They Might Be Giants expands its kids' music empire

By Evie Nagy

NEW YORK (Billboard) - In the animated video for They Might Be Giants' song "One Everything," a singing globe helps a little boy deal with his overwhelmingly messy room by invoking the unity of the omniverse: "If you go out and count up everything, it all adds up to one."

The song is from TMBG's new children's release, "Here Come the 123s," but it plays with the kind of braininess that has attracted loyal adult fans -- many now parents -- to the duo of John Flansburgh and John Linnell throughout their 25-year alternative-rock career.

The Disney Sound CD/DVD, released February 5, is a follow-up to 2005's "Here Come the ABCs," which has sold 110,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and reached No. 6 on Billboard's Top Kid Audio chart. That project was backed by Disney after the unexpected success of 2002's "No!," TMBG's first children's effort and a No. 1 entry on the Top Kid Audio list. U.S. sales for that effort total 144,000.

"The first kids' record seemed like such an incidental thing at the time. We were working on all these other projects," Linnell says, adding that "No!" jumped between labels for several years before Rounder agreed to distribute it on the band's own imprint, Idlewild. "Then it completely outsold our adult work of that year, and that got everyone's attention."

Success in the kids' market, however, has fed rather than replaced the band's adult music output, and Linnell says he and Flansburgh take a nearly identical musical approach for both audiences. "A lot of parents want their kids to like the same thing they like, so they're pushing this stuff on the kid and the kids are going along with it," he says.

CROSS-GENERATIONAL APPEAL

According to Walt Disney Records executive VP/Disney Music Group general manager David Agnew, it's TMBG's unique simultaneous appeal to kids and adults that inspired him to executive-produce both Disney projects with the band.

"I've been a fan of the Giants since the '80s and have always thought of their music as being smart and fun -- both prerequisites for good kids' music," Agnew says. "The Giants can play a sold-out concert at noon in a beautiful theater to a thousand kids with their parents singing along to songs about letters and numbers, then later that night play in a sweaty club to a thousand teens and adults."