“We kind of just cycle them around,” Flansburgh told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay from his weekend house in New York’s Catskill Mountains. “We currently have 80 songs actively in the show, and we probably just added another half dozen for this leg.”
On the side, Flansburgh—who once went to a record store to get Sparks’ Propaganda on its release day—is also working on the long-awaited project of issuing the band’s entire discography on vinyl. Long Tall Weekend, which was initially released exclusively in digital format back in the ’90s was one of the first ones to go out, but some of the CD-era releases are proving to be difficult, largely due to much of the original album artwork being lost to the ages.
“A lot of the art has been lost. Sometimes, overseas record companies have the art, and it’s a lot of finagling to pull it together,” he added.
The 64-year-old maintains a pretty impressive vinyl collection himself, which he admitted has changed over the years thanks to moves and burglaries.
But Flansburgh still holds streaming services and CDs very close, and doesn’t have the ideology of “you don’t own the album if you don’t have it on vinyl.”
“I’m very happy to have Spotify, and be able to draw on that all the time. That’s very satisfying to me,” he added.
No matter what your format is though, you’ll probably see at least some wax for sale when John and John return to Jannus Live for the first time in two years, when they celebrated 33 years of their breakthrough album Flood.
Read our full Q&A with John Flansburgh below.
Thanks for doing this with me today, John. Are you in Brooklyn right now?
No, I’m in the Castle Mountains. I’ve got a weekender place here, and I do a lot of work up here, just as a way to get away. I can’t really make noise in my apartment in New York, so this is like a useful workspace for me.
Still cool.
Hey, I can’t believe I’m doing Creative Loafing!
Oh, you’re familiar with us?
Oh, sure. Are you kidding me?! Creative Loafing’s been around forever, yeah,
Yep. Pretty sure we’re going on 40 years soon.
Yeah, I think some of our earliest interviews were with Creative Loafing. I probably have some of the same answers prepared for you today.
Well, I hope not, but if you do, so be it.
*chuckles* Absolutely.
So, this “Big” tour is being described as a run of shows that will celebrate all corners of Giants’ career, while also having a different album in the spotlight every night. What do you think the decision making process is going to look like for each album? Like, are you and [John] Linnell gonna draw straws every show morning?
Yeah, right now, we’ve got three albums in rotation, and I guess we’re about to have a fourth, once we get enough songs in the repertoire. Even just to do the spotlight stuff, we currently have 80 songs actively in the show, and we probably just added another half dozen for this leg. So there are just a lot of new songs and old songs coming into the show. And to speak to how it gets selected, we kind of just cycle them around. I mean, we’ll do a Mink Car show one night, we’ll do a John Henry show the next night, and then Apollo 18 the next night, and just try to keep it as different as possible for the people who are coming back, as well as ourselves.
I mean, to be perfectly honest, it’s really fun to put on a different show every night. Like, to have this amount of material under our belts, and—I can sort of relate to why people like doing Repertory Theater, because once you sort of have the muscle memory of doing a song, and you’re well-rehearsed, you can do more than one show. It’s possible to do more than one show, and being stuck to the same setlist night after night is one of the very real traps of live performance.
Oh, absolutely. Which reminds me: The last time you were in St. Pete, two years ago, you guys were celebrating 30 years of Flood, and of course, a pivotal part of that evening was the whole “Stellub” portion. Can we expect any shenanigans like that on this run of shows?
Well, like a good card trick, I think we’ll be keeping the “Stellub” portion of the show in the mix. It makes a great set one closer, set two opener. Now that it’s kind of established—just to explain to people—we learned one of our songs from Flood, the song “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love” backwards. We learned how to play it sonically in reverse. We perform it, videotape it, and then flip the videotape to play at the beginning of a second set.
And that is a really singular kind of thing. I mean, I’ve never seen anybody do anything even close to what we’re doing in the show! So it still feels like it’s got a lot of juice in it. A lot of people have never seen our show before, and that’s the part that really blows them away. As we say from the stage, we challenge other legacy acts to follow our lead. We want to see other people learning and memorizing songs sonically in reverse. I think it’d be worthwhile.
What made “Bullets” the best song to learn backwards, anyway? Because I think you guys started doing that right before COVID hit.
Well, there were a few things that recommended it. First of all, it’s short, so it wouldn’t be too much of an endurance test for the audience or the band. But also, it’s really percussive, and percussive sounds are easier to reproduce in reverse. Sounds don’t translate the same way when you reverse them – sometimes, held notes just sound sort of disoriented, so having something that sort of percolates, like “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love” was a good vehicle for the idea.
Right on. So I did want to talk about your history a little bit. You’re, obviously, you’re part of the left-handed guitarist club, but when Giants started, and correct me if I’m wrong, left-handed guitars weren’t as common as they may be. You had McCartney, Hendrix, Dick Dale and maybe a handful of others, but anyway, was your first guitar actually prebuilt for lefties, or did you have to flip the strings like Hendrix did?
Oh no, I always had right-handed guitars until the late ‘80s. And the people you’re referencing, Dick Dale, Jimi Hendrix, and Paul McCartney? They played right-handed instruments a lot. Lefty instruments, I guess there were some built custom, but there were definitely very few factory-built lefties. I have a Japanese lefty Telecaster that was built in like, 1986, ’87, and that might have been early, early days for mass quantities of lefty guitars, and it’s a great instrument. I’m really grateful I still have it. I actually got a second one, because the first one got totally demolished on the road.
Aw.
Well, it was my fault. I knew what I was doing.
Okay, fair enough.
