They Might Be Giants, formed from friendships and late-night record-hunting in Massachusetts, will play two original sets at Boston’s House of Blues on June 5 and 6—each night built around a different album and featuring no repeats. Ahead of the shows, John Fl
When John Flansburgh talks about the early days of They Might Be Giants, it isn’t the big career milestones that come first. It’s the paper: laying it out by hand, chopping and pasting, and finding common ground with John Linnell while their high school classmates split off into other scenes.
For Flansburgh. that overlap—cartoons. vinyl records. and the work of The Promethean student newspaper at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School—helped build a partnership that’s lasted more than 45 years. Now the band is back in Boston for two nights at House of Blues. on June 5 and 6. returning to a city that has always mattered to them.
The shows come with specific boundaries meant to make each evening feel distinct. They Might Be Giants will play Boston’s House of Blues on June 5 and 6 as part of April’s “The World Is to Dig.” Each night will feature two sets. an eight-piece band including a trio of horns. and an opening set spotlighting a different album in full each night—with no repeats between the two respective shows. Selections from “The World Is To Dig” will appear across both setlists as well.
Flansburgh said the start of the duo’s story is rooted in something ordinary, almost stubbornly hands-on. He knew Linnell when they were younger. with a detail that still lands like a joke: Linnell is a year older than him. They both worked for the high school newspaper, and Flansburgh started doing graphic design stuff for the paper. In those days. the layout required physical effort—everything was done photographically. and while some computerization existed for the output of the text. the process still meant cutting and pasting with X-Acto knives and placing photographs.
“We were like the newspaper kids,” Flansburgh said, describing how that group energy—and a shared taste for cartoons—brought them together.
Those years also placed them inside a youth culture that treated music as something you didn’t just listen to—you wrote about it. debated it. and treated it like a living map. Flansburgh recalled that the rock music subculture was heavily part of the newspaper. and that the era felt shaped by publications like Creem Magazine and Rolling Stone. He referenced a copy of Rolling Stone from 1971 or ’72. which included articles about bands such as Jefferson Airplane and about David Crosby. and he said the language around “the revolution” wasn’t metaphorical.
He remembers the local scene in the simplest way: lots of cover bands playing dances. He also pointed to a tension that showed up early for kids who were trying to get on stage—between “doing something that could get you shows” and doing something that couldn’t. In that environment. he said there was a power in having a friend with a band that was distinctly his. even if it wasn’t aimed at getting high school dance gigs.
As for the broader Massachusetts music story, Flansburgh pushed back against the idea that they were just a random success. He acknowledged Sudbury-linked history that came up in research: Sudbury was founded by an ancestor of James Taylor and family. singer-songwriter Linda Chorney attended Lincoln Sudbury. and Mike Gordon of Phish—an Elektra labelmate at the time—graduated from Lincoln-Sudbury.
Flansburgh said he’d heard a passing comment from Gordon that They Might Be Giants were “one of the only famous music acts to come out of Lincoln-Sudbury. ” but he also explained the duo’s own roots. Both Flansburgh and Linnell are from Lincoln, a much smaller town next to Sudbury. He described it as more rural than residential, with a pig farm behind their house.
There’s also the library lore—part practical memory, part obsession. Flansburgh described the Lincoln Public Library’s vinyl record collection as “only about five inches deep. ” and said almost every record he and Linnell checked out. Records were shared because they couldn’t afford everything they wanted to try. He remembered the UN charity record that carried “Across the Universe” on it a year or two before it appeared on a Beatles release. He also talked about first encountering “Why Does the Sunshine?. (The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas). ” a cover the band later recorded. through Space Songs. which was in the library collection even though they didn’t own it.
For him. the impact of that library wasn’t just what they found—it was how that habit taught them to hunt for sounds they hadn’t heard yet. “The library really performed a very practical cultural function for us. ” he said. adding that they covered songs they first heard at the library. including a song he said was “like a Ramones version of this kids song.”.
