By Cory-LaNeave Jones
May 8, 2025
If you are looking for a night of musical fun with enjoyable, and smart entertainment, consider visiting the North Park Observatory May 13th or 14th. They are hosting a live performance by They Might Be Giants (TMBG). This proliferate rock band sold their albums with promo statements like: “Some records that come out today only have 10 songs, or less. This makes us angry. But instead of cursing the darkness, John and I have thought of something to do about it. We’ve put out a record with 19 songs on it…”
And that just goes to show how much time and effort they have put into creating a treasure trove full of musical magic to the delight of our ears. They have released 23 albums since their self-titled cassette hit the streets in 1986. On average, each of their albums contain 19.21739 songs, and have an average song length of 2 minutes and 19 seconds and a median song length of 2 minutes and 15 seconds, that is if you are counting (err, if you like statistics).
So what’s the big deal? Doesn’t everyone write 0.02814559 songs per day? That may not sound like much, but TMBG has averaged to create 10.3 published songs each year for a total of 442 songs (not including extra bonus tracks issued in other countries) over their 43 years in the biz. You get the idea, these guys are serious about maintaining a constant flow of music for all of us to enjoy.
My all-time favorite from when I was in junior high school was Particle Man. A song that pits Particle Man against Triangle Man, and Triangle Man against Universe Man, and an unfortunate Person man, who’s not as unfortunate as Degraded man. Many consider Birdhouse in Your Soul to be the penultimate. This song talks about the proper use of a filibuster and later references the Grecian myth of Jason and the Argonauts searching for the Golden Fleece.
I had the chance to chat with John Flansburgh, singer and guitarist and one of the creators of TMBG. This band basically created the indie- or college-radio sound in the 1980’s and 1990’s and re-directed the look and feel of music videos back in the day. Flansburgh is one half of two Johns that formed this force to be reckoned with, low-key supergroup. The other John being John Linnell, who sings and plays the accordion, saxophone and drum machines.
“They Might Be Giants” at one time was merely a phrase coined in Miguel De Cervantes. In his classic novel Don Quixote. Don was speaking of some windmills in the distance. TMBG has been using this name since 1982 after first appearing under the name El Grupo de Rock and Roll at a Sandinista rally in Central Park, New York.
Both of the two Johns also grew up in a small town outside of Concord, Massachusetts, called Lincoln. This is the same area of the country that is noted for developing many of the famous transcendental thinkers of the 1800’s, think Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lousia May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others. When we talk about transcendentalism, we are talking about a movement that has nothing to do with trans rights and nothing to do with a religious viewpoint of transcendence to Heaven. This was a movement that, as Stanford University’s dictionary it defines as:
“They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson’s words, ‘an original relation to the universe’. Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature…By the 1840s they… were engaged in the social experiments of Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden; and by the 1850s in an increasingly urgent critique of American slavery.”
Waldon Pond, a pond that Don Henley advocated to protect in the 1990’s is on the border with Lincoln, as was verified during my interview with John Flansburgh (F) last month. “Hats off to Walden Pond!” said Flansburgh.
Cory L:
“I remember my (11th Grade) English teacher (Mrs. Betsey Allen), she would go on about pronouncing it correctly as we were talking about transcendentalists and Thoreau and Walden and all of that good stuff. Do you guys do much transcendental meditation by chance?”
John F:
“I’ve done virtually no transcendental meditation. But I was having a conversation with my mom the other day. I visited her for her birthday and we were talking about Thoreau and I read that stuff so long ago and probably gave it such a cursory read. … I thought of Walden as a spiritual book about finding Inner Bliss as being part of the message, but I realized that there’s this whole other kind of civil disobedience, just anti norm-core, anti-work vibe to it that is really part of it. And just the idea of it … somehow being fundamentally antisocial didn’t really make a big impression on me. I didn’t think of it as being antisocial, but my mom reminded me that Thoreau was a hippie.”
Cory:
Speaking of Lincoln and Concord, “You might as well come up with several names for a town. And so that leads me to the next question… When did you know that it was the right time to cover that Four Lads classic, Not Constantinople?”
John F
My mom and my aunt Peggy used to sing that. They had a stack of sheet music in the piano bench of our family piano. And when my aunt would come around, she would pull out all the sheet music and one of the songs that she sang was Istanbul. She would sing it with my mom and they would just laugh and drink white wine and have a grand time singing all these old songs. And so that was where I became aware of it.
And we actually, John and I, had a clutch of covers that we learned when we first started rehearsing together, and I’m not sure why we took that one on, but one thing that was clear about it was that it was a very simple song. It only has two chords, so it is simpler than most songs.”
The TMBG duo were joined by a back-up band including additional horns and percussion after gaining fame and beginning to tour the country. This move created a stir and apparently some die-hards protested outside of some of the shows that included the band. For a good dive into the bands history, a documentary called “Gigantic” is available on YouTube. I mentioned to John F, that from my research the band includes “the Johns,” “the Dans,” plus Stan, Marty and Mark.
