Alison: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio or live streaming or on demand, I'm grateful you're here. On today's show, we'll speak with crime writer SA Cosby about his latest novel, All the Sinners Bleed, a super creepy, excellent page-turner. RuPaul's Drag Race winner, Jinkx Monsoon joins us to discuss her show Everything at Stake, which she describes as "stand-up comedy meets rock concert meets drag."

We'll speak with the outgoing President and CEO of the Apollo Theater, Jonelle Procope, tomorrow's her last day. That is our plan. Let's get this started with, They Might Be Giants.

MUSIC - They Might Be Giants: Birdhouse In Your Soul

Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch

Who watches over you

Make a little birdhouse in your soul

Not to put too fine a point on it

Say I'm the only bee in your bonnet

Make a little birdhouse in your soul

I have a secret to tell

From my electrical well

It's a simple message

And I'm leaving out the whistles and bells

So the room must listen to me

Filibuster vigilantly

My name is blue canary, one note spelled L-I-T-E

Alison: That is Birdhouse In Your Soul. The highest charting track of They Might Be Giants four-decade career. The duo of John Flansburgh and John Linnell went to school as kids in Massachusetts and then started making music together when they moved into the same building in Brooklyn in 1982. The group is partly credited with the invention of a news subgenre of alt rock, nerd rock, geek rock, thanks in part to tracks like Particle Man.

MUSIC - They Might Be Giants: Particle Man

Particle man, particle man

Doing the things a particle can

What's he like? It's not important

Particle man

Is he a dot, or is he a speck?

When he's underwater, does he get wet?

Or does the water get him instead?

Nobody knows, Particle man

Alison: Some of their tracks were even used in science classrooms to teach kids about nuclear fusion.

MUSIC - They Might Be Giants: Why Does the Sun Shine?

The sun is mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace

Where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees

Yo ho it's hot, the sun is not a place where we could live

But here on earth, there'd be no life without the light it gives

Alison: Maybe you know them from their era-defining banger Boss of Me, the theme to Malcolm in the Middle.

MUSIC - They Might Be Giants: Boss of Me

Yes, no, maybe

I don't know

Can you repeat the question?

You're not the boss of me now

You're not the boss of me now

You're not the boss of me now, and you're not so big

You're not the boss of me now

Alison: Last year, They Might Be Giants, kicked off a 40th-anniversary tour, which continues in our area in the coming weeks with shows in Deerfield, Mass, New London, Connecticut, and they'll be headlining the Pleasantville Music Festival in New York on July 8th so mark your calendars. Joining me now to talk about their career and a preview their shows, and also have a bit of a listening party for their latest release an album called BOOK. We'll explained. It's accompanied by a book of liner notes and photographs. That was actually nominated for this year's Grammy for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition package. Let's get into it with John Flansburgh. Hi, John Flansburgh.

John Flansburgh: Hey, hey.

Alison: Hey, hey.

John Flansburgh: Greetings from New York.

Alison: Hi, John Linnell.

John Linnell: Hello. Greetings from Edinburgh, Scotland.

Alison: Oh, you're in Edinburgh. That's excellent.

John Linnell: I am.

Alison: May I ask what you're doing in Edinburgh?

John Linnell: We have a little flat here, and this is where I spend some of my time, especially when it's unpleasantly hot in New York. Nice to be here.

Alison: Understand. Well, thank you for making time today. You've been on this 40th-anniversary tour for a few months now, averaging I hear about 30 songs, a show from your catalog. John Flansburgh, what considerations do you have when you curate your set lists?

John Flansburgh: Oh, well, for the last 80 shows we've done, we've been doing these Flood shows where we actually play the entire Flood album but we don't play it in sequence because it's already an experiment in music under glass enough already. We try to just keep the variety strong and play everybody's favorite songs. We're a band that is desperately trying to break down that fourth wall.

Alison: Why?

John Flansburgh: To entertain people.

Alison: Does it entertain you as well?

John Flansburgh: We have the rich cornucopia of emotions about what we do. This is our job. Parts of it are really entertaining it and parts of it no is when we climb on the bus after some brutal day, guys in the band will say to one another like, "You wanted to be in a band." Musicians are a self-pitying bunch by nature.

Alison: John Linnell, last year in all of 2022, you played 29 shows, this year you've already played 43. What have you been feeling as you've gotten back to touring in pre-COVID glory days?

John Linnell: It just seemed like in a way back to normal, gradually. Because when we started touring, we were being very, very strict about not hanging out with anybody backstage. Everybody was wearing masks and we were testing every few days. That's kind of that started to relax now, so it's feeling more like classic, They Might Be Giants on tour now.

Alison: John Linnell, have you felt more relaxed?

