August 29, 2008

Flans in New York Times, new Theynow

Time to wrap up this week's links. Sunday started off with plenty of action as John Flansburgh appeared in print in The New York Times. In the article, Flans lists five music acts he'd play for his kids. If you didn't pick up that paper, TMBG's MySpace and website blogs both posted pointing out that it's available online as well.

Sunday also brought about another installment of Theynow. This latest episode brings us a TMBG cover and some other songs you're likely to enjoy as well.

Finally this week, Flansburgh posts on their "Rent Party" stand in NYC. They'll be playing the last Saturday of every month at Le Poisson Rouge starting next month. If you can't make it to any of those, a MySpace post lists upcoming shows elsewhere including a free kids show in Minnesota.

August 22, 2008

Here Comes Science named as next children's album

In this week's online wrap up we have an interview with John Flansburgh. The Super Cool Stuff Show podcast asked John some questions (about six minutes in) and got some news with his answers.


Back in January, John Linnell made known their idea to make a DVD about science for kids. Flansburgh confirms this and that Here Comes Science will be their next album with the possibility of an EP showing up before the next non-kids album.

Other interesting points of the discussion include the show that reminds Flans of childhood memories and that they are involved in writing a song for the World of Warcraft community. The beefy parts of the interview are transcribed at Blogcritics.

August 15, 2008

New Coraline song preview


This Might Be a Wiki seems to have the news this week. Yesterday, WBWC 88.3FM in Cleveland, Ohio, and streamed via their website, held a They Might Be Giants marathon. It was 18 hours of TMBG filled with great songs and what seemed like dozens of user requests. Don't expect this one to be archived folks.

CMJ has announced several of the bands set to play in the CMJ Music Marathon and They Might Be Giants are included. Scheduled for late October, you can find the full list of announced bands on the marathon's website.

Lastly for the week, Neil Gaiman has been posting updates on his journal telling of IGN's Coraline previews. Yesterday's video has a snippet of a song, sung by Linnell, about halfway through. This is the first we've heard of the Coraline songs and if it's a glimpse of what's to come we're in for a treat in the soundtrack department.

August 8, 2008

Audience appreciation shows this weekend

You may have heard that the Disney Music Block Party Tour has canceled several shows, but They Might Be Giants' dates seem to have been unaffected. Their scheduled shows in New Jersey and Maryland have already taken place and their final run of late August shows in New York seem to be the only concerts remaining from the event.

In other show news, TMBG has a MySpace blog/bulletin out telling us that Saturday and Sunday's audience appreciation shows will have "selections from" Factory Showroom and Apollo 18, respectively. "Selections from" doesn't exactly mean "album shows," but I would expect them to focus on that night's album with more than the usual songs from it.

If you can't make it to this weekend's shows, see if they are playing another show near you sometime this fall or pick up a live show from TMBG's download site.

August 1, 2008

"Davy Crockett" hits the internet

I've just a couple of links from the past week or so here today. With "The Ballad of Davy Crockett (In Outer Space)" video released last week, both the tmbg.com blog and the band's MySpace blog are pointing out that the video is available for easy, embeddable viewing on YouTube.

If you like the video, you may want to check out the "making of" post from Tiny Inventions' (creators of the video, along with illustrator and frequent TMBG collaborator David Cowles) blog. The post describes some of the methods used to create the video and includes lots of interesting pictures and videos.

Finally, we have an article from the Asbury Park Press speaking to some of the Disney Block Party acts including They Might Be Giants. John Flansburgh describes what it's like to play for children who might not recognize they're at a concert and tells what he's learned from audiences.