John Linnell

John Linnell: Yeah, we’ve done this kind of thing before, and for whatever reason, we have repeat customers. So we try to encourage that by doing a different thing every week. We’re going to have a night were we have a big band, which is something we did the last time we did this. We have a seven-piece horn section along with our regular band. And then we’re doing our entire Flood album in order. And then we’re doing a special presentation of our new children’s album, No!. I actually don’t know what we’re doing the other two weeks.

NATN: It says here you’re doing a ‘Dial-A-Song greatest hits’ show.

JL: (Laughs)..Right.

NATN: Could you comment on what the Dial-A-Song service has meant to you over the course of your career?

JL: Absolutely. John and I started Dial-A-Song in 1983, I think. We’d like to impress people with the fact that it’s been going continuously, but obviously people who’ve called it over the years know that it’s sometimes broken (laughs). In spite of that, it’s been this sort of clearinghouse for every demo we’ve done since we started the band. You know, we put everything up on Dial-A-Song, and then it eventually either gets thrown away or finds its way onto a record, or into the live show. Or both, hopefully. It started out as a regular phone machine, but then went through a rather painful growth period of existing on a Mac computer with a not-very-great voicemail setup. It’s in Flansburgh’s kitchen -- it’s been in the same place the whole time, in the kitchen of his studio. I think he may have actually gone back to the phone machine recently since we’ve had so many problems with the computer. I’ll have to ask him about that.

NATN: So do you have vaults of tapes from the machine?

JL:Yeah, we do. When they were on the phone machine, we had these tapes made by the Record-A-Call company. The way it worked was there were two cassettes in the machine, and one had the outgoing message and the other one was supposed to record an incoming message. So we had this machine, and next to it was this giant box full of these cassettes of our songs. And it was pretty low-maintenance -- you could just take one out and put in another one when you wanted to change it. When we were on the road, John had his landlady come down and do it for us, you know sort of just like feeding a cat or something.

NATN: When you could record incoming calls, would you get responses from people who listened to it?

JL:Well, originally we did. For a period of a couple of years at the beginning, we listened to the responses we got, some of which were really nice and some of which were incredibly mean. And then after a while, I think we felt like it was kind of a time-consuming thing to go through all the stuff. Dial-A-Song got really sort of popular by the mid-'80s, and we sort of got burned by all the nasty stuff we heard. So at a certain point, we just turned off the incoming message function. I think that sometimes it was people just being encouraging because they thought we sort of needed encouragement; that we were obviously struggling (laughs). And then there were people who said stuff like “Don’t quit your day job.” Kind of mean stuff.

NATN: Aww. So, what’s the scoop on this upcoming album?

JL:Well, it’s chock-a-block with great songs, but unfortunately…wait, are you talking about the next They Might Be Giants album or the children’s record?

NATN: Well, both, I guess.

JL: OK. The Giants record…we’re still in this position where we are trying to cut a deal for the Giants record. We have a lot of songs, and it’s been quite a while since the last Giants album. The last regular Giants album that is -- we had a live album after Factory Showroom. So we’ve compiled a lot of material for it, but we still haven’t finished up a deal for it. So that’s kind of frustrating. We have, however, finished recording our children’s record, No!, which we are in the process of cutting a deal for, and that I believe will come out at the beginning of the upcoming year. And it’s a really great package. Not only is it a bunch of songs that we’re really happy with, but the enhanced CD comes with software that, if you put it in your computer, it brings up these screens for each song. And for kids, there’s basically just a lot of funny stuff you can do by waving your mouse around in front of the pictures. It was put together by the same people who do our web site, Chopping Block. They do really great work. I am just totally, totally delighted with the stuff that they did for this thing.

NATN: Did any of the inspiration for the album come out of the "Malcolm In The Middle" project?

JL: Well, in what way do you mean? On the "Malcolm In The Middle" thing, we’re sort of working for somebody else. So in a sense, it’s kind of expanding our horizons in a way. We’re doing things that we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. Like, we’re recording lots of music that is almost nothing like the style of music we normally play, so that’s really different. But it’s an entirely different age group than the No! record. No! is really aimed at… well, my son is almost two, and he already likes some of the songs. But it’s probably more directed at kids who are between five and ten, something like that. The thing is that adults like it too. You know, I think it’s a really good example of something that is not uninteresting for adults. It is sincerely aimed at kids, but it’s not sort of something like an in-quotation-marks “children’s album”.

NATN: The interesting word in the press release is “edutainment”.

JL: Edutainment? Yeah. I don’t think that No! is a particularly educational record. I think we really wanted to avoid the remedial style that you see associated with “children’s albums;” the idea that they should be steered toward some kind of higher moral ground or they should learn how to spell while they’re singing or something like that. I think that’s OK, but that’s not something we wanted to do. I think we should let kids off the hook sometimes. They don’t always have to learn. Well, my experience is that kids learn automatically. They’re learning all the time. They’re learning how to read and to talk and stuff. I mean, the reading you have to help them with, but just the learning about the world is something that happens all the time. I don’t think that “children’s records” are much of a help in that area.

NATN: It’ll be interesting to see how the record gets known to children or families with children.

