[Fwd: Linnell State Songs Interview]
Peter Ohlert
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Linnell State Songs Interview
Date: 27 Oct 1999 21:10:29 -0400
From: kristen...@utulsa.edu (Kris Maxwell)
Reply-To: kristen...@utulsa.edu
Organization: TMBG Gateway
Newsgroups: tmbg.list
Interview with John Linnell
By Kris Maxwell
10/11/99
I did this interview for my school newspaper a few weeks back. It will
be
on tmbg.net with the next update (in RealAudio), but until then here it
is.
Sorry if this is too long.... if you have any comments, please contact
me
off-list! Enjoy:
KRIS: Hello?
LINNELL: Hi, Kris?
KRIS: Yes
LINNELL: This is John Linnell calling from They Might Be Giants
KRIS: Hi John
LINNELL: How are you sir? Sorry I’m phoning you late.
KRIS: I’m not bad at all, how are you doing?
LINNELL: Pretty good. I must say, the information I have is that you are
from The Collegian, but I don’t actually know where you are.
KRIS: I am in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with the student–run paper here at the
University of Tulsa.
LINNELL: Very Good.
KRIS: How are things in St. Louis?
LINNELL: Well, we’re playing at our usual little hole here.
KRIS: Mississippi Nights?
LINNELL: yeah, it should be fun.
KRIS: Is that where you guys recorded “Beneath the Planet of the
Apes?”
LINNELL: No, I mean I’m not sure, but that may be correct… I wouldn’t
be at all surprised
KRIS: I think I was at that show…
LINNELL: Oh really?
KRIS: That’s a nice venue there… I like that place
LINNELL: We pretty much alternate between here and the Pointfest,
those are the two gigs… Are you from St. Louis?
KRIS: No, I have some friends from there, the only place I’ve actually
been is that Laclede’s Landing area
LINNELL: Oh man, well that is the absolute nadir of St. Louis from what
I can tell. Pretty much walk in any direction and it gets better.
KRIS: Like the whole wax museum thing, and the arcade and everything,
right?
LINNELL: Oh yeah, that’s right.
KRIS: Craziness… So how’s the current tour going?
LINNELL: We’re all, you know…We’ve avoided getting sick…
KRIS: Oh, that’s good…
LINNELL: Yeah, it’s going alright. And we’re nearing the end of this
particular… yeah…
KRIS: Yeah, and you’re going back out on the road for the State Songs,
right?
LINNELL: Correct. But not for long, I’m just doing a couple of major
cities. Not Tulsa, unfortunately. Basically I’m booked to play 2 shows
on
the west coast- San Francisco and LA- New York and Boston on the east
coast, and then Chicago. So we’re pretty much making a semi-circle
around Oklahoma.
KRIS: As you are wont to do. I think it’s been something like 100 years
since you’ve been here.
LINNELL: Yeah probably. We did actually play. . . I’m forgetting now,
maybe it was Tulsa come to think of it.
KRIS: I think I remember hearing stories from a long time ago…
LINNELL: We passed through Oklahoma City, but I think maybe we
played a show in Tulsa at some point.
KRIS: Cool. So you are going to be out on the road. Do you know when
and where you’re going to be playing in LA?
LINNELL: I do, let me consult my calendar… It’s probably not in this
particular calendar, but it might help me to look at the calendar. Oh
yeah,
I’m going to be in LA on the 22nd of November.
KRIS: Really? That’s awesome, I’m going to be in Los Angeles at that
time.
LINNELL: Excellent. Please come down and bring 100 of your friends.
KRIS: I definitely will. That’s great luck. I’m going home with my
girlfriend to visit the family, so we’ll definitely go catch the show.
LINNELL: Excellent.
KRIS: So speaking of the State Songs, I guess that’s what this is all
about, how did that whole thing get started?
LINNELL: Well, that’s difficult to say. Like They Might be Giants, it
was
very informal when it started up. I didn’t really have any plan for this
project at all, I just started writing songs with states as the titles,
in-
between writing They Might Be Giants songs more than 10 years ago..
KRIS: Really? What was the first one that you wrote, do you remember?
LINNELL: I don’t actually… Although if I had to guess, I’d say it was
“Michigan,” which is very collegiate sounding… did you get a copy of
the record?
KRIS: Yeah actually, and I had a question about “Michigan”
specifically. I don’t have the lyrics or anything, but does it say “we
must
eat Michigan’s brain?”
LINNELL: It does say that.
KRIS: That’s great. I’m glad it wasn’t my own psyche putting that in
there…
LINNELL: It’s not just what you think.
KRIS: There’s more out there supporting that idea…
LINNELL: Yeah, that was probably the first one. It has this sort of
football fight-song vibe, and I think it’s probably the closest thing to
an
actual state anthem type of music.
