Straight talk

No, they’re not giants yet. But they loom pretty large. Brooklynites John Flansburgh and John Linnell, aka They Might Be Giants, now wield the awesome power that comes with winning a Grammy for writing a sitcom theme. But they’re still very much the same lovably eccentric cult rockers, singing about James K. Polk, purple toupees, and nightlights that daydream of being lighthouses. We spoke recently with Linnell—the lanky one with the accordion—about the duo’s current projects, including the pleasingly quirky documentary Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns. TMBG also just finished its second kids’ project, an illustrated book and CD called Bed Bed Bed. They’ll play a short, free set and sign books December 8 at Wild Rumpus bookstore.

THE RAKE: Was making Bed Bed Bed different than No!, your first kids’ record, now that you’ve got your son?

LINNELL: That’s a good question. Obviously I had a lot of experience with getting my son to go to bed by that time. But part of it was, we just wanted to do this thing that was cool. We often think, for instance, how cool it would be to have a picture book with a CD stuck inside, this bizarre thing. We don’t always think in strictly practical terms about how the thing gets used. With Bed, we discovered pretty quickly that you can’t flip the pages that fast and really take in the illustrations. So really what the experience is about, I think, is the picture book is for bedtime, and it’s enhanced by these songs that the kid may already know, or can hear later.

THE RAKE: Even before you made those records, your music was already pretty well attuned to children’s sensibilities. How did you change your songwriting to make it “officially” children’s music?

LINNELL: We didn’t define it very fully when we started working on No! In some ways we were being a lot freer than usual. We felt no obligation to write the college-radio single. Normally we’d throw in a bunch of those. And we sometimes have stuff on our grownup records that’s a little too death-obsessed or in some other way dark for children.

THE RAKE: How do kids like the live shows?

LINNELL: They’re really engaging with it a lot of times. But they’re not ashamed to turn their backs if they’re bored, or run around. That’s tough. It’s a hard crowd to play for. We don’t want to do just anything to get their attention. We want to feel like we have some pride left at the end of the show.

THE RAKE: Last time you played First Avenue, I recall, the crowd filled the entire bar. How can you fit in these comparatively tiny bookstores?

LINNELL: There’s something about a bookstore that makes people behave themselves. But the young kids, there’s this chaos factor generated just by that. That’s been our main security problem, tiny hands grabbing electrical equipment. But the shows have been really fun. They’re not really just kids’ shows. Adults should come even if they don’t have kids. And maybe we can trick them into buying this book.

THE RAKE: Although you’ve been doing a lot of soundtrack work lately, it must have been pretty strange for guys who aren’t all that interested in going mainstream to win a Grammy.

LINNELL: The Grammy was totally weird. It meant a lot for us professionally because it legitimized the work that we do for hire. We’re much more of an institution now, in a weird way, even though we feel like that’s a ridiculous idea. A lot of people that liked us a long time ago when they were in college are now in jobs in places like Disney, and NPR, and Cartoon Network, so we get to do all kinds of things. But we still feel it’s a very personal project, that we just goof around and come up with stuff.

THE RAKE: Which is why you still devote so much energy to offbeat things like your CD soundtrack for McSweeney’s sixth issue.

LINNELL: The stuff that we get most excited by is what’s not trying to be huge. The only real problem for us is cooking up those ideas. That’s the challenge, to think of something interesting that isn’t just what everybody else already thinks of for you to do.

Wild Rumpus, 2720 W. 43rd St., (612) 920-5005, www.wildrumpusbooks.com