Dear John and John,
Thanks for the new adult record—the first since 2007. Although you taught my seven-year-old son a lot about numbers and letters—and have created for yourselves a place in his world, of fantastical finger-puppet troubadours—he and I have graduated beyond the land of “Here Comes” science, language, math, and recently into your thirty year catalog of Songs. We’ve spent fullafternoons relishing and dancing, as one of us is E and one of us is W, and chases ensue; we’ve sleepily pawed the bizzare drawings in the book/CD “Bed Bed Bed”; we’ve rerun old Podcasts for Kids, exhausting all online playlists we could find; we’ve called Dial-A-Song, though to my knowledge, your legendary service has never been active during my son’s lifetime. We’ve all grown up considerably—and will again, as we consume together “Join Us,” your first ‘adult’ work since “The Spine.” The timing is right: my son and I checked it all out via the free AOL stream last week, and were both separately drawn to “When Will You Die,” as a cheeky anthem that may be a superhero’s ode to their villian as much as another Linnell-based rumination on a weird, historical Hall of (Presidents’) Heads, and the legacy we might leave. But we’re all far from
such moments of departure, and there’s nothing on the new album that hints that TMBG may suddenly Sell Out to a Spiderman 4-Green Lantern 2 theme song extent—so you’re both going to be around for a long while to come, at this rate, and maybe you’re going to find a happy medium between what y’all consider to be a Kids Record and an Adult Record. Or maybe you’re set with the Kids set, and your Deal with Disney is complete (whatever was the story behind the revised editions of “Here Come the ABCs,” anyway?), and we’re in for material and tours that are more Back to Skull and less Bloodmobile. Regardless, for the same voice that sang the beloved summer 2011 anthem “I Never Go to Work,” I was struck by the ethics of creativity described in a recent interview:
“We work very quickly. We record very quickly. We try not to belabor stuff too much. I think it’s important for John and I, because you stop hearing something if you hear it too many times. You can’t remember what the point of it was. From what I understand, Steely Dan really enjoyed that process. For some reason, they were really happy to grind into something that much. I personally cannot do that. I can’t spend too long writing a song or it loses its flavor, and we can’t spend too long recording it. So I think we do feel like there’s a danger in worrying too much about technical concerns—even the sound, the playing of it, or fussing over the structure. I think one thing we’ve learned is, maybe because we’re uptight in the first place, we’re still giving the impression to
people that we’re uptight, but we really prize spontaneity and freshness. I see that as essential to doing good work. It’s often the uptight people who wanna let their hair down” (Linnell, cited by Robinson, 2011).
Not falling into the burdensome fun of “technical concerns,” I ask you both, please: do not turn into Steely Dan. Neither Walter Becker or Donald Fagen could take laps in and out of the back doors of a temporary steel concert hall, to stay amp’d, as you, Professor Flans, did last year at Bonnaroo; and while Steely Dan’s technical prowess has enabled, especially as of late, some of the glossiest polished turds in the history of recorded music, it’s still shit one wouldn’t especially want to step in, wake up to, or raise their kids by. It’s easy to imagine the Fortress of Solitude that must be the house y’all escape the city with, in Sullivan County, New York, where the abandonment of responsibilities goes hand in hand with working fast and loose, a place to “not
to belabor stuff too much,” where one may don hideous masks, refraining from being the “uptight people” the world elsewhere may push us to be. Becker and Fagen of Steely Dan could never be so humble as to write “Chess Piece Face,” a thematic collection of songs about states or physical science, or recently tender numbers like “Never Knew Love.” And unlike Becker and Fagen, you both maintain a healthy disinterest in where you’ve been—your catalog is not worth its weight in FM gold, and your history is less important than the present and the future. This may be an essential quality, one that keeps your bizzare wheels spinning, revising yourselves innately. For a pair of musicians whose t-shirts still proclaim that they’ve been “Installing and Servicing Melodies Since 1982,” this latest album is a direct effort, through horn charts and a quick, steely tightness in the recording, to reinvent yourself—a stone’s throw from what “The
Else” sounded like, but with new musical risks that have become an inherent part of the TMBG process. You, Professor Flans, revealed how a “strong cup of coffee” leads to that place of “pure experimentation” that leads to being “unhinged from the tyranny of the hit song,” that lead on the new album to the charming and weird “Cloisonne.” I wonder how different your quick process was to the process that produced the song you can’t stop singing and you don’t like
(“For The Longest Time” by Billy Joel)—neither of you Giants have ever crashed a car, but have been busy writing television theme songs, developing educational theories inside pop music frameworks, and wearing funny masks in snowy upstate New York, no doubt tinkering on “tiny electronics” during blizzards. For now, these things lurk at the End of the long and spontaneous
(and “empheric”) Tour, on which many of us look forward to Joining You in some event of music, alive, jumping around like kids, far distant in aim from any Steely Dan lawnchair-listening scene. Good luck on so many stages!
Chris
Robinson, T. (2011). “They Might Be Giants’ John Linnell.” A.V. Club. Retrieved from http://www.avclub.com/articles/they-might-be-giants-john-linnell,59434/
Robinson, T. (2011). “They Might Be Giants’ John Flansburgh.” A.V. Club. Retrieved from http://www.avclub.com/articles/they-might-be-giants-john-flansburgh,59461/
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