KRIS: So how did you approach it? Once you started writing these
songs, was it like you wanted to do songs about states, or you were
inspired by the states?
LINNELL: I always have a hard time explaining this, because I don’t feel
like it makes 100% sense to me. John [Flansburgh, the rest of They Might
Be Giants] and I tend to write songs where we come up with a title or an
idea that is encapsulated in the title. And that is also the chorus of
the
song, and it pretty much states the basic idea of the song. There are
other ways of writing songs, but that’s a very common one. So the thing
about the State Songs was that it was a way of trying to leapfrog over
that., and come up with a basic template for a song which didn’t really
tell you anything about what the song was going to be. In some ways it
is an echo of the kind of pop song with a woman’s name as the title.
Like
a song called “Betty” or something- you don’t know what it’s going to
be about.
KRIS: You don’t know where that’s going.
LINNELL: Exactly, but with the states, its even more. You really don’t
know where its going.
KRIS: And listening to it, it seems like [the songs] have a varying
degree
of how much they actually have to do with the state.
LINNELL: I’d say they’re pretty close to uniform in that they don’t
really have anything to do with the states. But some of them maybe feel
more like they could be about a state.
KRIS: Yeah, like in “West Virginia” you have the whole thing about the
trees, and it sounds like it could be about the state.
LINNELL: It refers to some symbolic things about West Virginia, but it
isn’t really about it.
KRIS: And then on the other hand, “South Carolina” sounds like it
could be any state. Is there anything underlying there, or is it just a
song
you wanted to make and then decided on the state?
LINNELL: Are you asking about “South Carolina” specifically?
KRIS: Yeah, for example, would that particularly have to have been
South Carolina? Is there something about that song?
LINNELL: I think that in a lot of cases that it was the rhythm of the
name
of the state that dictated the general meter of the music. Maine only
has
one syllable, so the chorus is this one-syllable high-note. So there are
a
lot of those kinds of things going on as well.
KRIS: So are you planning on, as the title songs suggests, going
though and doing all the 50 states?
LINNELL: I’d like to. It took me so long to do the 15 that are on the
record. I hate to think that it’s going to be another 10 years before I
make
the next record. But even if that were the case, I suppose I have enough
time in the rest of my life to finish all 50 if everything goes well.
KRIS: Well, you’re more than a quarter of the way done. So I guess that
by touring around in a rock band all the time, you have been to all the
states?
LINNELL: No, I’ve never been to Alaska actually. We’ve never played
in a few of the other states, like Wyoming. I think Alaska is the only
state
I’ve never been to though. Even in the last six weeks, we have pretty
much covered the whole mess of them.
KRIS: So do you feel that you will have to go there to write the song?
LINNELL: Alaska? No. I can write about it without going there.
KRIS: It’s cold, that’s all you need to know.
LINNELL: It’s cold, yeah [chuckles]
KRIS: That could be the song itself.
LINNELL: That won’t be what the song is about.
KRIS: Well yeah, it has way too much to do with the state. I know that
you released about five of these songs on the Hello Record Club in 1994,
and some of [the songs on the album] are different from those
incarnations. What did you feel you wanted to change, or how have they
evolved since then?
LINNELL: Well, it’s been a number of years. For a lot of them I used the
same tracks, and just cleaned them up. I think in most of the cases I
fattened-up the bass.
KRIS: It sounded like “Maine” had a fatter bassline. One thing that
threw me off was “Pennsylvania.” It sounds radically different with the
strings.
LINNELL: I wasn’t too happy with the Hello version of that one, the
piano just sounded very clunky. I like it better with Mark Feldman
playing the violin.
KRIS: It seems like you’ve got a lot of instruments in there. How much
of it did you actually play yourself?
LINNELL: Well, I just played the keyboards and the woodwinds, and I
did the programming.
KRIS: I wanted to ask you about that. They sent me a press release that
said “see attached for information on programming the organ,” and there
wasn’t anything attached. So you’re going to have to serve as the
attachment. What was the deal with the carousel organ?
LINNELL: Well jeez, I wrote this whole essay on the carousel organ…
There were two different ones on the record. One is this very large
machine that lives in a carousel in a park outside of Washington, DC.
Then there is another one that’s in a guy’s home. The bigger one has
things like glockenspiel and drums and all these things attached to it.
KRIS: How do you have to go about programming something like that?
LINNELL: It’s an unbelievable chore. First of all I had to get the
information about the ranges of everything, because they don’t just play
whatever note you want. They are extremely restricted in the range of
notes and even the selection of notes within a range. For example, the
big one didn’t have most of the G sharps, the D sharps, and the A
sharps.
