They Might Be Giants 'Here Come the 123s' album

Kids! Parents! Prepare to be delighted as They Might Be Giants triumphantly return to the world of kids stuff with their new CD & DVD set "Here Come the 123s." The album includes two dozen instantly memorable songs direct from the imaginations of John Flansburgh and John Linnell. Replete with TMBG's notoriously engaging melodies and energized arrangements, even including a production collaboration with the Dust Bros. on the track "Seven," "Here Come the 123s" is destined to become another kids' classic from Brooklyn's GRAMMY® -winning duo.

The story of TMBG's music for kids
In a singular career, perhaps no turn has been more unlikely than They Might Be Giants' emergence as one of America's most successful creators of children's music. Leading the charge of what is now a full-blown movement of creative musicians looking to save tots (and parents!) from the shrinking world of mainstream children's music, TMBG's kids' projects have become the gold standard of the industry.

The alternative rock legends entered the world of kids' stuff in 2002 with their self-styled kids album "No!" The project was immediately met with audience and critical raves, and became a unexpected commercial success. They followed up that effort with a collaboration with fine artist Marcel Dzama on the CD & picture book "Bed, Bed, Bed" (Simon and Schuster), then joined forces with Walt Disney Records for the album and DVD "Here Come the ABCs."

TMBG is already a familiar sound in many kids' daily routines. The band has created many original themes for televison including "Higglytown Heroes," "The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse," "The Oblongs," PBS Kids "Share-A-Story," along with their GRAMMY-winning theme "Boss of Me" for "Malcolm In the Middle." They have also appeared on "Blue's Clues" and "Home Movies."

but wait - there's more! TMBG and the Sims?
Yes! They Might Be Giants have just recorded music for a new edition of multi-million selling video game The Sims to be released early next year. TMBG recorded a new version of Mark Motherbaug's theme, along with a re-recordeding of their own song "Take Out the Trash". In their new version of "Trash", the lyrics are sung in Simlish, the imaginary language of the Sims.

They Might Be Giants biography
Following the resounding success of "Here Come the ABCs: Original Songs about the Alphabet," the Disney Sound/Walt Disney Records 2005 debut of They Might Be Giants, the New York duo of John Flansburgh and John Linnell have released a successor CD/DVD collection entitled "Here Come the 123s."

Crafted with the same kinetic mesh of colorful smarts and plain magic that characterized the earlier work, "Here Come the 123s" pairs tightly focused, sometimes dance-inflected pop based in folk-rock clarity with fresh animation, cool graphics, winning puppetry, and more. It assumes that kids more or less have absorbed the basic Arabic number system, then offers little and big new worlds for experiencing and contemplating them that They Might Be Giants alone can provide.

"The songs in this collection," says Flansburgh, a Massachusetts native who has worked with his childhood friend Linnel for over two decades in They Might Be Giants, a band in post-punk Manhattan that has survived and prospered over the decades with an idiosyncratic intelligence like none other, "express how many ideas you can use numbers to generate. It's all about sparking kids' imaginations. It's pretty powerful stuff for us, as songwriters, an open invitation to get your ideas going."

These ideas, though, float through "Here Come the ABCs" with the pleasure and seeming effortlessness of beach weather. "The dirty little secret of it," Linnell says, "is that it's primarily entertainment. It sounds like it would be a lesson, this sort of remedial CD for kids. But mainly it's fun. You may not feel as though you're being taught anything when you're watching it."

And "watching it," for all the memorability of the music, represents a major part of "Here Comes the 123s." As with the earlier collection, They Might Be Giants worked on this project with a wide array of young U.S.-based animators who form a growing movement of known as 'motion graphics'. Often inspired by the acute Japanese-sired style of tremendous visual focus and clarity encountered in much contemporary art and cartooning and fabrication, these artists working on computers in their small animation shops offer a fluid independence of style. "They're not amateur," Flansburgh says, "but they represent an exploding creativity somewhere beyond routine movie studios or video production companies. These are people, I believe, who twenty years ago would have been making low-budget rock videos."

They bolster songs about numbers that please as they instruct. As awesome as the animation is these tunes about sixes and nines masquerading as one another, about the kick of knowing how to add, about monkeys that come by the dozens, about sevens that stage home and dessert take-overs would never fly so high without the melodic light and rhythmic pluck of the music; the funky "Seven," a definite highlight, was produced by The Dust Brothers, with whom They Might Be Giants worked on "The Else," their current adult album.

