TMBG Sing the ABC's

They Might Be Giants head to the land of painting penguins and flying letter V's in two weeks, when they issue the CD/DVD Here Come the ABC's!, the band's second effort aimed squarely at youngsters.

Disney Sound/Walt Disney Records will release the follow-up to the band's acclaimed 2002 children's effort, No!, on February 15th. This time around though, the group will add a DVD to the package (in most outlets), showcasing their alphabet songs through a host of animation, illustration and puppetry.

"Moving images seemed like such a natural thing for kids," says TMBG's John Flansburgh, who recruited artists from outlets including MTV, Pixar, Disney and his own home, thanks to his puppet-creator wife Robin Goldswasser. "There's just something exciting about seeing a video or making an extra visual effort."

Flansburgh and TMBG co-founder John Linnell began working on the project a year ago, drafting songs about the alphabet and letter formations in spelling. In creating cuts such as "The Vowel Family" and "E Eats Everything," the band used their own intuition and knowledge in drafting kid-appropriate material.

"We don't do focus groups, and we don't have educational consultants," Flansburgh says. "I'm sure an educator will look at it and say this is a slightly uninformed effort, but it's really as much to entertain kids directly as anything else. When I was in my twenties, I actually worked in educational stuff for kids. The main thing I picked up was that, as an industry, it's incredibly mediocre. People are more afraid of being wrong than they are of being lame. The fact that there's some stuff that will be over certain kids' heads is not a crisis. Our only mission statement is to really spark kids' imaginations and entertain them in an immediate way."

TMBG are currently planning just one live concert featuring this new material -- next July, in New York City. Though they are already back focusing on their adult musical career, writing the follow up to 2004's The Spine, Flansburgh says they enjoyed their brief return to penning tunes for young people.

"The thing that's nice about doing kid stuff for us is it's completely outside of the rock culture," he says. "I don't feel like They Might Be Giants has ever been relevant or irrelevant. We've always enjoyed the status of your alternative to the general mainstream culture. Whether that's Soundgarden or Rod Stewart, if it's all too much, we're here over on the left waiting for you, and that's a nice place to be."