KRIS: How old where these machines?
LINNELL: I think they’re both from the ‘20’s. They didn’t expect that
you’d ever need those notes.
KRIS: It’s from the pre-MIDI phase, made it difficult I imagine.
LINNELL: They’re really expensive, so they figured “what kind of music
is going to be played on these?” Mostly very simple pop tunes, that
don’t have a lot of key changes. So that’s what they designed them for.
KRIS: And how did you learn about and decide to use these?
LINNELL: I’ve known about carousel organs for a long time, and I
actually got interested as a kid in the one in Central Park in New York.
It
was this very loud machine that you could look at as the horse was
going around the machine. You could peek in and see the drums getting
hit and stuff like that, so that was kind of interesting. I think that I
like the
idea of mechanical music. And I like the idea that even thought it’s
inhuman, there’s something very expressive about it anyway. It
expresses a kind of failure on the part of the machine to completely
execute something. It’s got mechanical precision, but it’s still not
quite
there. Part of the problem is that technically they’re not quite
perfect.
KRIS: It’s missing that spark
LINNELL: Yeah, there’s something sort of poignant about the fact that
its not quite able to soar to [human] heights. And yet at the same time
obviously they were designed to be these incredibly deluxe objects. It’s
very complicated, I don’t know if I can describe in words what attracts
me to those things, but I think they’re very appropriate for this
project,
too. There’s something about the sound of the band organ that I could
hear in a lot of the songs.
KRIS: How many songs did you use them on?
LINNELL: There’s four. [“Illinois”] and “Iowa” are the smaller band
organ, and “New Hampshire” and “Utah” are the larger one. In both of
those cases all you hear is the vocals and the band organ.
KRIS: Ok, that’s the heavy percussion in “Utah.”
LINNELL: Yeah, It’s extremely crude. I hate to say this, but they guy
who cut the roll for me didn’t do a very god job on those two tracks, so
the rhythms are a little sloppy and there are some wrong notes in there.
Unfortunately there wasn’t a way to fix that. It was just technically
too
difficult.
KRIS: Well it came off as aesthetic, so it turned into a feature. Those
definitely lend [the album] a different kind of air
LINNELL: It’s a really strange vibe.
KRIS: It reminded me of the Edison stuff you did [on wax cylinders] for
Factory Showroom. Is there a similar fascination there?
LINNELL: Well yeah, there’s something fascinating about ancient
technologies of music reproduction. You get the result, even when
you’re doing it now. If you use the old gear- and I’m sure Lenny
Kravitz
says this too- it’s like you’re time travelling. You can take the tools
from
them and apply the ideas from now, and it still sounds more like then
than now.
KRIS: How much time did it take for you to actually program this stuff?
LINNELL: Oh God, I can’t even add it all up. The songs were written
over a long period of time, and in order to score out the band organ
parts, I had to be very specific. I don’t even know if you want to hear
all
of this technical information, but there are four different parts on the
band organ. It the equivalent of four sections in an orchestra. There’s
what they call the trumpet, the melody, the accompaniment and the bass,
and you have to divide everything up into that. Like I said, there’s
these
very extreme restrictions on what notes you get to play. The only way I
could ensure that I would get back what I expected was to make tapes of
a synth playing the same music. I gave them to [the programmers] along
with the printed music. In the case of the guy in New York with the band
organ in his home, he was extremely careful and conscientious about
making it the right tempo and making the notes have the right duration.
He obviously really worked to make it sound right. Unfortunately I think
the other guy didn’t even listen to the cassette.
KRIS: You should put his name in the liner for programming. “Not Me.”
LINNELL: I don’t know if he understood what the point of the project
was either. I don’t know if he was really getting what I was doing.
KRIS: It sounds like it was a big challenge, but it gives the album a
very
different sound, apart from the obvious departure from regular pop
music. Did you choose “Montana” as the single?
LINNELL: I think that Rounder [the record label] was thinking about
“South Carolina” as a single, and then they came up with this idea, what
I have to credit them for, which was to make a vinyl single in the shape
of
the lower 48 states. So that will be coming out at some point.
KRIS: Ah, one of my other questions was “why vinyl,” so I guess that’s
the answer.
LINNELL: Although somebody told me that you can cut CDs as well.
KRIS: You can, I’ve seen ones for Star Wars
LINNELL: I just found out about that. I don’t know if Rounder would be
into doing that. So the thing with the vinyl was that once you start
chopping into the 12-inch in the way to make it shaped like anything,
you’re really losing a lot of space.
KRIS: Yeah, you’ve only got the inside part
LINNELL: So they said that as a result there wasn’t enough room to put
“South Carolina” on there, the song was four minutes long. So t had to
be a shorter one, that’s the reason they went with “Montana.”
