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Album

Lincoln

They Might Be Giants

About “Lincoln”

Lincoln is They Might Be Giants' second studio record.

The record is named after the Johns' hometown, Lincoln, Mass.

“Lincoln” Q&A

  • What has the band said about this album?

    In 2015, Flansburgh and Linnell spoke to Spin about their albums to that point. Here’s what they said about this album:

    Linnell:

    Lincoln to me doesn’t seem like that big of leap from the first album. When we had to write another album, we obviously didn’t have, like, five years to write Lincoln. So it seems we were really quick in writing songs back then. We had more of a plan. We bought the Alesis HR-16 —

    Flansburgh:

    — Our entire earlier career would be a delineated by the development of drum machines.

    Linnell:

    Yeah, it had just come out. It was very cheap.

    Flansburgh:

    Chris Butler [of the Waitresses] said, “You should wait to make your record because there’s a new drum machine that’s coming on the market.”

    Linnell:

    The early drum machines had a lot of circuits that just played, like, a sine wave. This new Yamaha was actually using samples so this was kind of a major advance.

    Flansburgh:

    I feel like our second album was very much like a lot of bands’ second album experience, what you read about people doing. It came much faster.

    Linnell:

    By that time, we had quit our day jobs so I’m pretty sure we had more time.

    Flansburgh:

    But we were also touring really relentlessly in this almost brutal way. I think we realized in that ’88, ’89 moment that it was a bit of a creative challenge to figure out how we wanted to remake our show and present ourselves. By the time we got to Elektra, we had already sort of shook off the kind of potential Carrot Top-ness of what we were doing and came up with this sort of unspoken rule about the stuff we would do in the show, that everything would be music-based. If we had one stage setup that had multiple metronomes, they were music-making devices, they weren’t props. So we did kind of evolve out of the New York scene into the national scene as a musical act rather than performance art.

    You mentioned that the songs were coming really fast. How long did the quickest song take to write?

    Flansburgh:

    I remember “Snowball in Hell” was written so fast that I couldn’t find the original piece of paper that the song was actually written on. I actually found it a couple years later and it has completely different words that are slightly better. [Laughs.]

What is the most popular song on Lincoln by They Might Be Giants?
When did They Might Be Giants release Lincoln?

Album Credits

Album Credits

More They Might Be Giants albums