You guys definitely seem to be fans of technology.

John: Actually, I don't think we're really fans of technology, so much as we have, you know...well, I think we have an un-neurotic relationship with technology. We use it exactly how we want to, and we're aware that it's out there, but we're not...I spend virtually no time online, to be perfectly honest. But I use the computer; I use a computer-based sequencer to do MIDI stuff, like every day. I've been using MIDI for 15 years now (or 10 years, 12 years). That's a big part of my life, so yeah, I mean some ways I'm a totally technical guy, but that's just one very narrow thing.

But you know, when we were starting out, there were a lot of bands that had synthesizers in the band, and the synthesizer player would be a guy in a lab coat. I think we always just felt, "Hey, you know, an electric guitar is not exactly a normal instrument." All rock music is kind of electrified--there's no "normal" kind of electrified music, and it just seemed unnecessary to make it so conspicuous, or make it seem so strange. I think for a lot of people what's interesting about what's happening online is not the novelty so much as it is what they really can do with it. There are a lot of things about what you can do online that have kind of a gee-whiz quality to it, but you don't want to do it for very long.

That's what I've noticed about your stuff--it doesn't seem like it's done just to use the newest technology and play with the newest toys. You actually seem to be saying, "Hey, we can use this to do..." It comes across as, "This gives me an idea," or "I've always wanted to do something like this and the technology is allowing me to do it."

Yeah, I've had the opportunity to give it a few listens, and found interesting stuff, like some selections off the "Hello" CDs, which I'd always been meaning to check out.

John: Part of it is that as we've gone on as a band, we've been involved in a lot of one-off things, like the Austin Powers "Dr. Evil" thing--it's been in movie theaters for months, but our recording is only available at Radio TMBG right now, because the soundtrack album that it's going to be on isn't out yet. We do a lot of one-off things that we put a lot of energy into, and it's nice to be able to collect them in a place where people who are specifically interested in the band can find them. I think everyone knows the Compilation Blues, where you're buying a record for one song and one group--there's something a little dreary about that. Also, I think that the more autonomous bands can become, the healthier it is for the whole music scene. This whole narrow-casting, web-casting thing is going to be a tremendous boon to all sorts of...it's really good for fringe artists, basically. It's probably bad news for the mainstream, middle-of-the-road stuff.

Having done so many interviews the past couple months just to ponder this and the effects of it, one side effect of all the activity among semi-professional musicians that I don't think people realize is that if you're a songwriter or in a band, the first few people that hear your music are really important in how much enthusiasm you have for it. I think a lot of people are going to get a lot of positive feedback, even though it might just be on a very low level. It might not be some overwhelming thing, like, "Here, you've got a record contract!" I don't think it's going to change the nature of how hard it is to get ahead, but I think it will make musicians evolve a little faster--they'll be able to find an audience for what they're doing. I think I'm just very positive in terms of getting people feedback, getting people encouragement, making people realize what works. I remember when we started Dial-a-Song, it was a real education for us in basic stuff about what people could tolerate. If you put something on that was kind of unfocused or meandering, they would just hang up!

We were lost in home recording, multi-tracking, building up 15 vocals on top of 15 guitars on top of 15 handclap type of tracks. So we were doing a lot of textural things that didn't really add up to a lot. And it made us realize that writing songs can be a very simple and very direct exercise. Production isn't the only...when you're doing it over the phone, production just becomes meaningless.

Earlier, I was making a list of the things that make me think of you as being technological; you may not even realize some of these when you think about it. I started off with the obvious stuff: keys, sampling, MIDI, three different web sites. But then there's things like Apollo 18, which was recommended to play on shuffle.

John: Oh, right.

And I think of Dial-a-Song as something else technological, it's just not computer or web like most people think "tech." There's Radio TMBG; releasing an MP3-only album; the Broadcast.com Irving Plaza concert. [which seems to have been lost in cyber-limbo since Yahoo! purchased them, but check out last year's House of Blues performance or even this year's performance if they ever get around to archiving it properly] And to me, I think one of the--and I mean this in a very complimentary way--geekiest things, is "I Can Hear You" off Factory Showroom. Done without electricity; to me that's just a "fan of technology" thing to do.

John: For me, that song is not specifically about electricity so much as the speaker. It's hard for people to imagine living in a world without speakers, but the introduction of the wax cylinder was also the introduction...except for music boxes, there was no such thing as amplification through something like a horn. It was just something that hadn't been developed yet. Now, everywhere we go...between the two of us there are four little speakers--two receivers and two speakers--that we're talking into, and it's just a part of our lives that affects us in every way.