"When we do these recordings," Flansburgh says, "the rhythms are as full-blown as they are on our rock albums. We can't control the volume knob, of course, but these records are for active listening. They're good for kids who are into dancing and into being physical."

The spoon-fed, on 'Here Comes the 123s," goes right out the window.

They Might Be Giants interview
Q: Did you ever think you would work with children's music?

LINNELL: No. But in many ways, our entire career has been a series of surprises. We backed into this world. We began our first one as a side project while we doing other stuff, booked solid in the studio completing a lot of commercial work we were finishing at the time. The notion was this would be low-key and not a big money-loser. We wound up having a really fun time making the children's album.

FLANSBURGH: We thought it would be not that different to making a Christmas album, something available and on the side. We started just as 'Gigantic', the documentary about They Might Be Giants, and our box set on Rhino were coming out. It was our 20th year, and there were a lot of things that just seemed like the band was finally established as a stand-alone entity. And we were working on instrumental music for 'Malcolm in the Middle', as well as a regular new rock album.

LINNELL: We had no plan, really. We were just trying to be amusing and apply the same high standards of interestingness -- of kids' psychedelia -- that we do to our adult material. And when the record came out, it became a huge hit. It surpassed everyone's expectations.

FLANSBURGH: That brought the attention of Walt Disney Records, who are the big cahuna in children's recording. We were offered a singular deal from them with full creative control. That's something that we've always operated with and never thought twice about. But we knew that this would be mass-marketed, so it was especially important to us. Two albums into it, it's been a lovefest, totally smooth sailing.

Q: Did you begin working on children's music with a particular set of ideas about the field?

LINNELL: We had a set of ideas about what we didn't want to do; we didn't want to tell kids how to behave. Frankly -- and this sounds weird in light of where we wound up -- we didn't really want to write songs that were educational. We wanted to write songs that were purely entertainment.

FLANSBURGH: The challenge of writing a good song is a set goal, whether in adult or children's music. I have to wonder if the secret of our success in the children's market isn't that we approach our work there as a full-on creative enterprise. A lot of times, kids are offered a lot of songs about brushing your teeth that, for some reason, sound kind of under-inspired.

Q: Did you have particular inspirations, from children's music past or present?

LINNELL: Clearly, 'Sesame Street' got there first with a lot of this kind of material, and one of the things that was so appealing about that series was the huge variety of media and styles employed, which made things less monotonous. It featured the repetition of letters and numbers, however presented it as not deadly boring. And then earlier there was Dr. Seuss.

FLANSBURGH: Yeah, we relate to Dr. Seuss. In general, I relate more to children's book authors than to the contemporary kid's music scene; the authors seem more invested in a point of view.

Q: What is it about Dr. Seuss? As children's lit goes, that was sort of punk rock, no?

FLANSBURGH: Well, 'The Cat in the Hat" parallels Johnny Rotten as role model

LINNELL: All kids are different and gravitate to different things, but there seems to be a general interest in absurdity and nonsense among young children. Maybe it's because they're trying to work out what sense is, trying to make sense of everything, so nonsense is a great contrast. Once they recognize nonsense, then the world of sense is more delineated for them, possibly.

Q: Something like "Hop on Pop" -- that' was pretty pogo, right?

FLANSBURGH: Linnell was really into pogo as a kid, as well as 'The Pogo Songbook'. We actually, as They Might Be Giants early on, covered a pogo song. But also, on a less frenetic note, I grew up in the shadow of the Cambridge folk music scene, a really child-friendly place. My dad had an architectural firm in Harvard Square, and all that stuff was right downstairs, right across the street. It was intimate and quiet, and many couples and families were around -- organic, low-key, with these really vivid children's songs like "Froggy Went A'Courtin'" and "Rock Island Line" performed frequently. These have become standards of children's music.

Q: How much bleed is there between your adult repertoire and your children's music?

LINNELL: I think we're applying to children's music the same sensibility that we've had all along. Adults have been playing their adult music for their kids for years and years. That was something we were alerted to for a long while, before we started making these kids' records, that people thought we were appropriate music to play for kids. Although maybe what they thought was that, unlike a lot of their other records, ours weren't inappropriate.

