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BY BENJAMIN BRADLOW

In print | February 17, 2005

John Flansburgh saw his band, They Might Be Giants, as an abnormality of American rock when the band first encountered success in the late ’80s. “We felt very much like an anomaly. On an immediate level we basically found ourselves in a world of alternative rock at a time that alternative rock was really exploding,” he said. “[Our music] was a lot more personal than most rock music. It was kind of fringe-y.”

The idiosyncratic band had developed primarily in the burgeoning experimental performance art scene in New York City’s East Village. The band didn’t totally fit in there, either. “We came out of the East Village performance scene, which, in the mid-80s, was a very art-school kind of world and very pretentious in an art school kind of way,” Flansburgh said. “We were definitely kind of like the happy guys in a self-serious scene.”

As a band that’s been together for 23 years, perhaps its inability to fit in has given it such long staying power. Flansburgh and John Linnell — the other half of the core duo that makes up TMBG — have written songs on some of the most eccentric topics in the pop canon: “Birdhouse In Your Soul” and “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” are some of their most well-known songs, both off of their most successful album, “Flood.” (A sample lyric from “Istanbul,” a song about the change of the city’s name from Constantinople to Istanbul: “Why did Constantinople get the works? / That’s nobody’s business but the Turks.”)

The band shies away from the grand social or philosophical statements that many rock bands aspire to make. “The rock star gene that makes you want to tell everybody how to live their lives is a recessive trait in us. I just can’t really relate to that on an essential level,” Flansburgh said.

As animal shelters and Turkish history lessons are recurring lyrical themes, it’s not surprising that the band is often tagged with the “nerd rock” label that usually covers a wide range of musical artists including the Barenaked Ladies, Harvey Danger and even Weezer. (It may seem as though nerdy glasses are the only prerequisite for entry into this exclusive club.) Flansburgh wants to distance himself from such labeling, however. “I don’t think anybody enjoys labels in general. The bands that we’re often compared with tend to have a very different slice of the cultural onion than us,” he said.

Their music borrows from almost any musical genre, but always has an authentic pop-sensibility. No, TMBG is not the sexiest rock band in the world, but the goal has always been something a lot easier to take home to your mom. Sixties surf music, Middle Eastern minor key strings and cheesy polka all seem to get equal time in the TMBG creative process. “We’re not worried about whether or not what we’re doing is, on a superficial level, viewed as authentic. The rhythms that we work with are from all around the musical globe and the musical ideas that we have come from a lot of different places,” Flansburgh said. “Anything we’re interested in we’ll try to incorporate into what we’re doing. And then hopefully it’ll be done with enough style that it won’t just seem like some crazy grab bag of stuff.”

The band’s eccentricities and unique approaches to music also extend to the business side of the industry. TMBG began a special answering machine service in 1983 called “Dial-a-Song,” which would allow callers to call a special phone to hear a different song from the band almost every day. The phone number still works: (718) 387-6962.

Flansburgh downplayed the ingenuity of the idea. “We were really just captivated by the potential of an answering machine,” he said. “The whole world of phone recording was something that was brand new. We had the idea to play a song over the phone as a way of reaching out to people who wouldn’t see us at the club.”

He noted how the marketing ploy set up the band early on as a unique musical experience. “Dial-a-phone had a really interesting effect because it changed the way you perceive a band. It was a device that said this band is not like a regular band. This band works in a way that you might not have experienced a band before,” he said. “That’s a really wonderful foundation for getting people to know your band. When you hear a band now you want to know what’s different about them. … It made people curious about what we were about.”

Of course, the band’s name has its own power in piquing the public’s curiosity. But Flansburgh said distribution schemes like Dial-a-Song were necessary to reach a wider audience. “We were playing — in a sense — in very trendy clubs, and I think we realized that a lot of people in our audience would be working people who would have a hard time getting out at night,” he said. “They weren’t going to go out in an experimental way. They weren’t just going to go to see a band with an interesting name. It was a way to get people a preview of our show and to try to make people understand the band on its own terms.”

Flansburgh sees parallels between music file sharing today and the Dial-a-Song service. “I always try to encourage songwriters and bands, ’Don’t worry about people hearing your songs.’ The chances of somebody stealing your song versus the chances of somebody enjoying your band are so skewed towards the latter,” he said.

The band also exploited the video medium in the early days of MTV during what Flansburgh sees as the TV channel’s more “pretentious” phase. “For us, our big break was through the side door. … We knew how to make really cheap videos that looked as interesting as really expensive videos — in some cases a lot more interesting,” he said. “One thing I do remember at the time is that MTV, in its own subtle way, was actually a little bit pretentious itself. It wanted to play stuff that included a stylish edge to it. They had every opportunity to champion New Kids on the Block and every other kind of nightmarish, purely commercial stuff. They really avoided that.”

In 1998, after at least 10 years of what Flansburgh described as a “write-record-tour” cycle, he and Linnell decided to explore different outlets for their creative energy. The band began writing musical scores for TV shows and movies, as well as some advertisements.

Perhaps their best-known TV work has been for the show “Malcolm in the Middle,” for which Flansburgh and Linnell wrote the theme song, “Boss of Me,” as well as the score for each episode of the show’s first two seasons. “For a long time we were very nervous about working with the outside world. I think we finally realized that there is a world of creative people that are, by and large, fun to work with. A lot of the stuff that’s on TV or in movies is really interesting and a different kind of challenge,” he said.

The band also landed a job writing music for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” after it burnished its news broadcast music writing skills on “Nightline.” The producers of “The Daily Show,” Flansburgh said, “wanted to work with people who could really do that kind of bombastic music.”

This week, the band will make appearances at a number of bookstores to promote their third children’s album, “Here Come The ABCs.” The album has an accompanying DVD, which amounts to a number of short music videos about various letters in the alphabet. “The world of rock video got kind of bloated. We haven’t been able to be involved in visual stuff and we want to be. We have a natural affinity to that kind of creative work,” he said.

The short videos include a variety of images, including dancing pandas in a field and two puppets voiced by Linnell and Flansburgh who serve as the narrators for most of the videos. “It’s nice that the kids’ stuff is successful enough that we get to work on this fancier level. It’s so trippy,” Flansburgh said.

Yet TMBG have not given up on their more adult — though still very far from the mainstream — rock roots. They recently embarked on a three-month club tour this past summer and fall, and the show here on Saturday will be the band’s normal rock extravaganza, according to Flansburgh. “The thing we’re doing at Swarthmore is our full live, arena rock, ear drum-crushingly loud rock show. There will be swearing. There will be jumping up and down,” he said.

For a band that has built its reputation on exploring seemingly random obscurities, both lyrically and musically, this perhaps describes the basic essence of TMBG: all they want to do is rock. “We will probably be more happy to rock than ever before,” he said.

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