What's weird is that a doorbell, or a clock radio, or an intercom...all that stuff goes back to Thomas Edison creating the wax cylinder recorder. We were making a recording on this wax cylinder, so it was kind of a meditation on the long chain of things that have come since this one invention. It's kind of crazy...think about when you're seeing a science fiction movie, how unbelievable certain things seem--say somebody touches their forehead and something jumps out, you just go, "Whoa, that's pretty weird." But speakers are a very weird idea, that this little circular thing can recreate pretty accurately the sound of music or a voice. That's a pretty haunting idea.

John: Yeah. It was very much inspired by our ability to record something on it...it was written for the event. Because we had the opportunity to record a song on a wax cylinder, I wanted to write a song that was kind of a tribute to the device. It's not a sentimental song--it's kind of funny song--but I do think it's...I'm just fascinated by sound and especially fascinated by the mechanical reproduction of sound. It just seems very amazing.

You know, I still don't quite understand how it works! I don't get how musical energy--the whole bandwidth of energy--is being reproduced in a speaker. I've had it explained to me a million times, but it still seems quite magical to me.

That it actually catches all the subtleties..

John: Yeah! And all the highs and lows coming off the same surface--just crazy.

New albums?

John: Yup! We're making a new album. We've got a lot of it done, we've got a lot of new songs. We're actually playing a bunch of them in the show.

Cool.

John: We do a song called "Cyclops Rock" that's a pretty rowdy rock song, as well as this other song called "It's So Loud in Here." Those are kind of like the two big rock warhorses and, in terms of the general direction that the record is going in, it--strangely--seems like it has a lot of rock songs on it. The other songs that we've finished...there's one song called "On the Drag" that's a total rave-up, and a song called "Rest a While" that's also pretty high energy. So it seems like the next record is going to be...well, it's not like a return to rock, because in a way I don't think we've ever rocked this hard. "Just as the whole grunge thing has blown over, we're getting into it!" [laughs] "If it's too loud, you're too old, man!"

[laughs] I saw on Radio TMBG that the new album apparently has a working title of Unreliable Narrator.

John: Yes, that is the working title--what did you think? It's a term in literary criticism that basically refers to someone telling a story who you can't trust the story that they're telling, and that sort of appeals to me.

I thought maybe it implied a little bit of a concept album.

John: Oh. Well, I think in a way we probably should have called our first four albums Unreliable Narrator, but it's too late to go back and change the titles.

[laughs]

Any ideas when that might end up hitting the stores?

John: I would love to put it out next month, if we could. There's a lot of it that's already done. It's more about timing it to coincide with the right momentum--to be free to do a tour behind it and devote the amount of attention that's going to make it work and get noticed in the marketplace. So it's sort of on the heels of this--the MP3 thing has actually gotten a lot more attention than we were expecting. I mean, consequently we're out on this big national tour--but it will definitely be out sometime next year.

Earlier this year, you were on NPR's Talk of the Nation and you mentioned two albums.

John: We're also going to be working on a children's album. That was another thing that's kind of gotten put off from this year, just because we've been doing so much...we've been doing a couple of television and movie jobs that have taken up a lot of time. We have three songs in one Disney movie and two songs in another Disney movie that are both coming out next year. We're also doing all the incidental music for this sitcom called Malcolm in the Middle that's going to be on Fox. In August, we recorded 2 hours of incidental music, that was just this unbelievable amount of music. We were just in the studio, going, "alright, Cowboy Song, here we go!"

So you're obliged to a children's record?

John: Well, we've signed the contract. We took the money, and now we've got to make it. [laughs] Basically, we were talking with tv people about making a children's TV show, and John and I thought it would be best...rather than pretend we've worked in that idiom before and felt comfortable with it--we thought it might be smarter to actually try writing children's songs and see if it worked. Because writing children's songs is really different than writing regular songs...all these jobs really feel different.

One more quick question--did you ever find out who recorded the schoolchildren singing "Particle Man" on Then?

John: You know, I think we found out who the guy was--I think he contacted the office almost right away, but I wish somebody had actually made a point of making me memorize who it was, because I feel kind of guilty. We did actually find out what the school was, we just never...I just haven't memorized it. They're from Texas, though. But you're the first person to ask about it. People love the song, but nobody's been curious enough to ask who it was.

On the Web:
Official They Might Be Giant's Site
Official TMBG News Site
Dial-a-Song
Radio They Might Be Giants
Hello
alt.music.tmbg
The Unofficial They Might Be Giants
MG's They Might Be Giants Page o' Fun

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