John Linnell: More relaxed? I would say generally, yes. Yes, it's very familiar. We've worked with the same band for 20 years in the case of the newest members. Yes, it's something we're really, really familiar with and we know exactly how to do this. Relaxing to be on stage, I would say.

Alison: John Flansburgh, I'm going to ask you to go all the way in the way back machine and think about your very first shows you played 40-something years ago.

John Flansburgh: Oh, wow.

Alison: What do you remember about those first shows?

John Flansburgh: I could really barely sing and play the guitar at the same time when we started. There was a lot of general homework for me. John had been in real bands before. I had just been in hobby bands, but it was just incredibly fun. It was incredibly fun. I do remember, it was me and John, and we played through a prerecorded rhythm track that we put together. I remember thinking that I felt like what we were doing was going to be understood as this very intense art music project that was absurdist, but also maybe desperately serious.

About halfway through the show when the audience was just obviously high-fiving each other and enjoying it in a very take-it-as-it-is way. I just realized that our perception of what we were doing and the way that the world would perceive us might be very, very different.

Alison: John Linnell, what are your early memories of that first show, or among your first shows?

John Linnell: Right, we were extremely nervous when we started playing the very first shows as They Might Be Giants. We had our original format. We had a tape recorder playing, all the rhythm tracks, and John and I were singing and playing instruments on top of that. I think that the one memorable thing was we were so concerned that there'd be horrifying there after we finished playing each song that we just had the tape run continuously. There were no gaps at all even for applause or whatever for anger or helpful comments.

We basically just snow-plowed through that evening, and it wasn't till we got off stage that people had a chance to acknowledge it. I think we got an encore. I might be misremembering, but it was mostly our actual friends were I think most of the crowd there, but it shows you how little confidence we had that we were not really planning on getting applause at the end of songs.

Alison: Whose idea was the audio filibuster? It's pretty genius.

John Linnell: It was probably Flansburgh. I'm going to say. He generally put the show set together, but I think we were in agreement about not leaving anything to chance.

John Flansburgh: Yes. John, actually, I was at my storage space last week, just sifting through a bunch of stuff and I actually found a bunch of setlists that you drew up. I think over time, it has definitely shifted. I think one of the lucky things about being in this band, for me, I feel like, is we have so much shared experience before we even started it. A lot of bands start-- they don't even really know each other. John and I had been friends for over a decade when we started the band. We had seen all sorts of stinky rock shows and good rock shows.

A lot of our opinions about just performance and entertainment and what was interesting were formed at the same time. I think we have this shared esthetic that the Venn diagram is I think very healthy for a collaboration.

John Linnell: I would say generally, we've always wanted to be the band that we would have liked starting out. We were gearing every-- I'm sure that's true of every band on some level, but we wanted to invent something that was what we would have found exciting before we actually started a band.

Alison: My guests are John Flansburgh and John Linnell, you know them as They Might Be Giants. They have been celebrating their 40th anniversary with a tour. The two of the tracks we heard in the intro came off your 1990 album, Flood, and as you mentioned, you were performing it, but out of sequence, which is pretty interesting idea. What had you discovered about yourselves as songwriters and performers at this point? Because Flood, to date, is your best-selling release.

It's funny. First, I wrote down popular, and I was like, "Well, that's maybe not the right word. The accurate word is best-selling because somebody else might think something else is more popular." What did you know about yourselves as songwriters at this point?

John Linnell: I should say, first of all, I think Flood is absolutely our most popular album. That seems to be uncontroversial. Flans, you can answer the question if you'd like.

John Flansburgh: I feel like we've evolved so much. There are things that we're doing in our show now that are so exciting to me. When we first started doing this coming back after COVID, we actually added a horn section to our show, which is not a natural thing for most rock bands, but I think what it does is it does a half dozen different things over the course of the show in terms of improvisation, and we have some really big horn charts. It's just a very spectacular effect.

I feel like the musicality of what we're doing has really come up even just in recent years. It's exciting to be able to draw on so much material and bring so much stuff to the stage in such a full-blown way.

John Linnell: I think one thing that's very surprising to me is that every time out of the box that we're writing and recording new songs, that it feels like an entirely new mountain to climb. Even though we've done this so many times for so many years, what's really surprising is that it's a brand-new challenge and there's no sense of whether success is guaranteed or whether failure is imminent. It's as if we're starting for the first time, which is weird, I have to say.

Alison: During this time in the '90s, it was a time when MTV, embraced the band. I remember I was there. When you think about the role of video, John Linnell, in your career trajectory, what was it?

John Linnell: It was not something we fantasized about when we were first-- I think our first experiences with checking out other bands was very much about listening to their albums, sitting in a chair, holding the album cover. That seemed like the consummate and ultimate experience. Occasionally, we'd see a band on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert on TV.