KRIS: I guess “Louisiana,” the unreleased b-side, was short enough to
put on the other side?
LINNELL: Apparently
KRIS: So what’s with “Louisiana” being a b-side?
LINNELL: To be honest with you, I recorded that one and mixed it in my
home. I wasn’t going to put it on the record. And they asked for a
b-side
that wasn’t on the record, and that was the recording that I had
available.
KRIS: So is it a demo version?
LINNELL: It’s sort of on the demo tip, although I think it is a nice
production, but like I said I did the whole thing in my little home
studio.
KRIS: You’re not ready to put it on an album?
LINNELL: I wasn’t thinking of it.
KRIS: Well I can’t wait to hear it. Just a couple more things about the
album… I noticed that the theme song goes into the “Arkansas” motif at
the end.
LINNELL: That’s right.
KRIS: Is there something special about “Arkansas?”
LINNELL: I just thought it was funny that in the lyrics [of the theme
song], it keeps going on about “my favorite one.” It’s something people
ask me and John [Flansburgh] all the time about They Might Be Giants,
“what’s your favorite song?” I don’t know why, but it’s like we have an
allergy to telling people what our favorite songs are. But I thought it
was
funny to have this incredibly biased thing right there on the record,
that
says “here’s the best song on the record.” Again, it’s not really what I
think. I mean I don’t think “Oregon is bad,” and I don’t think
“Arkansas”
is my favorite song, but I just thought it was funny to express an up-
front opinion like that.
KRIS: It’s like having a character singing. Whoever it is that sings
that
first song, it’s their favorite song.
LINNELL: Yeah, in a way.
KRIS: Speaking of They Might Be Giants, let’s shift gears here for just
a
second, when is the new rock album due out?
LINNELL: Well it’s not due out on a particular date. It will be coming
out next year sometime. Unfortunately we don’t have a record deal. We
have a lot of stuff recorded, but we don’t have a schedule for putting
it
out, and it’s not finished, so I couldn’t say at this moment.
KRIS: It seems like you’ve got a whole lot of material…
LINNELL: There is a great deal on our plate at the moment.
KRIS: What about the children’s album?
LINNELL: That’s the thing that will probably come out first. We do have
a record deal for it, and we have a bunch of songs ready for it.
KRIS: Is that going to be on Rounder as well?
LINNELL: That will be on Rounder, yeah.
KRIS: I don’t know if you’ve been reticent to talk about it or if nobody
has asked, but what is the idea behind the children’s album?
LINNELL: It’s probably that we tried to explain and it just wasn’t
interesting. It’s really just a children’s record. We were asked by
Rounder if we could do this, and we thought it would be an interesting
project for us because a lot of our music is already considered safe to
play for kids. Parents who own other rock albums would often pick They
Might Be Giants as the one that they think their kids will like. Also
for
whatever reason, I think kids are attracted to what we do. So this is
giving us a chance to define the difference between the stuff that we
normally do, which is undiluted They Might Be Giants, and the stuff that
we would do specifically for kids.
KRIS: Does it have anything to do with the fact that I have heard that
the next album is probably going to be more rock-oriented, with less of
the esoterica?
LINNELL: I don’t even know if I agree with that statement, because we
haven’t finished the record. Who the hell knows?
KRIS: It might end up being lounge tunes by the time you’re done with
it.
LINNELL: [joking] Well, we’re going to jump on that lounge
bandwagon. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. There are some really
rocky songs that we’ve got now, but I think we’ll probably do a lot of
other stuff.
KRIS: Well you’ve definitely been hard at work this year. I can’t even
count on one hand, or maybe both, what you’ve been doing, with the
movies and television and things like that. Is it a TMBG renaissance?
Are you at a heightened level of activity, or are we just hearing more
about it?
LINNELL: We didn’t stop being busy before, but one of the things
that’s happening now is that we’re diversifying in a much more extreme
way that we have before. We’re doing TV, movies, and we’re currently
getting ready to do the music for an awards ceremony. We’re going to be
doing the walk-on music. It’s just a very odd thing, but for some reason
they thought we would be appropriate. So yeah, it’s been a crazy year.
We’re going to be doing all the incidental music for Malcolm in the
Middle which is a Fox TV show… and… I’ve got to go do sound check
now.
KRIS: Well it’s been a pleasure talking to you, and I will definitely
try to
come out and catch your Los Angeles show. I look forward to more
success with State Songs and hope to talk to you again sometime.
LINNELL: Great. OK Kris, nice talking to you. See you around.
KRIS: Thanks a lot John, bye.
LINNELL: Bye bye.