They Might Be Giants On Album 24 ‘The World Is To Dig’

They Might Be Giants treat the entire history of popular music as a trampoline rather than a rulebook. Like two pinballs pinging off of each other through musical murals stretching into a giddy ether, They Might Be Giants move by ricochet. On The World Is to Dig, the multi-Grammy-winning duo continues bouncing through the pop multiverse, digging into whatever they find with playful zeal. John Linnell and John Flansburgh continue to fire ideas off one another like particles in a perpetual motion experiment, each collision producing a new angle, a new joke, a new melodic left turn, resulting in tracks packed with esoteric references, mischievous details, and left-field detours. Untethered from trends, immune to nostalgia, and equally ready to draw from Tin Pan Alley theatrics and contemporary pop culture references, The World Is to Dig is the sound of a band very much in motion; not chasing relevance but generating it on their own terms. John Flansburgh talks to Hi Fi Way in greater detail about the album.

Congratulations on album number twenty four, it is an absolute beauty.
Yeah, difficult album twenty four. Often easier than album twenty three, but in this case, no.

Do they get any easier, or do they continually get harder each album?
You know, it’s sort of a little bit of both. Like, we know what we’re doing in a lot of ways that we didn’t when we started. You actually do learn things over the course of your life, so there’s efficiencies in that.
But then there’s additional challenges, not only do you not want to accidentally plagiarise The Beatles like you might be nervous about when you first start writing songs, but you also don’t want to repeat yourself, which is a whole other problem. Because even at your most original, you’re still stuck with yourself.

Did you guys have a vision in mind of what you wanted to do with this album, or where you wanted to take it?
Not really. Basically, we just start working on songs and piling songs up. Sometimes you reflect on what you’ve got so far and think, how can we stretch this out in another direction? Or do we have the best version of a poppy song, or the best version of a more introspective song, or a more experimental‑sounding song? It’s a process, but we don’t make concept albums in that way.

So it doesn’t start with a particular theme or certain topics?
No, it’s kind of the opposite. We’re coming from a pop music background where variety is what we’re after, trying to create a universe of songs that all shine in their own unique way.

Even the album title itself, The World Is to Dig, is such a bold title, it could mean almost anything.
Yeah, I think it’s a positive title, it’s a vibe. It’s saying there are things to explore. Albums that have that open‑ended quality, that suggest there’s a whole bunch of different ideas going on, that’s interesting to me. But no, we don’t come at albums with preconceived notions or concepts too much. We just hope we have some memorable songs.

Does it start with lyrics first, or ideas of certain sounds?
Every different way. There are songs that start with beats, songs that start with interesting opening lines that could never be a title, songs that start with a desire to capture some kind of instrumentation. We work with computers as much as we work with acoustic instruments, so we come at it every way you can imagine and we hand things off to one another. I’ll do a set of lyrics and give them to John, John will cook up a track, or I’ll write a melody over a chord progression. We just try to figure out more new ways to write songs. That’s our quest.

Is the creative process for both of you is the most exciting time, there are always so many interesting and quirky ideas. I still go back to the last tour when you played one song backwards.
Doing that live was a whole unique challenge, learning a song sonically backwards so it would reproduce and sound like it was forwards when you flipped it. That was a very hard left turn. But the popular song has been around for one hundred years, and yet there are still interesting ways to come at it. It’s a remarkable format, short and sweet, but with a lot of impact. The popular song is an amazingly durable thing.

Do you ever get worried about hitting a creative roadblock? How do you approach that?
I can’t speak for John, but I feel like I’ve hit a million roadblocks over the years. When you can’t finish something, that’s often a good time to start something new. Sometimes finishing songs is the most tedious part, you think you’re onto something, you get halfway through, and then you don’t know how to expand on it. You’re stuck with forty five seconds of an idea. That’s when I move to what I call “research,” working with a drum machine, cooking up a new beat, making a little track and sampling part of it, turning it into a sampled instrument, or just strumming a guitar and yodelling into a cassette recorder to hash out a new song. There are no rules and no limits.

Were there any songs that surprised you with how they turned out compared to how they were originally thought about?
There’s a song on the album called New Wave Will Never Die that was a super quiet song when I first put it together, and now it’s a very pop, full‑production song. It’s always funny when songs start quiet and end up poppy, maybe that’s not that uncommon for us. This album is pretty freewheeling. John really got some amazing ideas into this one, there’s a song called Je N’en Ai Pas, which is all in French. We’ve never had a song in French before.

There are a couple of other songs I really love, and I was just curious what the story is behind those — like Wu‑Tang and They Might Be Feral.
Well, you know, both songs share something. Wu‑Tang is a really great power‑pop song, and it’s really unrelated to its subject matter, which is the Wu‑Tang Clan. I think most people would be surprised that there would be a song about the Wu‑Tang Clan that isn’t a rap song. It’s really about being a fan, that ecstatic joy you feel when you love a band, or love a song, or love a thing. Fandom is just a really powerful thing. They Might Be Feral is a stranger song. It’s not about us. It’s not a take on They Might Be Giants. It’s actually about… well, I don’t want to reveal too much about my personal life. It’s not about They Might Be Giants, is all I can say.

Fair enough. So what is the secret to the song writing partnership you have with John? It just seems to be enduring, you’re still on the cutting edge of being creative and doing awesome stuff.
That’s a very flattering thing to say. We have a perfectly great rapport as friends, but there’s also a healthy amount of collaboration, we still do a lot of things together. It’s not set up to be a competition, but if either of us is getting a lot of work done, it sparks the other to pick up the slack in a healthy way. If you go into a session and one person has four new songs and the other only has one, you just kind of know, I better hold up my end of the bargain and have more stuff for the next session. It’s a healthy relationship. Wherever there’s a bit of rivalry, it doesn’t get mean‑spirited.

Are you able to listen to the album with headphones on like a fan would?
Oh, I listen to the album with headphones on trying to figure out if there’s any distortion or anything, I’m listening to it like I’m listening to a Steely Dan record. It’s complicated, because sometimes there is distortion on it, and that drives me out of my mind. But I don’t feel like I have enough distance on any of our stuff to listen to it like a fan would. When I listen to our earliest records, I meditate on how much technology has changed, those records were made with very early drum machines, and the limitations are pretty apparent.

Is the whole AI thing a good thing or a bad thing, especially when you start talking about creating new music?
I mean, people hate AI. It seems like the world hates AI so much. I’m not particularly interested in it myself. It’s such a weird thing right now, everybody laughs about pictures of people with six fingers and this incredibly mediocre stuff that exists. There are AI bands on Spotify that are really annoying. I don’t know, it’s just not my thing. I find AI tedious. I don’t feel like it’s very important. I just don’t find it fascinating. It seems trivial.

Are there plans to tour this album and possibly even Australia at some point, once the chaos settles down?
Yeah, well, we had a great run last time we were in Australia, and I would love to come back.
I feel like we got in front of so many people last time, it was really a joy. It would be a blast to come back.

Musically, I know the album has only just come out, but do you start automatically thinking about what’s the next challenge for yourself?
Well, we’ve got so much on our plate right now just doing this. I’m doing so many interviews I feel like I’m making stuff up now. So yeah, this is what we’re doing. We’ve got a couple dozen shows right in front of us, and we’re getting our show back together, that’s the big challenge right now. We’ve got to learn how to play all these songs.

Interview By Rob Lyon

The World Is To Dig is out now and available HERE…