FLANSBURGH: Yet the most surprising thing for us as songwriters is how little interest we have in making the kid's stuff work on an adult level. Often, when people hear we're doing children's music, they think there's going to be this knowing wink…

LINNELL: When in fact, none of it has to be clever. That's the great thing: We're rescued here from being too clever.

FLANSBURGH: In our adult work we have used children's song in essentially a camp way -- or just used the sounds and language in a way that speaks to people who grew up with television and the sort of plastic qualities, if you will, of kids' stuff. And there is some kind of commentary there, to be sure. But when we work in children's music proper I think we're very aware of what a precious place childhood experience is. We feel it's a privilege potentially to have your music be part of somebody's childhood development. This is our most sincere effort. The fact is, writing for kids is a joy.

Q: In the fourteenth century, kids were taken to be little adults, just less physically developed. We've come way off that view, but maybe sometimes kids aren't given enough intellectual credit?

LINNELL: They're often not given a choice about what kids of records and DVDs they get. The expectation is that it has to be all medicine. They're not really afforded the same choice of just being entertained that adults would give themselves. My sense is that kids are just as tuned in about the truth of what they're offered as adults are. They can tell when they're being talked down to. They prefer their entertainment straight-up.

FLANSBURGH: Well, yeah, the projects we've done -- 'Here Come the ABCs' and this new 'Here come the 123s', both of them -- have a veneer of the good-for-you. They have the veneer of nutrition, but essentially they're just good times.

*****
They Might Be Giants - song by song

Zeros

This song isn't just about the famous number Zero, but zeros in other bigger and smaller numbers too. And you can dance to it! The girl's voice is Hannah Levine, the 11-year-old niece of TMBG trombonist Dan Levine. She sings the lead on 'One Dozen Moneys' as well.

One Everything

This is a bit of a headful for the youngsters, invoking the unity of the omniverse as it does. The idea, like the omniverse, begins simply and expands infinitely.

The Number Two

Here's a song about parents and kids. The video features the Deeply Felt Puppet Theater, and was directed by artist David Cowles, who has collaborated on a number of the videos on the DVD.

Triops Has Three Eyes

There really is a little fish-like creature called a triops that has three eyes. You can buy them at the gift shop in any self-respecting science museum.

Apartment Four

When we were kids there was this kind of music for preteens called bubblegum. This is kind of like bubblegum for even younger kids.

High Five!

The tune is a celebration of friendship, of the simple joy of this universal gesture.

The Secret Life of Six

This concerns the numbers six and nine, and how when they stand on their head they can pretend to be older or younger, respectively. Hine, a Japanese visual artist, created the amazing animation.

Seven

The song tells story of the menace of the number seven, which will come over to your house and eat all the cake in your fridge. Produced by those LA rock-and-rhythm legends The Dust Bros.

Seven Days of the Week (I Never Go To Work)

This is a traditional song that has been amped up for today's kids. Mark Pender from the Conan show provides the swingin' trumpet sounds.

Figure Eight

The Brothers Chaps, who are responsible for the enormously popular Homestarrunner.com website, did the animation for this ice-skating song.

Pirate Girls Nine

Here we tell the famous story of the legendary pirates. Parrots tattoos, etc. Hi-jinks ensue.

Nine Bowls of Soup

The song is sung by an apparently selfish and grumpy ichthyosaur (which is a marine reptile from the Mesozoic period). His mysterious behavior is explained at the end of the song.

Ten Mississippi

The Deeply Felt Puppet Theater sing this one, introducing this simple time measuring device with a memorable melody.

One Dozen Monkeys

Hannah Levine, age 11, is a featured singer here. The story is true but the names of the monkeys have been changed to protect their identities.

813 Mile Car Trip

Are young kids ready to understand 3-digit numbers? They are if they're stuck in a car for weeks and weeks.

Infinity

Every kids favorite concept!

I Can Add

This celebrates the breakthrough accomplishment of this early math hurdle. High fives everyone!

Nonagon

The song introduces kids to polygons, and it describes polygons being introduced to each other.

Ooh La! Ooh La!

This modifies the traditional rhymes from the New York City street game The Double Dutch and puts them to music.

Even Numbers

There are many ways to explain this idea. We tried out a bunch of them in this song, figuring that at least some of them might make sense.

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They Might Be Giants - Here Come the 123s