John F corrected me saying:
“There are eight fellows in the current lineup, which is, yeah, it’s Dan (Dan Miller on guitar, keyboards, and backing vocals), Danny (Danny Weinkauf on bass guitar and keyboards), Marty (Marty Beller on drums and percussion). … I feel like we’re in the Monkeys just using their first names. Mark Pender from the Conan Band (and The Max Weinberg Seven) is playing trumpet with us and Stan Harrison playing sax and Dan Levine is playing trombone.”
This group became popular in the early days of MTV by creating a series of “music videos,” back when MTV actually played music, and not reality TV. John F indicated that the producer of their videos, Adam Bernstein, advanced the quality of music videos in those days by recording the video on film. They also utilized numerous interesting camera angles (shot from the ground up, very close up profiles, use of large photographed faces as masks, and use of enlarged hands to the size of a quarter of the person wearing these magic hands).
John F
“We poured our whole stage show and all our imaginations into making them original.
And we really found an audience from having these low budget.”
In the Gigantic movie, the lead singer for the Pixies, Charles Michael Kitteridge Thompson IV, also known as Black Francis, said he had a copy of a cassette copy of the Flood album in his car and it took several listening’s before he really dug it. Back in the days when you had to record music off of the radio or off of other people’s copies of a cassette or CD copy of an album.
TMBG became innovators by including the accordion as one of the key instruments in the bands music. It’s an instrument that most rockers would hesitate to consider. John F mentioned that this derived from the days when he and John L would visit clubs in New York City (NYC), where they moved to after college. One of the interesting bands that would visit from Texas was “Brave Combo.” He said he believed they were nominated for the Polka category in the Grammys. I asked if Weird Al Yancovich was ever in that category and he said he believed that there is a different Yankovic (Frankie) who tended to win until they ended the category in 2009. Upon “googling,” Google AI indicated that Jimmy Sturr actually won this category 18 times.
Asking about other influences, John F mentioned a group called The Residents, from Shreveport, Louisiana, who always operated mysteriously and were considered an avant-garde multimedia band. They also had an eyeball helmet and other masks in their performances.
TMBG won a Grammy award later for the kids albums called Here Come the 123s and were nominated in 2011 for their album Here Comes Science. For math-and-science-heads, like myself, they also created a couple albums to support STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) education. Here Comes Science included hits like “Science is Real,” “Roy G. Biv” (a song about the visual color spectrum), and Computer Assisted Design (what we refer to as simply CAD in engineering parlance). I told John F that I never heard CAD played as a song, just a frustrating buzz when I occasionally got the blue-screen-of-death in the middle of trying to rasterize my updated proposed grading sheets, because sometimes even the best computers do not have enough computing power to get the job done.
One song TMBG created is called “I Palindrome I.” I asked if they ever intended to add “I emordnilap I” since a palindrome is the same forwards and backwards. John F just laughed off my bad Dad-joke. But I think still it’s a great chant to do with your transcendental meditation.
The band has worked with a lot of other artists in their career including creating a song for the Mike Meyers’ Austin Powers movies. I asked John F about that.
Cory:
“Did you ever meet Mr. Bigglesworth when you were working with Dr. Evil in Austin Powers?”
John F:
We never met anybody we sent the song to. That’s such a weird story. I feel like kind of a gossip revealing the back end.
We were approached to write a song (for the movie) and we put together exactly the thing that’s in the movie, the Dr. Evil song, and sent and submitted it to the powers that be. And we thought, I mean, to be perfectly honest, I think we kind of knew it was a home run. It really tonally fit the movie, and it was memorable. And it hearkened back to kind of the ‘Goldfinger-vibe’ in a very interesting, cool, musical way.
Because Goldfinger has a song- it has the James Bond qualities that are like – a harmonic thing to James Bond music that’s very specific. And I think we felt like we’ve kind of nailed it.
And it was a situation where we asked, did Mike Myers actually hear the song?
And people were like, oh, yeah, yeah, Mike, he loved the song. It’s just not going to work in the movie.
And I was like, I have a sneaking suspicion, Mike Myers did not (hear it).
And – my wife went to summer camp with a woman (happened to) who worked in Mike Myers management (company) – and I basically just begged long distance … for just a mailing address direct to Mike Myers that I could send him a package.
And I sent him a tape of it, and the second he heard it, (He thought) this is perfect for the movie! I would like it (for) our movie and we’re going to change our plan and have the movie open with this song.
So, I think the fact that Mike Meyers actually did really like the song – he liked it a lot, but I do feel like kind of a weirdo that I went to that extra length to get him the song.
But we had done so much work to get it done and then got such a cursory blow-off.
And that’s actually one of the things that you find doing music-for-hire is that a lot of times what you don’t realize is that your song is just being put on a pile on top of a pile of songs that is kind of like the ammunition for the producers (use) to strong arm other people.
