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| « Quotes From Print » |
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| Unbound Online Interview, 1997, on touring | "A lot of what we do is pretty monochromatic. We spend a lot of time at the Holiday Inn express breakfast counter refilling our orange juice before we drive for six hours." |
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| Unbound Online Interview, 1997 | Interviewer: "Do you have a favorite audience that you like to play for?"
Flans: "I like to play for drunks."
Interviewer: "Who makes up the bulk of your fan base?"
Flans: "Drunks." |
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| Mountainx.com Article, March 28, 2001 | "Ultimately, I think the thing that really confuses critics is that it's hard to understand if we're just, like, a fun band, or if we're a serious band. And you know, the reality is I think we're both." |
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| Bar-None Mono Puff biography page, about his numerous directing stints | "I was looking for a job that would sound more unlikely and dubious than 'I'm in a band,' and 'I'm a video director' wins hands down." |
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| Hartford Advocate, 1994, speaking of his relationship with Linnell | "We probably are like brothers in the sense that we hide a lot of our feelings. I think we have a pretty good working relationship. We're sort of forced to be together more than [most] people and it's very difficult to be around someone without them getting on your nerves. We try to be respectful of each other. In an interview John said, 'At a certain point you just get tired of the way the other person breathes,' and I took that pretty hard because I, personally, am infatuated with the way John breathes." |
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| Hartford Advocate, 1994, talking about how Dial-A-Song tapes got changed | "My landlady used to come down and change it. She was so great about it. I have a very cool landlady. When I don't pay my electrical bill she just doesn't let the guy in [to shut the electricity off]." |
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| Rambles.net Interview, January 1996 | "I dress like my father. I couldn't fool anybody into thinking that I'm a cool dresser. It's a little weird, I'm in the same business that Prince is in. Sometimes I feel like I just can't compete. But you just work with what you got." |
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| Rambles.net Interview, January 1996, on what he expects of an audience | "They need to strike that perfect balance between paying close attention and wild abandon." |
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| CNN.com Article, April 12, 2001 | "I see us going in the direction of a rock band playing in stinky clubs for the rest of our lives." |
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| CNN.com Article, April 12, 2001 | "To paraphrase a quote that was given to the Grateful Dead, we're not the best at what we do, but we're the only ones who do it." |
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| Answers From TMBG, Slashdot, December 21, 2000 | "The Napster discussion is such a strange cultural third rail, and bores me so completely now, I just can't talk about it anymore." |
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| Pop-Culture-Corn Online Magazine, October 1998 | "If I were worried about having hit singles, I probably would have killed myself a long time ago. Speaking as somebody who's never had a hit single..." |
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| Pop-Culture-Corn Online Magazine, October 1998 | "We're not into jabberwocky. I feel like we could write a song with the title 'I Wanna Fuck You' and people would still say, 'I don't understand... explain to me what that song means.' For whatever reason, the reputation that the band has, people just assume that we're somehow cryptic. But I think a lot of what we do makes quite a bit of sense at face value. We are trying to communicate." |
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| MetroActive Music Interview, March 13, 1997 | "Adding the band was like strapping a booster rocket onto the They Might Be Giants space capsule -- it hasn't changed our direction in space, but it has greatly increased our velocity." |
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| People Magazine, June 1988 | "We like playing fun rock music, for the love of it. We only pretend to have a plan for world domination." |
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| People Magazine Article, 1988 | "They Might Be Giants is available now in shopping mall record stores, under the Ts. Right next to Tiffany." |
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| X.S. Magazine, right around Apollo 18 time | "One of the great things about pop songs is that you can fly radically around surreal and very concrete images. You can work things as metaphors or in the literal sense, really go back and forth and work both sides of the fence. That's one of the great things about it -- you can be extremely literal and poetic at the same time." |
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| X.S. Magazine, same interview | "I wrote songs because I didn't know how to play other people's songs. I remember it seemed to me that it was like creating a photograph without a camera. It was extremely satisfying -- it was so beyond what an individual could do. I guess I'm really in love with the song form." |
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| X.S. Magazine, talking about how time-consuming music can be | "I don't know how people are drug addicts and do this at the same time. I can't imagine how you'd keep up." |
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| Launch Online interview, referring to TMBG's fan base | "Oh, we're a freak magnet!" |
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| Launch Online interview | Interviewer, referring to FS: "There's something I find vaguely disturbing about some of the songs on this record."
