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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 one of our interview with They Might Be Giants; you can read part two here.

The artists: They Might Be Giants have proven themselves to be many things over the course of their multi-decade career—why, they might even be Dr. Spock’s backup band!—but one thing that they have consistently been is fun, offering up a diverse musical palate co*bined with lyrics that are sometimes educational and sometimes utterly inscrutable. They’re also extremely prolific, so to delve into their discography and try to cover a significant chunk of it was a Herculean task, but John Linnell and John Flansburgh were kind enough to do a lengthy Zoom interview with The A.V. Club and tackle as many songs from throughout their existence as we could squeeze into one interview. We kicked things off with a song that was actually recorded by Linnell before he and Flansburgh first teamed up.

The Mundanes, “Make It The Same” (1980)

John Linnell: [Surprised.] Oh! Okay…

The A.V. Club: From what I can tell, John, that seems to have been your first release co*mitted to vinyl.

JL: I guess so, yeah. The Mundanes was a New Wave band. I was just a band member, not really one of the leaders of the band. We’d been together for about a year, and we put out a single, a 45 RPM single with three cuts on it. We squeezed two short cuts on one side of it and one on the other. My contribution was Farfisa organ and Moog synthesizer, which were also the instruments that John Flansburgh and I started using when we first started making our recordings. We had this leftover gear from being in The Mundanes, and it was kind of like the New Wave starter kit, those instruments.

AVC: So how did you two first cross paths? 

JL: Well, you wanna tell the story, Flans?

John Flansburgh: Oh, I can’t remember. [Laughs.] Well, we went to the same grammar school, but John’s a year older than me, so as George Harrison will remind everyone, that’s a huge difference. We didn’t really beco*e friends until high school and we were sort of running in a clique of kids who all worked at the newspaper. It’s not that different from being like theater kids; it’s like an affinity group as much as it was a working newspaper.

AVC: How did you discover your musical bond?

JF: Well, we had a lot of musical experiences and we had a good friend, James McIntyre, who turned us on to a ton of music. He was kind of like the Lester Bangs of Lincoln Sudbury Regional High School. And he was just a really colorful guy. I don’t know if he played you the Ramones record first, Linnell…

JL: Yep.

JF: …but he played me the Ramones in his attic bedroom, and it was like one of those things where hearing the Ramones was a lot closer to hearing either Laurie Anderson or Motorhead or maybe a co*bination of both. There was something kind of unbelievable about the Ramones. I think that was the thing about punk rock/new wave, the emerging thing that we now think of as alternative music. Rock was notable in a lot of different ways, but there was something extra new and extra unbelievable about the things we were getting used to and we just had that shared experience. Some of it was listening to the same music, some of it was going to the same shows. We saw a lot of shows together. 

“Everything Right Is Wrong” (from 1985’s Wiggle Diskette)

AVC: So what was the first thing you recorded as They Might Be Giants? Because it looks like it was “Everything Right Is Wrong.”

JL: Yeah, that was the first thing we put out. I think before we made that flexi-disc, we made a bunch of recordings. John and I recorded together when we were teenagers, before there was any idea of getting a band together. We did a lot of recording projects, I believe, in your childhood bedroom. But then after that, I had a rehearsal space when I was in The Mundanes, and John brought his tape recorder in and we did a bunch of recordings just in that rehearsal room. As I recall, I think we did a cover of a Soupy Sales song called “That Wasn’t No Girl You Saw Me With.”

JF: Oh, right. That was that Beatles exploitation song. For people who don’t know who Soupy Sales is, which might be everyone reading this, I guess Soupy Sales is most famous for being the father of the Sales Brothers, who were the rhythm section on Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life.” But Soupy Sales was sort of a New York City children’s entertainer and kind of a notable nutball.

AVC: I didn’t realize until today that, per the flexi, Chris Butler [of The Waitresses] did the programming.