When the conversation turned to Boston concerts growing up, Flansburgh described a teenager’s scramble for access. A friend had access to fake IDs. and he said he used one when he was 16. getting his driver’s license the day he could. That meant getting to shows at The Rat in Boston—where he said he saw “a ton of shows” and even recorded performances with a cassette recorder.
He singled out a moment that later became more notorious: seeing The Cars’ second show. He had heard about it through a friend. Jimmy. who had seen The Cars at a high school the week before and told him the band was “fully formed.” Flansburgh said the band looked like themselves—“funny” in his telling because they looked like they were from New York. even in Boston.
He also described what it was like to see New Wave acts from New York at The Rat, including Mink DeVille and Robert Gordon. In his view, those bands always looked a bit different than the rest of the circuit—“dirtier,” “skinnier”—with a toughness that made The Cars’ sound feel even more mysterious.
The day-to-day habits of listening and recording eventually broadened into larger work outside the club circuit. including a project that helped make them part of an American advertising catchphrase. Flansburgh said the band is the one that can claim responsibility for popularizing the phrase “America Runs on Dunkin’.” He described that work as a “dream job” and told how the project was run by Tim Cawley.
Cawley, Flansburgh said, was smart about how he allocated tasks—offering “simple, slightly crazy concepts” without getting too specific. Flansburgh said the songs were built to fit into radio jingles—“30-second songs or 60-second songs”—but could be about almost anything. The partnership worked, he said, because Cawley understood the band’s tone and trusted them to run with the ideas.
He also gave a sense of the pace. Flansburgh said they recorded like six or eight songs in a day, and after a week of all-nighters, the work still felt like fun. He admitted the practical question immediately when he held up a cup of iced coffee. “It’s a product we live by,” he said.
Their latest record, “The World Is To Dig,” released in April, sits at the center of the conversation. Flansburgh described their albums as collections of songs created “at the same time and the same place. ” unified by a vibe that comes through without being forced. He said it’s unclear what makes a good album. but he believes an album has to hang together in an organic way. He cited an earlier example—“The Else”—as a record that naturally carried an edge shaped by the times.
For “The World Is To Dig. ” he said the title carries weight. but the album’s goal is to hold back some of the pessimism of the era. He described it as still choosing to celebrate the creative enterprise and what’s possible. even as there is “some grumpy old man stuff” in the songs. “There’s something about what we’re doing that is always reflecting the times,” he said.
He also tied the album directly to the period after COVID. Flansburgh said the record is “very much a post-pandemic record. ” and that it was inevitable because “we’re all in the world together and living through all this stuff.” He added that while those themes were in the foreground and sometimes in the background. conscious planning wasn’t the main driver. “To us, the task of writing a song is already overwhelming enough,” he said.
The conversation reached their songwriting approach as well. including the song “Wu-Tang. ” which deals with extreme fandom from another person’s perspective. Flansburgh said that perspective belongs to Linnell’s work. and he linked it to Linnell’s fascination after seeing a documentary about the group. Flansburgh also said he liked A Tribe Called Quest, describing them as having “very good beats.”.
More broadly, Flansburgh defended the idea of writing through a different lens. He said he and Linnell lean into that kind of perspective because it isn’t confessional. and because it allows imagination to run. He cited Randy Newman and Alice Cooper as major influences on unreliable-narrator songs. saying both wrote from the point of view of a character.
He connected that method to a belief about what listeners truly want. He quoted something John Linnell once told him: “People don’t know they want to be surprised.” Flansburgh said surprise is essential, and without it, songs can drift into sentimental territory.
He ended with a sense of the craft’s emotional rhythm. Songwriting. he said. is “super fun”—like working in a dark room—because while you have a good idea. the spark can slip away the moment you commit. He compared the feeling to magic and said time disappears quickly in the process. claiming it can mean writing a thousand songs without noticing.
They Might Be Giants will play Friday & Saturday, June 5 & 6, 7 p.m., at House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St., Boston. Tickets cost $55-$191.
They Might Be Giants House of Blues Boston June 5 2026 June 6 2026 The World Is To Dig Lincoln-Sudbury John Flansburgh John Linnell Dunkin’ advertising America Runs on Dunkin’