JL: Yeah, I think we are partly assuming that parents of kids are one-time or possibly still They Might Be Giants fans, you know, who would think that this is the kind of thing their kids would enjoy. I mean, when I am thinking of stuff for my kid, I think ‘well, what’s the sort of stuff that I would like?’ That’s the one really obvious criterion. I mean a lot of kids like things that no adult likes. And it’s very hard to know how to steer them. I mean when it comes to stuff like Raffi, that’s strictly for kids. Or Barney. I have to say I’m kind of allergic to a lot of that stuff, you know? And I think that kids can get by without some of that stuff. It seems very arid to me. But, I like the Teletubbies. I like Sesame Street a lot.

NATN: Well, you and Flansburgh have each ventured out in recent years to projects outside of They Might Be Giants. I was wondering how those experiences have helped you grow musically, both individually and as a duo.

JL: Well, I learned a lot from doing a record myself. I learned that John Flansburgh is an incredibly hard worker. Because when I had to do all that stuff myself, I couldn’t believe what a chore it was. And you know, I think it helped me figure out some stuff to do. I think we both thought, ‘what doesn’t fall under the category of a new They Might Be Giants album?’ We haven’t ruled out that much in the band, so it didn’t seem to leave all that much for our solo projects. But I think maybe the answer was, for both of us, we found more specific definitions for our solo work. John did – particularly on the second record -- did a dance/groove-oriented thing that was probably not something he and I would cook up for an entire album, but it was something he could really flesh out himself. And similarly with myself. The one record that I did was all songs with States for titles, and I think that’s something again that maybe would seem like it wouldn’t be enough for a They Might Be Giants album. It’s a little too marginal in some way. But for me, it was like the perfect kind of thing to focus on.

NATN: You have your work set out for you, and you just progress from State to State…

JL: Oh, yeah. That’s something I had been working on for years and years, before I got a record deal, and you know it was almost like a challenge to myself to come up with an entire album’s worth of State songs. And also to define what that was. I mean, speaking of edutainment, they’re not really songs about the actual States. In fact, they’re really not songs about States. So I guess I wanted to pose that question to myself -- what exactly this collection going to be, and if I rule out one thing, then what does that leave? So that was the challenge, and I think all along I was thinking that if this was too sort of an opaque or vague idea, what would make it good. I mean if it doesn’t fit one definition -- say, ‘these are informative songs’ or something like that -- then what exactly would make it good? And that was the problem I sort of set for myself, like trying to do something that was good by a sort of oblique definition.

NATN: Is that project kind of on the back burner? Are you going to eventually do all 50 states?

JL: I will eventually, yeah. Life is long, we hope. But at the moment, we really have a lot of other stuff on our plate, so I think I can hold off a while on the next State Songs record. But we’ve got plenty of other stuff going on right now, most of which at the moment is writing music for TV, at the midst of waiting around for the record deals to come pouring in. We are spending a lot of our time writing music for "Malcolm In The Middle," the FOX show, which is sort of an ongoing weekly gig for us, and that’s a huge amount of work. Also we’re still rewriting music for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Most of the music you hear on the show now is stuff we cooked up last Spring, and now we’re sort of rewriting stuff as they re-arrange the show.

NATN: So how do you go about something like the "Malcolm In The Middle" gig? Do you get the episodes and then write from them?

JL: Yeah, I just got mailed another box of tapes this morning. We look at the tapes of the shows, which are still in the process of being edited, and they say “we want a cue for this scene here, and here’s some music we dropped in -- music we would have to license if we were going to use it, but this is the idea.” So they would take some music by Lit, for example, and say 'this is the idea for this particular scene.' And then we go into the studio and cook up a soundalike, which sounds sort of like the thing they want and sounds kind of like us. And then for most of the work we’ve done, we’ve just cooked up a lot of cues that aren’t for anything specific. We just do like five sort of Burt Bacharach-y They Might Be Giants instrumentals. Or Henry Mancini-ish, or something with a heavier beat, or something electronic sounding. So we just cook up a lot of these cues. One thing we knew at the beginning was that there’s a big part of the show which is about this kid who’s in military school, so they wanted a bunch of rat-a-tat kind of stuff. So we did a whole bunch of that right at the beginning and then occasionally we’ve gone back and done some more of that.

NATN: Interesting. Well, to change gears a little, what in your opinion is the most significant way the Internet is changing the music industry, and the way you go about making music?

JL: Well, for us, this is the one thing we really are actively doing: we have a relationship with a company called EMusic, and we pretty consistently put out MP3s with them. They’ve got money, and they’ve got visibility. That’s pretty much the one thing we have been doing, whereas our relationships with physical record companies has been not as consistent, you know. So it seems like it’s a good direction for us to move into. It seems like in our audience, we have a good percentage of people who are computer literate, and who are interested in getting our music that way. So that’s good, that’s lucky for us. I think that eventually what’s going to happen is that records will be sold online more. I don’t know what things will be like in 30 years, but I think what’s going to happen in the next 10 years is that there will be a lot more record sales online, and I thinking what’ll probably be the case is that it won’t be all that different from the way it is now, except you won’t be going into record stores.