JF: No, he didn’t do the programming. He lent us his drum machine! [Laughs.] But the thing about that: I have to give Chris incredible credit because, at the time, the drum machine he had cost in those year’s dollars, I think $2,000. So it was almost like lending someone your Lamborghini. “Here’s my incredibly fancy thing, You guys take it.” He didn’t really know us that well; he was just a very generous guy. He really dug our scene, artistically. I mean, he knew the guys from DEVO when they were a local band in Akron, Ohio. He was not a stranger to small-town weirdo music. He was a real booster. I’d have to say he was kinder to us than I’ve ever been to anybody. I have to shout out to Chris Butler—he’s a cool dude.

“Don’t Let’s Start” (from 1986’s They Might Be Giants)

AVC: Setting aside the flexi-disc, “Don’t Let’s Start” was officially your first single, right?

JF: Yeah, it was a weird story. Like a lot of bands that have a song break out, it really wasn’t co*ing from us. Part of that had to do with how “Don’t Let’s Start” entered our repertoire; it was one of the last things we had recorded for the record, but I don’t think we had that much regard for it.

JL: Actually, we had a discussion about where it belonged on the record, and I felt it was so not strong enough that we moved it to later [on the album]. It was going to be the first track, and we thought, “No, no, no, let’s just move it further back,” and we put “Everything Right Is Wrong” on the top.

JF: Its co*mercial life can really be linked directly to these two co*mercial radio stations in Pittsburgh and Long Island.

JL: My concern was that the song didn’t have the sort of mission statement that we were hoping to get across. And that, instead, it was just a poppy melody. Also, I think I was embarrassed that it was borrowing this sort of Britishism by phrasing it “Don’t let’s start.” It felt a little mannered to me.

JF: I’ve never thought of “Don’t let’s start” like a Britishism.

JL: Well, the grammar isn’t typically American. So I think I felt a twinge of, oh, this is weird, me putting on a fake accent kind of feeling about it. So that was part of my lack of confidence in it. In a way, it really gelled with Adam Bernstein’s video. I feel like that was the thing that made it into a salable product. We were lucky to team up with Bernstein. Although, now I’m remembering that was not the first thing we did. That was “[Put Your Hand Inside The] Puppet Head,” wasn’t it?

JF: Yeah, we came out with that video first. But that was sort of emblematic of how little [we believed in it]. It was not at all clear to us that “Don’t Let’s Start” would be the song that it ended up being. 

“Ana Ng” (from 1988’s Lincoln)

JL: Well, what a difference a year makes! We had kind of established ourselves—we had an album and we had started touring. I think we just suddenly felt like we were already in the slipstream by that time and we were well into gigging all over the place when we started planning the second album and recording it. 

I remember the story about “Ana Ng” was [I had] this idea of putting a noise gate across Flans’ guitar, and I think I was doing a very bad job of explaining to him what I wanted to do. I think this is a thing between us. I would say, “‘Let’s put a noise gate on the guitar!” And John would not understand the point of that. It wasn’t until we got into the studio and started doing it that he would say, “Oh, this is what it is!” And this kind of defines this whole sound that was startlingly different to recording a guitar. I felt like even if you didn’t know who we were and didn’t care about the words or anything, it had this sound. Like a jagged, knife-edgy guitar that was distinctive. Now, John, was that the one we got on the CMJ charts with, or had that already happened?

JF: Oh, I have no idea.

AVC: It was definitely the first one to hit the Billboard Modern Rock chart.

JF: It was sort of a parallel experience of people [making the band] an exponentially bigger deal, kind of like “Don’t Let’s Start.” We went from playing for 35 people to playing to 200 people in the week “Don’t Let’s Start” hit MTV; that was kind of like the ignition moment. I’m not sure what we thought the other big songs from Lincoln were, but it’s weird to me that it was put out as an advance single, which I think the co*mon wisdom is that those things are not mutually agreed on. Maybe it was sort of a head-fake from [record label] Bar/None, like,  “And by the way, there’s even bigger bangers in the chamber!” There certainly weren’t, but it really jumped out.

AVC: Whose idea was it to record the female voice for “I don’t want the world, I just want your half”?

