They Might Be Giants - C/D, S/D, OPO etc

new album finally came in the mail, only listened once but I really liked it. maybe the only TMBG album where I thought every song was good on the first spin.

I just found out that apparently if you join their fanclub at the highest tier they will record a custom ringtone for you with your name in it. I guess when you have the ability to write a tune in 15 minutes you might as well make some money off it

their first 3 releases are the best but they lost me after that pretty much except Can't Keep Johnny Down is good!

as usual the new album made me Google a bunch of stuff, "If Day for Winnipeg" is a pretty cool slice of history. weird to hear them doing overtly political stuff like this now

I think they're completely excellent up to and including John Henry, and there's lots of rad stuff in amongst the rest, but it's definitely an "in small doses" thing for me past that point.
I say that as someone with all the releases including bonus CDs and whatnot, and for some reason even a member of the current Instant Fan Club.
I've moved on, but they're still a nice place to visit.

thats all accurate

idk if I just burned myself out on the early stuff when I was younger but I actually get more mileage out of the newer albums these days. Join Us, Nanobots, Phone Power, I Like Fun, Book...maybe the high points aren't as great but overall I think these albums are more solid track-for-track. in part I think this is because I get to see them live a lot, and hearing the new songs alongside the old helps you appreciate how good some of them are. I actually don't think their songwriting has changed a whole lot in the last three decades.

that said getting into those first 4-5 albums as a teenager is the sort of thing you can't really replicate, idk if I'll ever again just slam an album on repeat for a few weeks the way I did with Flood and Apollo 18. but when I'm in the mood for them I always seem to pick something new

So I'm guessing you guys would say NOT to buy that package of BOOK

I have the BOOK of BOOK and it's very pretty and has recent lyrics and things in arty fashion.
It's definitely a fan thing. I am not quite at the level but enjoy the fun inherent in the Instant Fan Club.

this bit from a JL interview is fascinating (the getting pulled off YouTube part...I didn't know it could do that):

We seem to specialize in finding complicated things to do, although sometimes we do simple things, and that works really well. Last year we learned how to play one of our songs, “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love,” backward. We taught the band to play all the notes in reverse order, and John and I learned to sing the song phonetically in reverse order. It took weeks. But not only did we pull it off, we played it live just just before the COVID lockdown started up. We were on tour and we got to play it a few times. Somebody took a video of it, and then whatever the robot is that figures out what songs are under copyright heard our backwards version and could tell what song it was, and tried to ban it from YouTube. Once we start touring again, we’re hoping to revive it, because we spent so long learning how to do it.

sheesh...right after their first post-pandemic show

An important message from John L. pic.twitter.com/S3YHMdrH7N

— They Might Be Giants (@tmbg) June 9, 2022

Oh no, poor John F. When I'm back in the US, I really hope to see these guys again

Oh man, that tour is cursed. I was going to see them Saturday for a show that had been postponed mutiple times due to COVID.

Feel so lucky I got to see them back in March of 2020, when it was just an uneasy air of “this may be the last thing we do for the next few weeks”

It was a great show by the way. The Flood set was good but the second set was even gooder. All the best to Flans.

Damn this sucks

I am thinking about their feelings and about fan disappointment, but my hard-headed son asked a good question; is this going to be OK for them financially? I have no concept of what the business of being They Might Be Giants looks like.

I kind of feel like Gloria from the Dial-A-Song answering machine: "But what kind of money does he make? It don't make no sense. Well, he don't make any money, right?"

I am purely speculating here, but I would hope/guess/think they will be fine. Smart guys, at it for many years (hopefully they learned long ago and have been doing it right for a long time), made many licensing / royalty deals, played many sold-out shows, etc.

The two Johns, I mean. The rest of the band obviously would be different.

They had already (re-)re-scheduled the 2020 Flood tour into a series of 2-3 week regional tours stretching into 2023, to limit the financial liability of any one mini-leg getting cancelled by covid. In that light, it seems plausible that this will be a major financial hit to the business and their band/crew seasonal employees.

They Might Be Broke

Sad to hear about John F, hope he recovers quickly

Someone uploaded the recent show to D1m3adozen, and included this link, which may be of interest -

"PS, I've got a google drive fulla older (mostly TMBG) cassette bootlegs I've recently obtained and digitized. I don't have enough time in the world to try and put all on here individually. Feel free to share these wherever. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1H9ICuR0cjVNBph3kbuqWzEomc2EGQAqQ "

very good link, thanks!

I'm listening to a Jan & Dean compilation I made years ago but never put on again until now...I grew much more familiar with They Might Be Giants in the interim, and listening to these Jan & Dean cuts now it sounds like they both could've been the same band had they never aged and left behind surf and California culture after moving to Brooklyn. Their musical sensibility and even the physical character of their voices sound eerily similar. It's even more amusing when I realize the biggest TMBG fan I personally know lives in Pasadena.