Yeah. I didn’t smash it. I think I probably did like, 500 shows with it, and it got so thrashed from the shenanigans I was doing with it. So…it had to go to a farm.
Haha, a farm in upstate New York where all of our dead instruments are.
Yes, exactly.
Do you still own any albums from your youth? Because I heard you bought Propaganda by Sparks on release day.
Yeah, I owned a ton of albums. I mean, I have a record collection. I’ve even got a storage space so my house isn’t overwhelmed by record albums. But compared to a lot of people, I think it’s probably a pretty modest collection. Like, if you do it by feet…I’m staring at it right now *counts* I probably have like, 30 feet of records, which is not a lot, I don’t think. It’s not huge, but when I was in college, I actually lost almost everything I owned. My apartment was burglarized, and so this is my third set of records. I don’t know what records I have from my childhood. They’d only be the ones that I left at my parents house when I moved out. There were just a few of those. I think I have The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night soundtrack, but the Sparks album, I had to buy again.
Well, at least you got most of them back in one way or another.
Yeah, it’s like, I’m not a collector of record albums in the sense of “I have to own things that I’m thinking about.” I’m very happy to have Spotify, and be able to draw on that all the time. That’s very satisfying to me. But, there are a lot of obscure albums that I just enjoy digging into. And as a music listener, I tend to be kind of obsessed about specific things, in terms of listening to the same thing over and over again.
Sure. And you mentioned how you don’t really have much of a preferred format, but it leads me into my next question. I’ve heard that you’re at the helm of trying to finally get Giants’ entire discography out onto vinyl. How is that journey going for you?
Well, it’s a funny task, because the early albums that were on vinyl are the easiest ones to reproduce, because all the artwork exists in the vinyl format. But getting stuff that only came out on CD, finding ways to get the artwork scaled up can be a chore. A lot of people don’t have their film, the various record companies we’ve worked with. I always wanted to get copies of things and dukes of things so I could just have a little file of it. And you know, when you’re a younger person, especially if you’re somebody in a band, you kind of get infantilized a little bit, in that people treat you like you’re a baby, and that can feel nice, in that you’re being taken care of.
But there’s this other aspect to it, where you’re suspicious that they’re not quite as responsible as they seem. I’m so grateful that I saved so many things from back then, because having to reproduce all this stuff, a lot of it just came right out of my attic. The CDs are harder because they just don’t have full-size art, and we don’t have the original art. A lot of the art has been lost. Sometimes, overseas record companies have the art, and it’s a lot of finagling to pull it together.
Gotcha. I know running out time here, so I got a few more for you. You mentioned Mink Car earlier. A great record for sure, but considering its unfortunate release date [September 11, 2001], do you guys see that album in a different light than, say, the week before 9/11?
The thing about having a long career is that you do see the bumps in the road. You live your life around the work that you’re doing, and all sorts of things happen that are public, and all sorts of things happen that are private that kind of shade how you feel about various things, various work that you might have done. I think the thing that was frustrating about Mink Car professionally is that we had worked so hard on it to try and create something that would be commercially viable and like…listen, we’re an unlikely band. We’re not like a natural fit on the radio, a natural fit in the popular culture, and we’re just as aware of that as anybody, and I think with Mink Car, we were trying to…our career is very odd in a way, because we have had a lot of commercial success, a lot more commercial success than a band like us would typically have, with our sensibility, our sense of humor and the musicality of what we’re doing.
I think it’s very much a take it or leave it thing, and that’s not the kind of music that necessarily ends up on the top of the charts. So I think, with Mink Car, we were trying to make an interesting album, but we were also trying to make songs that would be interesting to hear on the radio. A song like, “Man, It’s So Loud In Here” that’s very much a piece of electronica that is like, if you like electronica, you can enjoy that song just on its own terms. And there are other tracks on the record like that, you know, like “Cyclops Rock.” It’s a very rockin’ song…I don’t know. It’s like we were kind of swinging from the rafters with that one, and I think it was frustrating to have the rug pulled out of it right on that day. But it was a crummy day for everybody, so…
Last question for you, and I’ll let you go. I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about the album that you and Linnell are currently working on. Is there anything new you can tell us about it?
We are essentially done, unless we’re not. It doesn’t have a firm release date, and it doesn’t have a cover. I can tell you both of those things are happening, but you know, maybe there’ll be some last-minute adjustments. It’ll be out sometime relatively soon, and it’s a very strong record. I’m into it. But again, you know, only time will tell. There’s a song with strings, and there’s a bunch of songs with horns. It’s like a big production.
Awesome. Can’t wait to hear it.
Well, great. Thanks so much.
Yeah, of course. And thanks again for doing this with me, John. Stay warm up there, and when you get down to St. Pete, let me know if you want to go record shopping together.
Oh, you know, my mom lives in the area, so I got a lot of hanging out with my mom to do. I got family time.
It’s the important stuff.
It is, but thanks for the invite! What’s the record store to check out? I will be puttering around downtown, so what’s the spot?
If you’re going to be downtown, there’s one closeby called Bananas Music. Well, there are two locations: One’s a warehouse with just vinyl, and one’s a retail store with CDs and such as well. Then, there’s another spot called Daddy Kool Records, which is similar to the vibe of that retail store. There’s vinyl, but also CDs, DVDs, books…it’s fun.
Well, I’ll check it out… Bananas. Alright, cool. Well hey, thank you for your time. Cheers!
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
UPDATED 02/24/25 1:37 p.m. Updated to note that Flansburgh was in the Catskills.
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