Brooklyn’s alternative rock pioneers They Might Be Giants’ barn-storming live act returns with a brand new show. Spirits will be high as the band celebrates the release of their brand new 18-song album Join Us and their 30th year of uninterrupted rocking. As always, They Might Be Giants’ boundless energy and arresting melodies will engage all. Tickets are $30 general, $30 Senior/Child and $20 HSU students. Tickets are available at the University Ticket Office and at humboldt.edu/centerarts.
They Might Be Giants’ began as a key part of the early ’80s explosion of visual art, music, and performance art that put New York’s East Village on the cultural map. But while most cutting-edge rock at the time was bruising and nihilistic, the two Johns were making Dadaist, truly post-modern pop, forming a branch of underground music whose membership consisted entirely of themselves. “We’re fully aware of the musical worlds both to the left of us and to the right of us — we’ve heard avant garde music, we’ve heard popular music,” says Flansburgh. “That’s given us the notion that we can be as original as we can be and still make worthwhile songs.”
In 1990, They Might Be Giants created some of their greatest work just as alternative rock was cresting — and went platinum with the classic Flood. In the ensuing 20 years, they’ve become a beloved and fully diversified institution, conquering all media throughout the known universe, contributing to film and TV soundtracks, making hit DVDs, winning two Grammy awards, becoming Musical Ambassadors for International Space Year, appearing as cartoon characters, writing music for a robot ballet, topping the iTunes podcast charts, and being the subject of the acclaimed documentary Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns. And now they release the very aptly titled Join Us.
Join Us is a great leap forward for They Might Be Giants — in part because in several ways, it’s a “get back” record. On their previous album, 2007’s The Else, the two Johns worked with producers the Dust Brothers (Beck, Beastie Boys); this time, they produced themselves, along with (very) long-time co-conspirator Pat Dillett, and took a new approach that was actually an old approach. If The Else was a self-consciously rock record, this one strives to be unself-conscious. “We got back to our beginners’ mind about how ugly it could be, how strange it could be,” says Flansburgh. “We’re flying our freak flag super high on this one.”
They Might Be Giants both recall and reinvent pop songwriting; they’re in a league with modern masters like Elvis Costello, Sparks and XTC, echoes of whom you can hear in Join Us. As Flansburgh notes, “We’re rock people — we grew up in this hypnotizing moment when there was nothing more persuasive than popular song. It was so good, it stole the minds of an entire generation.”
Opening the show is singer songwriter and web guru Jonathan Coulton. In 2005 Jonathan dropped out of a perfectly good software career to write music on the internet. He embarked upon a bold experiment called Thing a Week, in which he home-recorded and released a new song every week for an entire year, giving them all away for free. Even he thought he was crazy. But while a struggling music industry fell to pieces over filesharing and shifting business models, Jonathan Coulton quietly and independently amassed a small army of techies, nerds, and dedicated superfans who buy his music even though they don’t have to.
For more information and credit card orders, call CenterArts at 826-3928 or at humboldt.edu/centerarts.