They Might Be Giants

They Might Be Giants are two Johns from Brooklyn, Flansburgh and Linnell, who started the band in 1982 and spent years playing as a duo with a tape machine or a drum machine standing in for everybody else. Flansburgh sang and played guitar; Linnell sang and played just about anything else. The songs were brainy, catchy and slyly satirical, the kind of thing a college radio DJ plays twice in a row just to make sure it really happened.

The self-titled debut arrived in 1986, the year of the lopsided, grinning "Don't Let's Start"; Lincoln followed in 1988, the same year as the jittery, hyper-literate "Ana Ng". Their records have come out on labels from Bar/None to Elektra. Flood, in 1990, turned the cult into a crowd and went platinum, and that year also brought "Birdhouse in Your Soul", a fizzy pop confection, the madcap sprint of "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" and the cartoon brawl of "Particle Man". Apollo 18 kept the whimsy coming in 1992.

In 1992 the duo became a real band, with Tony Maimone on bass and, from 1993, Brian Doherty on drums. The lineup kept evolving: Dan Miller on guitar, Danny Weinkauf on bass, Marty Beller on drums, and a horn section with Dan Levine on trombone.

From there they found a whole second career. Their theme for Malcolm in the Middle, "Boss of Me", won a Grammy in 2002, and their children's records, Here Come the ABCs, Here Come the 123s and Here Comes Science, all went gold, with Here Come the 123s taking a Grammy of its own in 2009. Flansburgh and Linnell even landed a Tony nomination for a song in SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical. They're still making albums, still smart, still strange.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.