Back in the golden year of 1987, I discovered the aural and visual joys of They Might Be Giants almost simultaneously. John James, my boss/friend at Cincinnati’s Wizard Records, had recommended They Might Be Giants’ 1986 debut album, and within weeks of that initial headsmack, I experienced their nonsensically surreal homemade video for “(Put Your Hand Inside) The Puppet Head,” shown when the band was a guest on the nonsensically surreal late-night gabfest, The Joe Franklin Show. Franklin was a charming but gauzily clueless vaudevillian who hosted his cable program seemingly in his basement; throughout the segment he never got the band’s name right, vacillating between They May Be Giants to They Must Be Giants. John Flansburgh and John Linnell were beyond giddy for the entire segment.
They Might Be Giants had been around for five years at that point, and were already well established through residencies around NYC and the band’s famously unreliable Dial-A-Song answering machine. The duo’s 1988 album Lincoln blew the Johns into the stratosphere, but the duo never allowed the success of the album and its signature single, “Ana Ng,” to homogenize or water down their anarchic musical approach. It proved to be the right strategy when Flood, the twosome’s 1990 Elektra debut, notched platinum sales figures.
After four albums with Elektra, the duo struck out on its own and has followed its fiercely independent impulses for the subsequent two decades. The Johns released five popular and acclaimed children’s albums in that time, without a whiff of artistic compromise. Just as they did with their adult audience, Flansburgh and Linnell attracted kids with their skewed lyrical perspective and infectiously unique sound.
They Might Be Giants’ last true studio album was 2013’s manically brilliant Nanobots. The group’s last three titles — last year’s Glean and the kid-centric Why?, plus the recent Phone Power — constitute a trilogy comprised of material featured on its rejuvenated Dial-A-Song service.
Click here for tickets/more info.
This article appears in Mar 9-16, 2016.
