Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wondersWhat the part that isn’t thinking isn’t thinking ofShould you worry when the skull head is in front of you?Or is it worse because it’s always waiting where your eyes don’t go?
They Might Be Giants came home to Brooklyn Steel on Saturday, May 30, closing out a three-night residency in the neighborhood where the Johns once lived cheap, wrote weird, and turned absurdity into a municipal service. The Bigger Show tour, true to its name, brought no opening act, no filler, no warm-up comedian in a cardigan (sorry, ghost of Shecky Greene): just an eight-piece contraption with Brooklyn’s Ambassadors of Love: John Flansburgh, John Linnell, Danny Weinkauf, Dan Miller, Marty Beller…and a three-man horn section: Dan Levine, Stan Harrison, and Mark Pender, ready to inflate every miniature TMBG universe until it could be seen from space.
Across much of their discography, the gloom and mordant philosophy in They Might Be Giants’ lyrics can rival The Cure, Nick Cave, and The Smiths, though their existential unease usually arrives disguised in bright, buoyant arrangements that pull from klezmer, free jazz, polka, musique concrète, the madcap noodlings of Raymond Scott, and, apparently, the nonstop caffeine-current of Sparks. They have long been darlings of well-meaning misfits: people with overactive brains, social anxiety, and a bone-deep sense of isolation, all finding refuge in feeling understood, for once.
The first set was devoted to 1988’s masterpiece Lincoln, the band’s second album and still one of the great documents of American brain-pop gone beautifully berserk. The second half cracked open the cabinet and let the creatures crawl out: deep cuts, fan favourites, later-period live detonations, bits of Mink Car, the big sing-along monsters, the jokes that somehow got sharper with age, and the songs that have spent decades proving that cleverness can survive contact with an actual stage, a bar line, and several thousand people who know the words.
Beginning with Santa’s Beard, the band tore straight into Lincoln with the confidence of people who know the record by muscle memory but still enjoy finding loose wires in the walls. Stand on Your Own Head bounced in with a ridiculous little grin. Piece of Dirt kept its strange miniature cruelty intact. Where Your Eyes Don’t Go carried that old TMBG chill. Pencil Rain and Cowtown landed with manic precision.
Then came The Stick.
For the uninitiated, The Stick is Flansburgh’s long-serving stage prop, a piece of sacred tree solemnly – if sporadically – employed as percussion during Lie Still, Little Bottle since the late Eighties. They Might Be Giants have had plenty of oddball visual business over the years: giant heads of newsman William Allen White, a long-retired confetti cannon, puppets big enough to terrify children and drunk college kids alike – but The Stick has earned its own strange little kingdom, complete with audience chant. There it was again at Brooklyn Steel, made divine by repetition, timing, and Flansburgh’s deadpan commitment to behaving as though he had brought Excalibur itself.
The best TMBG shows always remind you that the band’s comedy was never sprinkled over the songs after the real work was done. It is structural. Their timing is musical, their music spans pathos and comedy, and their jokes usually contain a trap door and a footnote. During the between-song patter, Flansburgh and Linnell talked about living in Williamsburg in the 1980s, right around the corner from what is now Brooklyn Steel, back when paying $100 in rent was both a blessing and a curse.
Another bit found Linnell talking about having strained his throat from a spirited scream chorus, telling Flansburgh he now sounded like Brian Keith from Family Affair, then realizing in real time that only a narrow slice of the room had any clue what he meant. (Don’t worry, at least one did.)
A woman near the front held up a sign that read PLAY BOAT OF CAR, asking for the beloved track from the band’s self-titled debut. Linnell had bad news: the setlist was too tight to make room for it. Mostly, he said, he was just worried about her arms. This is the kind of mercy They Might Be Giants offers: no song request granted, but sincere concern for your deltoids.
By the time the band reached They’ll Need a Crane, Snowball in Hell (even acting out the samples from the album), and Ana Ng (half the front row busted out the choreography from the video), the show had built up the peculiar emotional math of that album: songs about failure, jobs, dread, love, geography, phonetics, power, small humiliations, and larger humiliations, all delivered with the zip of a novelty single and the aim of writers who can make a two-minute song feel like a trap sprung by a philosophy department. Ana Ng remains one of their perfect machines, sung by a room full of people who have probably spent half their lives knowing exactly how much of the world we want. (Answer: YOUR half!)
The late-set curveballs kept the mood from slipping one inch. A cover of the Raspberries’ Overnight Sensation (Hit Record), Wu-Tang, stelluB, and monster hit Birdhouse in Your Soul closed the first half.
