How do you describe the music of They Might Be Giants? With songs that explore the history of forgotten presidents ("Henry Polk") and obscure artists ("Meet James Ensor") as well as ponder the "Birdhouse in Your Soul", John Flansburgh and John Linnell have hit upon an original mix of satire, wit and quirky pop that defies categorization. Pop Culture Press spoke with John Flansburgh between tour dates with They Might Be Giants and his funky side project Mono Puff.

When I called a couple of weeks ago you had just finished a video for "Private Helicopter" by Harvey Danger. How did you get involved with doing videos?

I've been doing videos for a long time, kinda in my spare time. I've basically been doing one, maybe two a year, since 1992. This year [1998] I'm on number three. So it's been heating up. I kinda backed into it. My friend Frank Black [The Pixies] asked me to do his first video. I did the "Los Angeles" video with him, which was a video that involved a hovercraft. It was a very successful video and a lot of people noticed it. I guess between that and people always kinda taking notice of the Giants' videos that it was just kind of a natural progression to start doing other people's videos. And I think [it's good], from a band's point of view, to be able to work with somebody in a band and have same kind of general point of view and probably share like a fair amount of their suspicion about videos. For most people, it's the first thing in their career that presents them this very personal way that they also have nothing to do with the fabrication of. It's a hyper-precarious situation for a lot people and bands to be in.

So did you receive any special kind of training to do videos?

I'm an art school graduate. I graduated with a degree in the fine arts, not in commercial art. So, no. But I had a lot of on the job training. The Giants have done twelve videos as this point. The technical part is not as complicated as, I mean, anyone who watches TV... you know a lot more about the actual stuff than you probably realize. I think everybody pumping gas in the world knows what a "two-shot" is. To be able to generate ideas and come up with things that kinda break out of the standard issue things—that's the real challenge. And I don't know if you could go to school for that, really.

Is it in art school where you met the other John [Linnell]?

No actually I met John in high school. We were high school friends and we worked on the school newspaper together, and we both ended up moving to New York. We both grew up in Massachusetts, and ended up moving to New York after being in other states. John was in a New Wave band called the Mundanes and he moved to New York. That band was very of the moment and it seemed like they had very real commercial possibilities. I mean they had a female lead singer and it was a very slick band. And it just seemed like they had their thing really all together. So they all moved to New York to get signed, basically, because they were like the biggest band out of Rhode Island for a couple years. So they moved to New York and just kept on working. And we kinda started They Might Be Giants in the shadow of that other band.

So you were originally a side project.

Yes. And what's funny about it is that, in a lot of ways, the spirit of being a side project has kinda kept with us. And part of it is that we really started doing this thing strictly for our own personal satisfaction - and that's a complicated, difficult thing to quantify exactly... I mean, there's a high energy performance, but in terms of just how we approach the material... in some ways we're very ambitious. But we've always approached it on a very personal level. Our missions are very personal. We've never really calculated the professional part of what we're doing too far ahead of ourselves.

Has that changed now that you're touring with a backup band?

I think we have to be smarter about what we are doing because our ability to lose money is pretty much unlimited. At any given month of the year there's like 20 people on our payroll. And that's a lot of money coming in and a lot of money going out. We just want to be smart enough not to end up wearing barrels! (laughs) You have to be pretty smart in this business. When I was a kid I was always like, that band - they're only in it for the money and that band - they're so calculated. And you would think of bands all in varying degrees of selling out. I think that almost everybody I've encountered, no matter how bogus what they're doing is, none of them are really sellouts. It's actually this incredible personal commitment to a very crazy dream to want to be a performer and think that you're going to be able to make a go of it.

Which brings me to another question: why a live album? And with so many songs in your catalog, were there songs that you would have liked to have included on Severe Tire Damage that you didn't have room for?

It's difficult to say. There are a couple of things that are in our show that are probably, almost inevitably, high points to our live show that are very difficult to record. There are two songs in particular that I can think of, one is the song "Spy," which has a long improvisational thing to it, which is like the craziest, most fucked up thing in the show. It's not on the live record because the few recordings we have of it just happened not to be the most dazzling versions of it. And it's unfair to the song and what it's become in the show to pin it down to one performance, because it does have this open-ended improvisational part to it. There are a lot of improvisational things that we do in the show that are basically "in the moment." In some ways the show that we do always has an element to it that is impossible to capture because it is essentially improvisational theater. It's almost like live radio. And since it changes every night and some nights it's really great and some nights it isn't, you never know when the cool part is going to happen. There's another song in the show called "The Guitar" that has a long improvisation in it and we ended up leaving both of those tracks off. But at the end of Severe Tire Damage there are these bonus tracks dealing with The Planet of the Apes that give you a taste of the "far left" part of the show. And those are songs that were created spontaneously on stage. Half the people on stage were probably playing in a different key than other half.

I also noticed that They Might Be Giants attracts a wide demographic. When you performed in Austin I noticed that there were parents rocking out with their 11 and 12 year olds.

There is a thing about rock music at this point where there's a lot of bands that have been around for a long time. I'm always surprised when I see kids, but I'm just glad that our audience isn't as old as me! (laughs) I'm 38 years old. I'm not saying that it's real old, but I have played for 38 year old audiences and categorically they're a drag. Because audiences that are 38 years old—audiences "my age" - they all sit down! I much prefer it when people are dancing. We don't check ID at the door, but it does seem like our audience has remained youthful.

And what's happening in your other band, Mono Puff?

I just got through doing a few shows with Mono Puff in New York and in Boston. And they were raging successes, so it was very exciting. Like the Giants, the line-up keeps on growing. We got five musicians on stage and three singers now. There's actually four, including me. So it's a real mob, but it's a fun show. It's the party band side - project of a guy in a party band.

They Might Be Giants latest album is Severe Tire Damage, a live album that includes some of TMBG's experimental/impromptu pieces. Also check out the funky party music of Mono Puff's It's Fun To Steal.