On the heels of its ‘Best Children’s Album’ Grammy win for “Here Come the 123’s,” They Might Be Giants is readying the release of another kid-centric set, “Here Comes Science.” The album and animated DVD is due Sept. 1 on Amazon and iTunes and everywhere Sept. 22 on Disney Sound.
“It’s very much in the spirit of the band,” frontman John Flansburgh tells Billboard.com. “The very pleasant side effects of doing kid stuff is that you can apply as much creative energy and just be as original as you want. Nobody’s going to say, ‘Well, that couldn’t possibly work.’ It’s an open invitation to experimentation, and that is a great thing for us.”
As evidenced by song titles like “Meet the Elements,” “Photosynthesis,” and “I Am a Paleontologist,” “Here Comes Science” covers a wide spectrum of scientific fields. Flansburgh and his bandmates — co-founder John Linell, Marty Beller, Dan Miller and Danny Weinkauf — recruited Eric Siegel from New York Hall of Science, a children’s museum in Queens, N.Y. to ensure that all the material was factually accurate. “We’ve never had to really fact check anything before; it’s not an impulse that I think anybody in a rock band meets with open arms,” Flansburgh admits.
In the process of making sure everything rang true, one of They Might Be Giants’ longtime fan favorite song, “The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas,” had to be reworked for the release. ” We were so sure we were on solid ground with the first song that we not only did a new recording of it, we had animated the entire thing,” recalls Flansburgh. “Eric looked at it and was like, “Guys, this is just so wrong, I can’t even explain.’ So we actually constructed an answer song to ourselves called ‘The Sun Is A Miasma of Incandescent Plasma.’ “
