GearLog has an excellent interview with They Might Be Giants‘ John Flansburg about the process they go through while recording an album, what technology they have used in the past as compared to today, and what their thoughts on the current music trends and gadgets.
TMBG is one of the few bands that will always have a place in my playlists. I was lucky enough to finally see them live a few years back in Houston during their tour for The Spine, and they put on one hell of a show. I’ve always been curious to see the steps they take to produce their music, and this article sheds a bit of light on that process.
On Technology and Electronic music:
Well, you know, two things can be happening at the same time in the world, and that doesn’t mean that they are in opposition to each other. We are very interested in technology. We’re very interested in experimenting with music, and one of the most exciting places to experiment with music is electronic music. But I think there’s kind of, even in the world of musical exploration, there can be a lot of orthodox thinking. It’s like your experiment has to be purely experimental–if you’re interested in pursuing electronic music, it should be purely electronic. An I guess we’re just… I’m loath to use the expression, but I think in some sense we are extremely post-modern in that case. We very freely mix up elements and don’t worry about it too much.
On overproducing songs:
The means to do anything in a slick way were so unavailable to us that it never really was an issue. We had very crude tools, for a very long time. We started out as a duo and used a drum machine. And something that I think we only became aware of, after we graduated to bigger studios and started working with live musicians, was how the sort of automatic, mad flava of the drum machines made our recordings exceptional-sounding.
Working with a drum machine, things come out sounding different, and less-familiar. Even when you’re just programming a simple drum pattern that’s familiar to everyone, there was this interval of time when it was the strangest way to do the simplest thing. And when we were working with drum machines, we thought is just sounded very immediate and normal. But listening to those recordings now, I realize that it’s sort of a more awkward sound than we fully understood.
On the evolution of their first electronically delivered music system, Dial-A-Song:
You’ve got to understand, we’ve been around for a long time. Dial-a-Song started as a piece of emerging technology. Dial-a-Song, when it started, was as odd as–maybe even more odd–than anything of the electronic gizmos that are coming out now. In the 70s, the only place where you encountered a tape recorder used with a telephone was with theaters, which had these devices that would give you the time of movies. There weren’t any places where you’d get a recording instead of busy signal. People didn’t have message machines of any kind on their phones. If they left the phone, it would just ring. The phone machine was really a late-70s/early-80s invention. The consumer phone machine was introduced then, and it was not very much after its introduction that we started Dial-a-Song. I think to a lot of people, it was as new-wave an idea as an asymmetrical haircut. It was definitely taking advantage of the emerging technology and using it for kind of a cross-purpose.
On their technology-savvy audience, Podcasting, and MySpace following:
Well, a percentage of them are technologically savvy. We have this podcast, which is extremely successful–it’s probably the most successful thing we’re involved in, simply because it’s free. We’re also managing this MySpace page.
What’s interesting about those things is how many people are doing it for the first time. A big problem we have with the podcast is that people don’t know how to do it. They don’t know the most essential parts of it. We’re introducing people to the applications that they need to do it, or simply to the idea that it’s not something that exists only if you have an iPod. Before you’ve done it, you don’t know anything about it, and that’s exactly where so many of these people are at.
The MySpace thing is interesting because of how many people are involved in that world but are completely outside of technology. They’re there for completely social reasons. It’s a brand new way to be social in the world, and their motivations for being there are entirely traditional. It gets back to what we were talking about before: You can use emerging technology, and it doesn’t have to be an expression of technology. In a way, that’s the best thing you can do with it: Find out how it’s good for you. Nobody knows what this stuff is good for until you actually use it.
Really an excellent interview with one of my very favorite bands. For the whole interview with They Might Be Giants click here for part one, and here for part two.