We’ve been called upon to write demos for jobs that we were told we were really up for, when in fact, we were just a backup, so that Fox, or whatever company, could be in a better negotiating posture with the person who wrote the material that they really want to use.
And that’s actually one of the creepiest things is realizing that you’re basically the weird negotiating battering ram.
Cory:
“If you’re not in, we can always use, They Might Be Giants. Right?”
John F:
“Exactly.
I think there wasn’t an interval there where we were the strong backup to a lot of better ideas.”
TMBG also wrote a theme song for the theatrical performance for SpongeBob SquarePants titled “I’m Not a Loser” which is a very great song that speaks to the joy of life and also discusses the use of double and misuse of triple negative terms in the English language.
Cory:
“Do you like Dunkin’ Donuts the best, or did you have to sign any kind of NDA about ever talking about other donuts or donut holes?”
John F:
“In fact, when you do any of these commercials, we’ve done TV commercials for tons of different products over the years, and you do have to sign these. They’re like NDAs. They’re these phone book size contracts that basically say they’re like non-disparagement contracts. A lot of the language in it is about they don’t really want people working for the company and then leaving. …
We had a great (run), we did something like 25 different songs for TV or radio for Dunkin’ Donuts. But it was so easy.
The guy, Tim, who was kind of the Don Draper of the ad agents, put it together. He was such a creative guy, and he gave us such a long leash. He could not have cared less how awkward or strange the songs were. He just was really positive, and he had a ton of great ideas himself. It was really fun.”
Cory:
You’re like, do you need a jingle?
John F:
“Exactly, I mean, I guess the truth is we were kind of raised on TV, and the music that came out of the TV was sort of fascinating. Whether it was the Twilight Zone theme or Outer Limits theme, there are lots of really interesting music that can bend your ear as much as The Beatles.”
In 2016, TMBG issued an album called Phone Power online for a “pay what you want” price. This was similar to how Radiohead had issued In Rainbows in 2007, but not related. It was a reference to an old gag that they did in the 80’s that was called Dial-A-Song. In those days, before everyone had cell phones, if you called a “landline” and no one was home, they had analog tape machines to play an intro and then would record a message. TMBG’s Dial-A-Song gag was just to record new music on the cassette tapes and allow people to call in to hear a song over the phone. They placed an ad in the Village Voice and other places with the number.
TMBG have also tackled other difficult issues such as racism with lyrics like: “I know politics bore you, but I feel like a hypocrite talking to you, you and your racist friend.” And they also later wrote a matter-of-fact statement about the way that our U.S. government functions as a tune for CNN titled “Who Are The Electors.”
“They’re called the electors
Because they elect
They’re like our protectors
Adding one extra step
You single your choice, you give them your trust
But it’s up to them and not up to us
We’re only the voters
They are the electors.”
They also do a bunch of ditties about art, like the one about James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor, a famous Belgian expressionist and surrealist painter who lived from 1860 to 1949. James Ensor painted many interesting groups of people wearing masks, and clowns, and skulls that remind me of what I see at a Dia De Los Muertos festival in October here in San Diego.
TMBG’s song about the artist reads:
“Before there were junk stores, before there was junk,
he lived with his mother and the torments of Christ,
the world transformed, a crowd gathered round,
pressed against his window so they could be the first to meet James Ensor, Belgium’s famous painter,
raise a glass and sit and stare, understand the man.”
I asked John if TMBG has other art on the walls for inspiration and he said “I have a blowup of a Manet painting on my wall… I must admit I went to art school. So the whole process of doing music and visual art are kind of combined in my mind. I think of them. It’s all kind of like there’s a problem-solving aspect to it. It gets another side of your brain moving.”
I met with John Flansburgh via Zoom.
He’s one of the two halves of They Might Be Giants.
He is a very down-to-earth sort-of man.
He is a famous man, maybe not A-List, but still famous.
Other famous people know him.
I sat there and stared into his down-to-earth eyes. And he told me many beautiful stories about his mom and I thought about my mom, and I thought Mama jokes (a.k.a. the dozens), and I thought about how my family used to sit around the piano and listen to my brother play songs. I probably know a clutch of songs from those merry times, as I am sure so do you.
And I raise a glass for John Flansburgh and John Linnell and all the amazing songs they continue to create for the world.
And I raise another glass for their mothers and for my mother and to your mother too.
And I hope that everyone has a great Mother’s Day this year.
I love to send my mother flower seeds each year because her grandfather was one of the largest growers in Ft. Smith Arkansas at the turn of the twentieth century. Here is a photo of a pink zinnia in bloom this year sent to me by my mother. Hat’s off to mom’s!
TMBG is playing at North Park Observatory, located at 2891 University Avenue, San Diego, 92104 on May 13th and 14th, just two days after Mother’s Day, May 11th. If you don’t have your gift yet, consider taking her out to see these wild and crazy guys do their thing.
Get your tickets before they sell out. The current tour is sold out in 15 of their 22 scheduled appearances crossing the west coast and a few southern spots.
