Alternaparenting site Offsprung interviews John Flansburgh from They Might Be Giants about the band's new new CD/DVD set, Here Come the 123s (out now on Disney Sound). Flansburgh reveals some of his musical inspirations as well as some of the nuts and bolts of creating kids' music in the shadow of the Man the Mouse:
Playhouse Disney decided it couldn't really afford to broadcast interstitial songs - that's the show biz term for songs between their TV shows - for much more than a minute and a half. That interstitial exposure is a big part of what makes folks aware of these discs, so it's important that the stuff work on the Disney Channel. It kind of fell to us to restructure the videos for broadcast to either fit the new length, or live with the longer songs getting edited down in some blunt way. So, to really just make it easy on ourselves, and to make sure the songs being broadcast would have the right structure, we just started writing all the new songs shorter. Of course writing short songs was pretty natural for us...
My question is: Isn't the whole idea of a TMBG children's album a bit redundant? Why not just let your kids listen to Lincoln and Flood? They'll love it.
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Hey Jake,
Zero and days of the week is my favorite video. "On Monday, I didn't go to work. On Tuesday, I stayed at home....."
Hope things are well for you and the fam.