They Might Be Giants are a rock band hailing from Lincoln, Massachusetts, United States who formed in 1981. The band was formed by John Flansburgh and John Linnell and has released 17 studio albums since their debut in 1986.
Flansburgh and Linnell have the kind of back-story that could make one seriously think about whether fate or destiny had some kind of hand in it. The two met while they were teenagers in their home town of Lincoln, Massachusetts. While both of them were budding songwriters and wrote together a couple of times when they were still in high school, they didn’t form a band together and eventually went to separate colleges. This is where fate possibly comes in. Completely unknown to each other, they both decided to settle in Brooklyn, New York after finishing college, and didn’t just end up in the same neighbourhood, they ended up in the same apartment block, and moved in on the same day.
The duo started hanging out and writing together again, and soon after they regained each others acquaintance they decided to form a band together. Taking the name of a ventriloquist act that a mutual friend had used and then dropped, they called themselves They Might Be Giants, and started busking all over New York City. Flansburgh played the guitar, Linnell played the accordion or the saxophone, both of them sang and they were backed by a drum machine or a boombox playing a backing tape. Soon, their spirited live shows and esoteric songs attracted a devoted local following before they’d released their first single, which came in the form of March 1985’s flexi-disk, the “Wiggle-Diskette”.
A demo of theirs later gained a positive review in the highly respected publication People Magazine, which led to a record deal with Bar/None Records. In 1986 their self-titled debut album was released and was a huge hit around the colleges of New York City. Pressured to release a single from it to capitalise on their newfound popularity, they filmed a video for the track “Don’t Let’s Start”, which saw a massive amount of rotation on MTV. This led to the legitimate success of their second record “Lincoln” and especially the single “Ana Ng”, which hit number 11 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart. Clearly, they were not going to be a band that stayed underground for long.
The band signed a deal with Elektra Records in 1989, and one year afterwards they released “Flood”, their first record to be certified Platinum thanks to the success of its lead single “Birdhouse In Your Soul”. The single is still one of the bands most beloved songs, and was a top ten hit in the U.K and a top three hit on the Billboard Modern Rock charts as well. Ever since then the band have been one of the biggest cult bands in American Rock, always ready with the last thing anyone expects of them. To wit, their three biggest selling albums after “Flood” are three records of children’s music they did in 2005 (“Here Come The ABC’s”), 2008 (“Here Come The 123s”) and 2009 (“Here Comes Science”).
Most bands are considered unique if their singer sings in a weird accent or wears a particular kind of hat. They Might Be Giants aren’t so much unique as they are once in a lifetime, but beyond the weirdness is two of the finest songwriters of their generation, and for that, they come highly recommended.
Jack White
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