Flans: "The songs we recorded in the nude, you mean? You figured that out?" |
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| Cornell Daily Sun, November 1992 | "You see, we started touring with a band because we were making too much money and we had to figure out a way to lose some. So we're keeping honest, we're staying close to our indie roots." |
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| Cornell Daily Sun, November 1992 | "I think we're basically a band for people who aren't worrying about whether they're cool or not. Which is not to say we're trying to be uncool." |
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| Seventeen (yes, Seventeen), 1989 | "I was working in a parking lot, which is a great place to learn the guitar. I sat in the booth and practiced all day long. And only two cars were stolen while I worked there." |
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| Onion AV Club, August 20, 1998 | "I feel like the mere existence of They Might Be Giants in the world of commercial music is an untenable, unworkable idea... It's weird business to try to pretend that you're a mass-appeal thing when you're not." |
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| « Live Quotes » |
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| ??/??/?? | "This song is called Thunderbird. It's a brand new song, and we've never played it. We weren't planning on playing it. We don't know how it goes. There will be no refunds. And if the songs sucks after like 45 seconds, that was the way we planned it." |
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| Rochester Music Hall, 10/26/01 | "We can't read your sign and the people behind you want to kill you." |
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| Warfield, San Francisco, 9/19/2001 | In response to repeated requests for Birdhouse from the audience (in a British accent): "Why are you asking us to play that fucking song? We hate that fucking song. You must hate us if you keep asking us to play that song that we hate." |
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| Warfield, San Francisco, 9/19/2001 | In reference to Yeh Yeh! being used in a Chrysler commercial: "So this song is being used in a Chrysler commercial. Of course, we drive the Ford product." |
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| House Of Blues, 9/27/99 | "We can't say we actually feel comfortable in Los Angeles - because we don't - but the one thing that is has in common with New York City is that everybody here looks more like they're in a band than us, and that makes us feel really wonderful inside." |
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| The Bowery, 10/21/99 | "I feel like we've stepped into some kind of freaky time machine and suddenly I'm much thinner. It's wonderful!" |
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| The Bowery, 10/21/99 | "Performers want different things out of audiences, and in the mid-80's were were looking for a stunned silence. We felt like that was the highest compliment we could receive from a crowd. And the beautful thing is we got it over and over again... In performace art spaces, we were the guys in the rock band. In the rock clubs, we were the guys in the performance art thing. Wherever we went, we were like the performing Dutchmen, drifting around the cultural centers of NYC." |
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| The Bowery, 10/21/99 | After messing up during Maybe I Know: "Oh, I fucked it up... I was thinking about my rap for the next song and I got distracted... Here's another song by Ellie Greenwhich. This song is called Super-Short Song; it's called Deep Down Inside He Loves Me. It was a b-side." |
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| The Bowery, 10/21/99 | After messing up the beginning of On The Drag: "Oh, I fucked it up, I fucked it up. It's an indeterminate key. You know, you do that thing... (strums a few chords) Indeterminate key... That's the technical word for fucking up." |
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| The Bowery, 4/20/00 | "I don't know if you heard about these press people getting arrested at the WTO march the other day, but we actually were playing in Washington, D.C. and there were like about 40 million cops for every protester during this one long portion of the proceedings. And I actually had gone to D.C. without a change of clothes, and did one show on Friday night and Saturday night I had to go and buy another change of clothes because I was wearing the clothes from the show before and it was... super-awful. So I actually had to go right up... I was going through DuPont cirlce and I had to go up right to a photographer and say 'Do you know where the Gap is?' And it was then that I understood the danger of globalization. I've given up changing my clothes for you, the people. But this is a warning - don't get too close." |
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