Alison: I love that.

John Linnell: Videos were not a thing at that point. It was something that got introduced. I think initially I probably felt more resistant to the idea of videos just because it seemed to be beside the point, and it was maybe even a distraction. Very quickly, we learned that this was a whole other creative outlet and really critical to the promotion. In the 1980s, which is when we became more of a public thing, in the mid-1980s, you had to make videos. It was how you promoted what you were doing.

We thought, "Well, if this is what we're doing, then let's really commit." Luckily, we worked with these super-talented people. John Flansburgh, who had gone to art school and was very visual in his orientation, I think it was a lucky set of things that we were turned out very well suited to doing videos and doing videos that didn't look like anyone else's videos.

John Flansburgh: Just to jump in, I think culturally, we really felt outside of the mainstream part of the video-making process just because we were in Brooklyn and very much stuck in Brooklyn, and there wasn't cable in Brooklyn. There wasn't MTV in Brooklyn. The only time our neighbors knew we were on TV is when we were on the Joe Franklin Show.

John Linnell: That's right.

Alison: [laughs] My guests are John Flansburgh and John Linnell. They are They Might Be Giants. We're going to talk about their most recent record, BOOK as well as their tour. Stay with us. There's more all of it on the way. You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests this hour are John Flansburgh and John Linnell. They are--

John Flansburgh: Yay.

Alison: Yay. They are They Might be giants.

[laughter]

Everybody should have a little yay in their day. Let's talk about your most recent record book, which is accompanied by a book called BOOK, which you know in the first few pages it just says book and all over. It was nominated for a Grammy for Best Box or Special Limited Edition Package. John Flansburgh, how did BOOK the album and BOOK the book build off one another?

John Flansburgh: It was something that we collaborate with a designer named Paul Sahre, who's a very big deal in the world of graphic design. He had been approached by a publisher about doing a coffee table book about They Might Be Giants. This thing comes up periodically. I think John and I both-- we only have so much interest in watching our tombstone being carved while we're alive. The idea of doing a book was really interesting to me, but the idea of having it be just a retrospective thing was not quite as sexy.

I think what was interesting about putting the-- we collaborated with this fantastic fine art street photographer who I still have yet to meet in person because of COVID, a guy named Brian Carlson. It's all these lyrics of ours set alongside, all these very extraordinary street photographs from Brian Carlson. All the text is typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter that Paul Sahre put together over the course of a month doing his imitation of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

I guess what was interesting to me about the whole process was that-- I guess, when John and I are working on music stuff, a lot of times, it's for impact or it's for immediacy. But it's not really-- I don't think we spent a lot of time thinking about beauty that much. It was like putting together the book. It was very much like we're doing this coffee table project that's going to try to make it as rich an experience visually as possible. That was super exciting. It's a psychedelic project.

The album and the book do not really sync up as purely as I think they could. It's not like some dark side of the moon thing where you just enjoy it in real time together. The spirit is there.

Alison: John Linnell, I want to play some tracks from the record. We're going to start with Synopsis for Latecomers. Where did the idea for this song come from?

John Linnell: It's often the case that we come up with a catchphrase or a title, and then the rest of the song-- the lyrics follow from that. I suppose this was that song. The initial idea was just to catch you up on what's been going on, and then in the lyrics, what's been going on is this unfolding catastrophe, which has maybe some parallels in our actual lives but it's a metaphor. Let's say.

Alison: Here's Synopsis for Latecomers from They Might Be Giants.

MUSIC - They Might Be Giants: Synopsis for Latecomers

For everyone who only just arrived

A quick synopsis

If you came late and missed the commotion

And you wonder what was all that, here's the recap

Sound of gathering and shuffling of notes

I assure you there's a very simple explanation

If you'd only be patient

Okay you're asking how container ships were found

Abandoned in the desert sands covered in snakes?

And who composed the ransom note and taped it to the

Face of the equestrian monument?

You'll get your answers, all in due time

I know you've all been wondering

Alison: That's Synopsis for Latecomers from They Might Be Giants from the album BOOK. We're going to play another track now. Wait Actually Yeah No, that's the track. Really not me. Just saying that.

MUSIC - They Might Be Giants: Wait Actually Yeah No

On a south sea island

Wait, actually, yeah, no

In the doctor's waiting room downtown

No, never mind

On a highway exit ramp

In a big department store

Wait, um, yeah, no

World War I, the Western front

Place you went on business once

Yes, but not that

Twenty-car collision

Wait, actually, yeah, no

Alison: John Flansburgh, I have two specific questions about that track. One, what's the horn we heard?

John Flansburgh: Oh, John Linnell'll answer that question.

Alison: John Linnell, what's the horn we heard?

