The Apartment
In 1981 I was sharing an apartment on the Lower East Side of NYC with the drummer of a band called The Mundanes. Thanks to my roommate’s go at being a professional musician, people like David Hemming (Pat Travers and Ozzy Osbourne’s manager) and Mick Ronson passed through my orbit. It was around that same time that John Linnell left The Mundanes to start They Might Be Giants. I can’t say with certainty John passed through my orbit at that time, but I like to think that one day in the past, he was sitting on my living room couch, spitting out puns and hilarious quips. I’ll never know, though. I hadn’t given John’s endeavors too much thought until many years later, when my young daughter started singing “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” that I made a connection. And, these many years after that, I was even more pleasantly surprised when Spotify mixed their latest release into my stream.
Two Johns, No Plan
Linnell and John Flansburgh had been writing songs together since high school in Lincoln, Massachusetts, but it wasn’t until 1981, both freshly relocated to New York, that they actually started a band. Their first show was a Sandinista rally in Central Park, and they performed under a Spanish name because most of the crowd didn’t speak English. Soon after, they settled on “They Might Be Giants” — borrowed from a 1971 George C. Scott film, itself named for the moment in Don Quixote when a delusional knight mistakes windmills for giants. Forty-some years later, neither John has fully explained what the name means to them, which feels about right for a band whose songs include a love ballad sung from the perspective of a nightlight.
Genre Roulette, By Design
The two Johns played the East Village’s Pyramid Club as a duo — accordion, guitar, and a drum machine standing in for a rhythm section — building a cult following on wordplay and a refusal to sound like anyone else. When Linnell broke his wrist in 1983 and Flansburgh’s apartment got robbed, they started recording songs onto an answering machine and advertising the number in the Village Voice. They called it Dial-A-Song, and it ran, in one form or another, for over two decades. Their 1990 major-label breakthrough, Flood, went platinum on the strength of “Birdhouse in Your Soul” — a top-ten modern rock hit narrated by a nightlight — and proved a band this odd could still fill rooms. Odder still: they’d go on to win two Grammys, one for the Malcolm in the Middle theme “Boss of Me,” the other for a children’s album, having somehow built parallel careers as college-rock heroes and kids’-music Grammy winners without ever losing the thread between them.
Still At It
They Might Be Giants are, remarkably, still touring and still recording more than 40 years after that Sandinista rally — their 2026 album, The World Is to Dig, is out now. Its lead single, “Wu-Tang,” is exactly the kind of joke only this band would commit to fully: a sweetly nostalgic, ’60s-pop tribute to the Wu-Tang Clan that never once references their actual sound. Linnell has said the idea started years earlier as a Tin Pan Alley song extolling the greatness of heavy metal. Same impulse, different target — four decades on, they’re still doing the bit.
Few bands built on this much sustained weirdness get to have a fifth decade. Nobody could have called it in 1981 — not the two Johns busking their way into a scene, and certainly not the guy in the Lower East Side apartment, wondering, all these years later, whether one of the funniest songwriters of his generation ever sat on his couch.
A curated pick by Planet Mars Music Editorial Staff and crafted with the help of AI