JL: Oh, that was Flansburgh. We were in this tiny little studio in New York, and this is often the way it works, [as was] the case with “Puppet Head” and this song. We leave a little area like, “This is the sort of bridge moment,” and we had no idea what it was going to be. It was just “Music, music, song, music” and then something else. And that phrase was sort of a jokey phrase that we’d been tossing back and forth. So very spontaneously we called up our pal, Lisa Klapp, who…

JF: She was at work!

JL: I think she [said], “Alright, if you guys leave me alone, I’ll do it.”

JF: Yeah, I think she was being quiet because she didn’t want people to notice what she was doing. It perfectly works in the song; I don’t know what kind of performance we were trying to elicit from her other than that performance, but I think we made her say the statement ten different times. But it was great. Was there something else happening [when we performed it live]? I’m trying to think if we played the song without the middle section. What happened in the middle section?

JL: I don’t think we ever played [that section] live. We would just start it from scratch.

JF: If you think our songs are short, we’re just doubling the whole thing to make it two minutes long.

“Birdhouse In Your Soul” (from 1990’s Flood)

AVC: Was “Birdhouse In Your Soul” destined to be the first single, or did you have your eyes on something else?

JF: Oh yeah! We did a long demo process. And with [our new record label] Elektra, from person to person, it’s almost a mistake to think of a record label as a monolithic thing because they certainly don’t behave in a monolithic way. Everybody had their hot takes, everybody had their own experience with us, and different people perceived our band in very different ways. Sue True, who actually got us signed, was the Junior A&R executive and had been trying to get us signed for a long time. I think she really had a very clear-eyed vision of what we were as a band. She understood how pretentious we were and how personal this project was to us. And that understanding sort of shielded us from the more crass conversations. But I think, for a lot of people at Elektra, their very clear-eyed notion of what the best They Might Be Giants could do would be to hook ourselves into a dance craze or have a novelty record and maybe sell a ton of records one time. 

It was interesting being at the Elektra offices listening to people talk about other acts. I spent a lot of time co*ing in there, since they were a New York-based label and we were living in New York at the time, so it was very easy to just hang out there. So I spent a lot of time “working the refs,” as they say in sports. I remember when Deee-Lite had the number-one record in the country at the time, and not only was it a hit record, it was a great record. I guess Deee-Lite were just as equally co*plicated to work with, but nobody thought there was going to be a “Chapter Two” in their career, which is very weird. I was thinking, “This is like a whole vibe. This band is the good-time, party thing [of the decade]! You could ride this for 10 years!” But there was just absolutely no faith that there was going to be anything more for Deee-Lite, which really confused me, to be perfectly honest.

JL: Just to give you a picture of the culture of Elektra Records: You know, it started as this really free-form, folky thing. And then by the time Bob Krasnow took over, they did things like pulling up all the carpets on the floor of the Time Warner building and replacing it with some kind of animal skin. Like, all the floors for the entire building were leather. There were probably vegans working in those offices who were utterly freaked out by the fact that they had done this. But this was a massive show of largesse, which seemed co*pletely weird to us. Like, “Really? That’s Elektra Records? That’s their thing?”

“Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” (from 1990’s Flood)

AVC: How did you find your way into recording a cover of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”?

JL: I think John and I both had personal experiences with the song. John had known it growing up and I saw a TV show called something like [In a TV announcer voice.] “THE FIFTIES!” And this was a part of the education we were experiencing at the time. My assumption was that everyone’s idea of the music of the ’50s was rock and roll. And this particular show didn’t have a single shred of rock and roll; it was all Patti Page and stuff like that, which was really, like, “Oh, this is someone else’s 1950s,” and probably the more popular version. I mean, if you look at the charts from that time it wasn’t all Elvis Presley, it was a lot of this much more mainstream, MOR, kind of Mitch Miller-y stuff.

And so The Four Lads performed; it was the original Four Lads, this was sometime in the ’80s, and the whole thing was, they were on stage wearing suits, holding their arms out on either side of them singing, “Istanbul was Constantinople…” The whole thing was like an alternate universe 1950s. I was not aware that this was somebody’s idea of the essence of that period. But it was sort of exciting, this revisionist history that we had undergone, and I think it had begun in the late ’60s with Sha Na Na and Happy Days and all that. We were given the co*pletely wrong impression of what the culture of the ’50s was like. This is a long way of saying it seemed like a co*pletely other thing to mine. And that’s what attracted me to it.