John Linnell: It's our trumpet player, Mr. Curt Ramm, who recorded it because we were in the middle of the pandemic in Rhode Island in his studio after I sent him the rest of the track and he just put that on top, and then sent it back to me. Very contemporary style of recording where we're not in the same place at the same time. We just talked on the phone about it, and then he sent me his track.

Alison: John Flansburgh, when I hear the song, I think it sounds like poetry to me. It sounds like an E Cummings poem. I can picture the words on the page. Do you ever write poetry?

John Flansburgh: John and I worked on this song together called Hate the Villanelle that I actually wrote the lyric is a Villanelle, which is a poetic form, like a sonic. It's very much like a sonic in that it has all sorts of very, very specific rules. I have to say writing that formally really made songwriting seem like a breeze. For many years, I think we had a very casual notions of close rhyme being just as good as real full rhymes, which is a very anti-Broadway idea, I guess, or non-Broadway idea.

Like Broadway songs always essentially are proper rhymes and that you're considered you're cheating if you do anything less. What's the hardest crossword puzzle of the week?

Alison: Oh, Sunday.

John Flansburgh: Is Sunday the hardest?

Alison: Saturday.

John Flansburgh: Saturday is the hardest.

John Linnell: Saturday is the hardest. Saturday is the really killer one. I recall you writing poems in high school, and I don't know if you remember this, but we had established this format of making little comic books that were mimeographed, and at some point, you made a book of poetry. I don't know if you remember this before songwriting took over your life.

John Flansburgh: Oh, wow.

John Linnell: You obviously did a lot of different creative projects before we established this band.

John Flansburgh: I enjoy reading poetry. I have to say but sometimes, I feel like poetry it's right alongside opera as the least traveled cultural experiences.

Alison: If you want to see a Broadway show where they're on your side of the fence about rhymes matching, it shucked, it's looser. Let's just say that. [chuckles]

John Flansburgh: I'm not trying to judge. I think whatever blows your hair back. I think people who have the patience and the concentration to do it, I respect that.

John Linnell: I would say we're probably big fans of Stephen Sondheim, for example. That traditional style of lyric writing is terrific. Always thrilling and wonderful. I like the complete abandonment of form and rhyme is also always thrilling.

John Flansburgh: I bet he did the Saturday puzzle in Penn.

Alison: [laughs] Don't you know. My guests are They Might Be Giants, John Flansburgh and John Linnell so you have date in Deerfield, Mass, that's all sold out. New London, Connecticut on July 7th, and then you're going to be in our-- as an area of the Wood, July 8 at Pleasantville Music Festival. How is festival energy different than a regular show?

John Flansburgh: If you're at a really big festival, it's like playing for a sleeping dinosaur that you push against it and try to get it to wake up. I think the Pleasantville Festival will just feel a total Mayday celebration and it'll probably be just a nice day shared outside with a nice group of people.

John Linnell: I'm sure it'll be fun. I've just been watching the Glastonbury Festival on TV, and it is like playing to the static on the TV when the crowd is that big. It's like if you can just imagine it's just the sound of a vacuum cleaner that gets louder and softer. It's a little bit harder to connect to that audience. Of course, the most frightening thing of all is to play for a very, very tiny audience. You build a scale between those things.

Alison: As you're on this 40th-anniversary tour, John Flansburgh, what have you been reflecting on?

John Flansburgh: Oh, well, right as when we started, my Uber got hit by a drunk driver, and I was hospitalized for a week and bedridden for a couple of months. It was a pretty bad accident-

Alison: Oh God.

John Flansburgh: -for me. Basically, I'm just celebrating the one-year anniversary of recovering from that accident. It's been a real season of gratitude for me. Frankly, every time we do a show, I'm just grateful to be alive and it makes me weepy.

Alison: John, so glad that you're doing better. How about for you, John Linnell? What are you reflecting on?

John Linnell: I'm also grateful that John Flansburgh is still alive.

[laughter]

Things are going well and we've got a lot more touring to do this year. We're going to Australia and back here to the UK. Of course, the shows you mentioned. There's plenty of work to do and we're looking forward to it.

Alison: I have been speaking with John Flansburgh and John Linnell of They Might Be Giants. Check out theymightbegiants.com for tickets to their upcoming shows in our area, including the Pleasantville Music Festival on July 8th. John and John, thank you for being with us.

John Linnell: Great talking to you.

John Flansburgh: Nice talking to you again.

Alison: Let's go out on the track. I Lost Thursday from BOOK because it's Thursday. Get it?

MUSIC - They Might Be Giants: I Lost Thursday

I lost Thursday

I had it somewhere

Don't say it's where I left it

I lost Thursday like it was nothing

That fact is uncontested

I am sleepy

I'm not strong but it was like any day

Where I left it

Take it back

Now I suspect foul play

 

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