Set Two opened with a magic trick:. Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love was recorded live entirely backwards, performed by the band like a stage full of Twin Peaks Giants, then played back in reverse for the audience. They had done this before, including at Kings Theatre in December 2024, but it remains a brilliant stunt, because the payoff is both technical and silly in the best possible sense. The crowd watches the process on screen, hears the garbled incantation, then gets the song snapped back into (mostly) recognizable shape.
This go-around leaned hard into the breadth of their formidable catalogue, with a generous helping from Mink Car. Man, It’s So Loud in Here was a sleek little panic attack with a disco suit. Damn Good Times lived up to the boast without making a meal of it. Don’t Let’s Start still sounds like a nervous system trying to win an argument with itself. 2082 brought in later-career oddity with its own internal clock, while Wearing a Raincoat and Letterbox made room for the band’s softer zigzags.
This section also pulled me back to the strange pre-internet intimacy of Dial-A-Song, when fans could call a number printed in the albums and hear tinny little teasers through a phone line. Years before bands forced the same 30 seconds of music upon you in all forms of social media, years before the Information Superhighway itself, They Might Be Giants were already building a private broadcast system out of whatever was lying around. You could call a number, which still works today at (844) 387-6962. (Around the millennium, I remember hearing scratchy versions of Hovering Sombrero and Man, It’s So Loud In Here through that telephone haze (or was it the early website?), which made hearing the latter blasted out at Brooklyn Steel with horns and full-body force feel like a message from some absurd alternate future.)
The horn section, by the way, nearly ran off with the show. Levine, Harrison, and Pender were wild, sharp, and loose in all the right places, turning songs that already had funny bones into strutting, brassy beasts. Dan Levine even brought out a euphonium, prompting the band to joke about how rarely one encounters such an instrument onstage. In another group, that might read as novelty. Here, it felt like proper policy. Of course, there would be a euphonium to go with Linnell’s accordion, “Main Squeeze!” Of course some kid in the audience is now doomed to ask for one at Guitar Center. (I should know, my first eBay purchase in 1999 was an accordion.)
Can’t Keep Johnny Down, Cloisonné, Twisting, and Dr. Worm gave the back half a terrific run, the band moving from cranky resilience to jazz-club surrealism to clean pop release. Dr. Worm in particular showed how much lift the larger band gives the material. The horns punched it upward, Beller drove it forward, and the Johns held court in the center of the commotion with wide grins.
The encore was a brassy, batty victory lap. The Glamour of Rock led into Get Down, before Istanbul (Not Constantinople) gave the horn section another chance to go gloriously berserk. That Four Lads cover has been with the band so long that it belongs to them in the public imagination, and at Brooklyn Steel it sounded like a carnival contraption built by historians on espresso and bad sleep. Let Me Tell You About My Operation and When Will You Die kept the mood rude and ridiculous, and then came…as usual, The End of the Tour.
There was a glorious balance between discipline and derailment throughout the whole show. Boat of Car might have been denied (sorry, lady) – yet the night still felt full of trap doors, horns, jokes, props, backwards singing, rent memories, television references, and miniature explosions of odd grace. They Might Be Giants remain one of the rare bands who keep it delightfully genuine.
Can’t wait until the next one…or at the very least, we’ll “meet at the end of the tour.”
Catch them live next on the following dates this summer and fall:
- June 5 — Boston, MA — Citizens House of Blues Boston
- June 6 — Boston, MA — Citizens House of Blues Boston
- Sept. 24 — Milwaukee, WI — The Pabst Theater
- Sept. 25 — Milwaukee, WI — The Pabst Theater
- Sept. 26 — Madison, WI — Barrymore Theatre
- Sept. 27 — Madison, WI — Barrymore Theatre
- Sept. 29 — Kansas City, MO — The Truman
- Oct. 1 — Minneapolis, MN — First Avenue
- Oct. 2 — Minneapolis, MN — First Avenue
- Oct. 3 — St. Paul, MN — The Fitzgerald Theater
- Oct. 4 — St. Paul, MN — The Fitzgerald Theater
- Nov. 6 — Austin, TX — Emo’s Austin
- Nov. 7 — Austin, TX — Emo’s Austin
- Nov. 8 — Austin, TX — Emo’s Austin
- Nov. 10 — Houston, TX — The Heights Theater
- Nov. 11 — Houston, TX — The Heights Theater
- Nov. 13 — Dallas, TX — The Echo Lounge & Music Hall
- Nov. 14 — Dallas, TX — The Echo Lounge & Music Hall
- Nov. 19 — Washington, DC — 9:30 Club
- Nov. 20 — Washington, DC — 9:30 Club
- Nov. 21 — Washington, DC — 9:30 Club
- Nov. 22 — Washington, DC — 9:30 Club
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