John Linnell
They Might Be Giants on babies, bad shows and Brooklyn.
by Gwynne Watkins
February 8, 2008
Alt rock duo They Might Be Giants, known for cerebral lyrics, catchy melodies and unexpected instrumentation, has always attracted an eclectic group of fans. In recent years, however, they've added a whole new demographic: very small children.
Following the surprise success of 2002's No! , The Might Be Giants embarked on a project with Disney, creating kid-friendly CDs with accompanying music videos: the chart-topping Here Come the ABCs and the brand-new Here Come the 123s. Not that they've forgotten their taller, less squirmy fans: just a few months ago, TMBG released The Else, produced in part by The Dust Brothers and featuring songs like "The Shadow Government."
Babble spoke with singer/songwriter/musician/father John Linnell, who created the band twenty-five years ago with childhood friend John Flansburgh. — Gwynne Watkins
Which of your music is your nine-year-old son most into?
He likes the things we've done that have been turned into cartoons, like the Tiny Toons versions of our songs, but I think he feels pretty close to all of it at this point. It's just sort of around. I try not to rub his nose in it too much.
John Linnell, left, with bandmate John Flansburgh: "We kind of backed into doing kids' music."
When he was a baby, did you sing him They Might Be Giants songs?
Not really, no, I didn't sing him the songs, but he heard them all. He heard No! before it came out, and by the time it came out he was intimately familiar with it — which is funny. We actually recorded it before he was born, but it took that long for the record to be released.
Did you know you were going to have a kid when you started working on that?
I think that we did, but it wasn't really on the top of my mind. John and I were working on the music for Malcolm in the Middle, and doing a bunch of other odds and ends, doing commercial music, doing music for Jon Stewart, stuff like that, so the kids' project was just like this very impractical fun thing we thought we were doing, and the fact that it took off really was a surprise. We kind of backed into doing kids' music.
You must have had people, though, telling you — before you made that album — that their kids were into your music.
Well, when we put out our first record, there was some confusion, because the cover was this wonderful illustration by Rodney Alan Greenblat: sort of a cartoon landscape with me and John and all these cartoon figures and stuff, and people mistakenly thought that it was a kid's record. But then, in amongst what we were doing, there were songs that were perfectly okay to play your kids, and we have a lot of parents who naturally wanted to share the things that they liked with their own kids. You find parents who are ready to drive the car into a tree if they have to listen to Raffi one more time.
©2008 Gwynne Watkins and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Babble editor Gwynne Watkins is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work has appeared both online and in print. She is a consulting editor at Nerve.com, as well as a playwright and a lyricist. Her most recent show, the children's musical Space Pirates, premiered in May. |
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