JF: What’s interesting to me about the song is just how, as a musical statement, it’s this incredibly indivisible thing. It’s kind of riffing on “Puttin’ On The Ritz,” melodically. But it’s a two-chord song, which makes it kind of bulletproof. When we initially started performing the song, it was one of the few things that we did without the drum machine, so it was…I’m trying to think of a better word than “portable.” But it just worked! It had this kind of immediate appeal, and the curious thing was that nobody seemed to remember it. I guess because it’s riffing on “Putting On The Ritz,” it has this very familiar quality to it. So it has a sort of winning, hooky quality to it.

JL: My theory is that it was part of that Stalinist revision of the ’50s where all that stuff—particularly from the early ’50s, because it was a number-one hit—got erased in favor of a sort of ersatz idea of early rock and roll, and even doo-wop, as the official culture of the period. So all those kinds of songs had been swept under the carpet.

AVC: Were you surprised that it took off with people the way it did when you recorded it?

JF: We put the track together with Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, who were the official “hitmakers” who had been assigned to us. I shouldn’t say “assigned to us.” We approved the process and met with them—they were very charming guys. But for Elektra, I think they really were trying to figure out how to translate what we were doing into something that would be playable on the radio. And good luck to anybody trying to figure that out.

“We’re The Replacements” (from 1991’s Miscellaneous T)

JL: We were writing a lot of songs at the time and we were looking for a lot of diverse subjects. I think the idea was [writing] songs from a whole range of perspectives so we weren’t doing one particular style of song; I think that was something we were definitely aspiring to do. We had biographical songs, we had personal testimonial songs, and impersonal songs, and starting with a pastiche and working in some other direction. I think [the idea of] “We’re The Replacements” was, “Well, here’s a co*pletely different idea: we’re going to write the theme song for some other contemporary band and have it be sincere but obviously funny.” I was kind of trying to strike that note of being irreverent, but on the other hand, we do like The Replacements. So it’s not making fun of them. And the band liked the song, so that was meaningful, that they liked it and that they had the kind of sense of humor where they could appreciate [it]. They knew exactly what kind of song it was.

“Fingertips” (from 1992’s Apollo 18)

AVC: How do you look back at the “Fingertips” experiment, such as it was?

JL:  Well, I think initially it seemed like it was overambitious. We were working with Clive and Alan at that point.

JF: No, it was just Alan.

JL: Sorry, yeah, it was just Alan. And it was, like, “This is a technical challenge—this is going to be a crazy ton of work to put this whole thing together. So what’s the efficient way to do this?” It really just started off as a demo that I spliced [on tape]. I can’t quite remember, did we end up splicing the tape with the album version?

JF: Yeah, I think it’s just one flowing edit.

JL: Yeah, but obviously we were trying to not waste a lot of time, so we were doing this methodical thing of starting with–the typical process for us before we had a backing band was to start with the rhythm section and then layer stuff on top of that. This was a case where we couldn’t just create each individual track from start to finish because that was going to take too long. We were doing the thing of, “All right, we’ll do all the kick drums, [then] we’ll alter the kick drums, and do them throughout the whole piece…” I actually don’t remember very well how we put it together, but I know it took a long time. It was a big, long project and, obviously, indefensible. You don’t want to have somebody ask, “Why are we doing this?” Because it’s just way too much work for anybody to ask that question.

JF: I mean, to be perfectly honest, I think the way we did it was incredibly efficient considering what it was. It was a total bear to pull together all the elements, but the fact that the demo was really co*plete made it easy to line everything up. It wasn’t something that was up for grabs; the best way to do something like that is to have a text and then you just fill out the rest, in terms of production. We weren’t deciding, “Is this good enough?” or anything like that. It was in no way subjective; it was just what it was.

