the end of the night. He was very embittered about that.

“You’re On Fire” (from 2013’s Nanobots)

JL:  I think my favorite aspect of that song is the echo on the guitar, and the rhythm of the song is built around what’s going on with Dan Miller’s guitar. He’s hitting a pretty sparse rhythm, but then the echo goes back and forth and creates a hybrid rhythm. That’s a very technical thing, but that’s, in a way, the whole basis of the beat. And then I suppose it’s somewhat kind of a funny lyric about the expression “you’re on fire” and the literal meaning of “you’re on fire.”

AVC; The video is notable for featuring Lauren Lapkus.

JL: Oh, yeah, that’s right! You know, we heard a funny story. John and I went to the co*edy Bang Bang! podcast, and she told us she had agreed to do the video because she thought she was going to meet us. She did not. [Laughter] Which is great, just to think, “Well, of course the band will be there because it’s them on the song….” And I’m sorry we didn’t get to meet her, but unfortunately, you don’t necessarily show up for your own video.

JF: It’s just wild that she became such a big star right after the video. I mean, she’s such a big co*edy [actor] now.

“Whole Lot Of Glean” (promotional video for 2015’s Glean)

AVC: Glean is an album filled with tracks from your Dial-A-Song, which was a staple of your early career that you brought it back. 

JL: Yeah, actually, the best story about that album is a video we did for it called “Whole Lot Of Glean.” I shot the whole thing on my phone. When we put together the Glean album, I made a promotional video which was of me signing CD booklets. It actually took a week to sign all the booklets that I had in front of me. And actually, you only see one box being slowly unloaded, signed, and reloaded. But there were four in total, so it was a massive number of booklets.

I thought as long as I was spending all this time signing, I’d do a timelapse. I didn’t know what it was for, at first, and then I made up a song to go with the signing of the booklets, which was kind of a funny promotional song being brutally honest about the whole process of signing stuff. And so that’s me in my own dining room, signing booklets. I think Flans had already signed all of his, so you’re just seeing me adding my signature.

AVC: But the fans went crazy anyway.

JL: I don’t know about going crazy, but they liked it.

JF: They were already crazy.

“I Love You For Psychological Reasons” (from 2016’s Phone Power)

JL: Well, that’s another one of those songs that takes its cue from another song called “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons.” Probably anyone who’s heard that song and knows this song already knows that that’s the reference. It’s a lot of words! It’s one of those songs that was a huge amount of work, writing all the rhymes and trying to keep it interesting and poetic. I look at the lyric now and think, “Man, I had so much energy! How could I have possibly written all those words?” Obviously, I was drinking coffee.

“I’m Not A Loser” (from 2016’s SpongeBob SquarePants: Original Cast Recording)

JL: That was a very easy gig; we were super lucky. We were given a very straightforward assignment: Pick a character, write a song about [them]. I had watched my share of SpongeBob when my son was growing up, so I knew the show pretty intimately. And we were doubly lucky in that Jonathan Coulton was the supervisor for the project, so he was someone who I was fairly confident that I could give him the song and he’ll know exactly what to do. 

The original demo ends with the suggestion of a clarinet solo because the character of Squidward actually does play the clarinet on the show, and I’m a very pro-clarinet booster, so I [thought], “We need to get the clarinet in there.” And the production was astonishing! We were so lucky they came up with the tap dance routine for Squidward, which was a pyrotechnic idea of having a four-legged creature tap dance. We were blessed, and we met the guy who played Squidward, and he said, “Thank you for the gift,” and we said, “No, no, it’s the gift you have given us.” “Well, we’re exchanging gifts. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“Lazy” (2024 single)

AVC: “Lazy” was the most recent thing you put out. How did you find your way to releasing that?

JL: Well, we were contacted by the New York public radio station, WNYC, because they were celebrating their 100th anniversary. So, they had the idea of asking artists and ordinary folks to contribute songs from the year 1924, which is the year WNYC went on the air. And so we looked down a list of songs and, lo and behold, there was this very—I thought—apt song by Irving Berlin. It just felt like something we could sink our teeth into. It’s a lovely song and it worked with [sections where] John and I each get to sing. It was just one of these very easy, appealing projects for which we got paid any money but was something we just thought would be fun.

AVC: To start wrapping things up, do you have a favorite album? Or one that you consider to be the most underrated in the band’s catalog?

JL: You go first, Flans.

JF: Oh, I don’t know. I really like our very first album and how wide open it is. It’s interesting to me how, you know, just being in the world on the heels of the first album and making Lincoln. I think we learned so much about where our strengths lay as a band that we were forever changed doing a million shows. People talk about bands being unco*promised, and I’m not trying to be pro-co*promise, but there is an advantage to self-awareness in a way, where you can play to your strengths and create tighter stuff. But when I hear our first album, I feel there’s no getting back to the spirit of our first album, because I feel like we were so profoundly unself-aware. It’s very charming to me and it’s just a bunch of left-field ideas; it’s an exciting under-informed project. 

JL: I don’t have a favorite album. I feel like I can co*e up with a lot of ways to avoid answering that particular question or [in regards to] ranking things, I feel like it gets you into trouble. But I guess to me–I’m trying to say something interesting about an album. I think the ones I feel still hold up the best are the ones we spent the longest on. In particular, I think Join Us was one, and actually, the last bunch we spent a lot of time co*piling a lot of songs, normally twice as many songs as we wind up using. I feel like the general idea is that we actually do get out of them what we put into them and there have been times where we’ve been really, really focused and drilled down and co*e up with a lot of songs so we have a great set of choices. That’s still a really good method, I think, that’s what I like doing. We’ve had a lot of time since the pandemic, too. That’s enabled us to do a lot of work. So, BOOK, I think is a terrific album; I’m very proud of that one. The Else is another one that, I think, we were really doing that thing of trying to top ourselves which is incredibly hard when you’ve made this many records.

AVC: Lastly, because people always seem to be curious, where do you keep your Grammys (for “Boss Of Me” and Here co*e The 123s)?

JF: My mom has one of my Grammys.

JL: That’s a good place for it. Yeah, we have these things that you feel weird, maybe, hanging them on the wall in your home. I’m trying to get someone in our office to take on all these gold records and stuff like that that I don’t have anywhere to put. I kind of feel weird about looking at them. It just feels awkward. But my Grammys, I have mine on a shelf in Brooklyn. One of them was very useful when we were trying to train our kid to brush his teeth. We would award him with the Grammy if he successfully brushed his teeth each and every night. That was its second life.