They Might Be Giants' "Flood": Track by Track Guide to the Geek-Chic Breakthrough

Last week, They Might Be Giants hit the road to celebrate the 20th birthday of their signature album; Flood. To mark the anniversary, Giants founders John Flansburgh and John Linnell talked to Rolling Stone about the making of the record, then prepared exclusive new liner notes for each song.

Issued the first week of 1990, Flood was a landmark release in the evolution from college rock (the awkward handle for music like R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü that dominated university radio stations in the 1980s) to the alternative movement that defined much of the 1990s. Flood is still a hallmark in geek chic's rise, too: the Giants' two previous LPs proved a skinny guy with an accordion and a partner in crime wearing black-plastic glasses could rock a party.

Lifelong friends Flansburgh (guitar, glasses) and Linnell (accordion, keyboards) performed their first show as They Might Be Giants in early 1983. Both sang and played an increasing array of instruments including guitar, clarinet, Dustbuster vacuum and xylophone. After two minimalist records made with drum machines, Flood saw the duo let loose like a riptide.

The album launches with "Theme From Flood," which plays like the soundtrack to a Technicolor movie, followed by "Birdhouse in Your Soul," a leadoff single driven by a joyous keyboard, backward snare-kick beat and pogo-worthy bassline. The rest of songs rotate through folk ("Women and Men"), manic new wave ("Lucky Ball and Chain"), inspired noise outbursts ("Hearing Aid"), and retro-pop homages that split the difference between the duo's contemporary heroes and the 1950s aesthetic that imprinted on them as they absorbed TV reruns in their youth ("Twisting").

Nine guest musicians were featured on 12 of the 19 songs. Most were soloists drawn from the Johns' friends in the NYC rock music scene, like DNA's Arto Lindsay (the noisy anti-guitar solo in "Hearing Aid"). The also brought in journeymen like veteran Latin-jazz trumpeter and Dizzie Gillespie sideman Charlie Sepulveda (the solo in "Your Racist Friend" — to the Johns' lasting regret, he's misspelled as "Spalvida" in the credits).

TMBG recorded Flood at the ultramodern Skyline Studios in the heart of NYC in fall of 1989. The Johns spent two two-thirds of their budget to lay down "Birdhouse," "Your Racist Friend," "We Want a Rock" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)."

Though the album sounds like a straightforward production, it was technically adventurous. After years using tapes and drum machines, the Johns had become entranced by a new tool: the Casio FZ-1 sampler. "The De La Soul album [3 Feet High and Rising] had just come out," says Flansburgh. "And that was a huge sonic impression left on most people making records, even though it seems very simple now." (Read De La Soul's track by track guide to 3 Feet here.)

It's hard to detect, but the sampler yielded some of Flood's key moments. The "Birdhouse" trumpet solo is sampled from a studio session by Frank London, who played the memorable trumpet-plunger hook in LL Cool J's "Going Back to Cali."

After all the studio innovation, the elementary-simple "Particle Man" became the album's iconic song. Flansburgh, the Giants' business delegate, says it was "far and away" the group's most file-shared track in the early Napster days. And it's still a perennial bestseller.

Flood's copyright says 1989, but label held its release until the first week of 1990 to keep peak sales weeks within one year's tabulations. The album broke across the world over spring 1990 as the duo toured, backed by a rock metronome and taped tracks, playing to twisting audiences who bought unusual merch like fezzes in the lobby.

"We were in a very singular place entering into the Flood situation, because we had been a successful as an independent act, on a commercial level," reflects Flansburgh. "I think we felt like we had earned our place at the table."

"There was a thing about the year 1990, when Flood came out," says Linnell. "Our manager was getting much more excited and saying 'We're blowing up, this is kind of a big deal.' But artistically, we felt like we had already got a grip on where we were at in relation to the rest of the world."