JL: Yeah, I suppose that was the thing like, ‘What’s the best version of this?” It was, “Well, nobody knows.” It wasn’t this established thing. The other thing I remember is we went to master the whole album and this was kind of a curveball for Bob Ludwig, who mastered it. But he was totally respectful of it. He took way longer on “Fingertips” than any other track on the album. In fact, if I recall, John Zorn came into the room when we were working on the album and gave a nod of approval like, “Yes. Good job, boys.”

AVC: I was trying to explain it to my 18-year-old daughter a couple of days ago. “You have to understand, when I had the CD, the shuffle made it a pretty amazing experience.” Right now, you can’t even fully reproduce it.

JL: Yeah; well, that wasn’t the original idea of it, in any case. But that was a sort of wonderful bonus thing was that we figured out we could index each individual track and then if you shuffle —because shuffling was a thing—then you get this much more mixed-up, Julio Cortázar, kind of hopscotch experience. It was fun, it was all fun.

“Snail Shell” (from 1994’s John Henry)

JL: We just started playing that one; we hadn’t played it in forever, but we just started playing it in the live show. And I kind of like it now, I think I was a little cold on it for a while. But it’s fun to play. It’s been so long that I don’t remember what the original idea of it was. I guess it’s a little bit of riffing on [Sly and The Family Stone’s] “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” maybe. I think that somehow fed itself into the idea of it; just another absurd thing to be grateful for. You know, “Thanks for letting me be *mice elf*” and “Thanks for putting me back in my snail shell.”

“XTC Vs Adam Ant” (from 1996’s Factory Showroom)

JL: That would be John Flansburgh over there who came up with that one. 

JF: I think the nice thing about that song is that those are two acts that are co*pletely contemporaneous to one another and culturally related to each other, yet they kind of embody a hard-left and hard-right Dionysian continuum for rock music. I think the thing that’s odd is that the way the song is perceived by a lot of They Might Be Giants fans is that it’s somehow praising XTC over Adam Ant. And I have to tell you, in my little clutch of records I’d probably go for my Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant records more often than XTC. I know that seems unlikely, but there’s a spirit to those recordings that’s totally nuts, and Adam and the Ants was an exquisite little project. But they’re like the different food groups in a way; you kind of need them all.

“Dr. Worm” (from 1998’s Severe Tire Damage)

JL: “Dr. Worm” is an earworm, yes. That was an unusual recording because I think we recorded it two or three times in the studio. There was a demo, and then we [thought], “Okay, where is this going to go?” And it really took a number of drafts to get to the version with the full horn section with Mr. Mark Pender on the trumpet. I think that was the thing that really took it into the endzone. Sometimes I have a little trouble remembering the process, but it seems to me that everybody thought this was a good song but we wanted it to be “KA-POW!” We kept revising it, making it more snazzy with the horns. And this was when we were making the live album [Severe Tire Damage], I guess.

JF: Yeah, but there was a notion that having a single would be meaningful. And it was the first thing we had done with Restless [Records], so there was a lot of discussion with our manager of how we need to be as ruthless with ourselves as producers had been with us. [And] if we were going to take on the role of being a self-produced band, we have to take on the hit-making responsibilities. And that was a valid challenge. I think the fact that we did an official do-over was…I wonder what the first recording sounds like.

JL: Yeah, I could dig up the original demo. We did go into the studio and record it the way the demo sounded and I’m pretty sure we did at least two revisions. We got a ringer drummer, Zack Alford, and that’s the only time we worked with him.

JF: He’s the drummer in the video for “Love Shack,” though he’s not actually the drummer on “Love Shack.” But he’s a great, great player.

JL: But it was the most Steely Dan we’ve ever been, hiring session players like that.

JF: Oh, the big difference between the two recordings is all the instrumental breaks are half as long in the final recording. It was so luxurious to have all these expansive instrumental breaks in the recording. But if it wasn’t always horns, what was it?

JL: I think it was always keyboards, guitars, all our usual stuff. But then it was like, “How do we make it big–embiggen it?”

AVC: It’s a perfectly cromulent word. I’ll allow it. 

Editor’s note: You can read part two of this interview here.