But I think other than that, you’ll still have record companies, with A&R departments, and you’ll still have to spend a lot of money to promote an album. I think that’s something people tend to leapfrog over when they’re talking about this stuff -- if you put the music out there on the Internet, people will go and get it. And that’s true, except that they won’t know about it unless it’s promoted. So the same way record companies have always been these big promotional machines -- that’s kind of the main function of the company – that will continue to be the case even as manufacturing kind of becomes an issue of the past. Or at least physical manufacturing of the thing.

NATN: It seems like people will manufacture themselves. Because an MP3 is a good idea, but I still want to walk around with it, or play it in my car or something.

JL:Right, so you burn your own CD, or whatever it is you do. What do you do? Do you download MP3s?

NATN: Yeah, the thing is, I just got a computer last week that has the CD-write capability. I mean, I have MP3s on my computer, but I don’t have speakers that are that good, so I’d rather listen to my stereo. Luckily, back when the Long Tall Weekend MP3 record came out, someone actually sent me a CD version to review.

JL: Yeah, most of the people we knew at the time when that came out, including ourselves, got CDs. For a long time, we didn’t know anyone who actually downloaded the MP3 version. I mean everybody had heard it, but they all got the promotional CDs. But that’s partly because I know mostly older people, and younger people like college students were doing that kind of thing.

NATN: Yeah, I think that’s where a big boom of it is. For a lot of bands out there, you’ve got Napster and you’ve got people downloading their music for free, giving it to each other, and artists will take issue with that. But a lot of those artists aren’t giving their fans an option online. I mean, granted it’s somewhat going on the honor system here, but I mean if you’re favorite band is like “Here, come get our new MP3s on this site!” you’re probably going to do that, rather than say “hmm, how can I get around that and get them for free.”

JL: Well, my impression is that if one person downloads it then they could put it up and everyone else could get it for free. But I think the dust hasn’t settled yet with all that stuff. And at the moment, I don’t think artists are getting hurt too badly by not getting royalties for that stuff. I think it’s just a transitional time for that, and I think eventually they’re going to figure out a way to continue selling their thing in a legitimate way. I mean, I’m an artist -- I’m on the side of the artists, I guess. I think people should get paid for what they do. We’re in this position where we’re in the mix enough that people would have heard of us, and we’re trying to make a living doing what we’re doing. We’re not getting rich doing it, so we’re not in a position to say, “oh, take everything we’ve done for free,” you know. But on the other hand, we’re not sort of little enough that it’s strictly about promotion. We feel like this is sort of a trade. We take the idea seriously of getting paid for what we do.

NATN: As well you should. But it’s an interesting time with all this going on.

JL: Yeah, I know. And nobody knows how it’s going to end up, which is what makes it interesting.

NATN: What types of music have you been listening to the most lately?

JL: Well, I’m such a total stick in the mud. I don’t really listen to that much new music. I have friends who will play me something. But I’m just slow enough that I don’t usually get it all straight until it’s like the most popular thing. I mean someone will say, "these guys are a big hit already -- won all these Grammys" or something, and I will say “Oh yeah, I like that new song of theirs. I just heard that.” I kind of feel like my mom at this point. But what can I do? I’m trying. Flansburgh is much more on top of the new music scene than I am. He’s really genuinely interested in everything that comes out. Even though we both feel identically like 99% of it is not ultimately that good, I think he just likes to stay on top of it more. The other thing is I really don’t listen to that much music. It’s sort of a pain for the band and for my family to travel around with me because I don’t like to have the radio on in the car. I kind of like it when it’s quiet (laughs).

NATN: One of these shows you’re doing is the Flood show. Apparently it’s gone platinum recently.

JL: Well, we think so. Sometime early on in its life, it went gold. And it’s had a very long sell-through ‘cause it’s kind of a college perennial record. So it seems pretty clear that by this point we’ve sold whatever that is -- a million copies, I guess?

NATN: Yes.

JL: It must have sold a million copies by now, but we don’t get that sort of information reported to us very consistently. So, we can only assume.

NATN: Well, congratulations.

JL: Thanks.

NATN: So you’re going to play all the songs from the record in order?

JL: Yeah. We’ve been playing most of those songs for the last 10 years anyway, but there’s a few that we’ve played very rarely, and I think there might be one or two that we’ve never played. I was just going down the list -– I’ve been trying to cook up all the charts for the band this week, and I can't honestly remember if we’ve ever played some of these songs, so that’ll be interesting.

NATN: Well, have you picked out a Halloween costume yet?

JL: Ah, no, actually. I haven’t figured it out. I gotta get one for the kid -- I don’t know what he will go as this year.

TROY CARPENTER | Troy Carpenter founded NATN from a Chicago apartment during the ambitious winter of 1998 with co-conspirators Ben French and Jonathan Cohen. After a five-year stint in New York, he and wife Lourdes have recently relocated to Indianapolis, where he spends days listening to music and nights in the kitchen at Elements restaurant. Musical heroes: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Super Furry Animals. What else makes life worth living: Sushi, Phucty, runs in the park, and the Atlanta Braves.