In their 26 years of existence, They Might Be Giants [ tickets ] haven't met an audience tougher than one filled with thousands of children.

"Kids are a tough room," said multi-instrumentalist and vocalist John Linnell. "It's not as easy as you might think to play for kids. They're not as easily whipped up as adults. They're way more casual about how they listen to live music. They're not as socialized, obviously, as adults. A lot of them are just talking through the show and wandering around. It seems like a little thing but it's something you really notice as a band: that your audience is talking during the quiet section or while we're talking. That takes a lot of getting used to."

Linnell and his musical partner, singer/guitarist John Flansburgh, dove into children's music in the early 2000s with the releases of "No!" "Here Come the ABCs" and "Here Come the 123s." Concurrently, in 2007, They Might Be Giants returned to their quirky alternapop with the adult-targeted "The Else."

Linnell spoke to LiveDaily about his group's forthcoming appearances on the Disney Music Block Party Tour, working with the Dust Brothers on "The Else" and writing for children.

Are you looking forward to the Disney Music Block Party Tour?

It's unusual for us; we generally do our own promotion and production and everything. We pretty much bring our own party with us. This is very much of a Disney-packaged kind of thing.

Why did you decide, back in 2000, that it was time to do a children's album?

Well, we never really did decide. We kind of backed into it. The suggestion came from, I think, Rounder Records, in the late '90s that we put together a kids record. We were doing a lot of other stuff at that time. We were spending a lot of time in the studio. So it seemed kind of an efficient thing at that moment to write in a very loose and fun way, just kind of cook up a bunch of children's songs and then put that together and have them put it out. We didn't really think very hard about it, or we weren't feeling like it was a particularly high-pressure situation, which maybe is the reason why the record came out sounding sort of ad hoc and fun. That was "No!" The record didn't come out for a couple of years because we gave it back to Rounder and they were sort of unsure about it. We shopped it around to other labels and then finally it made its way back to Rounder. They put it out in 2000 or 2001. The end of the story is, it was this runaway success, which nobody was really expecting. It just sold a lot better than the stuff we had been doing for adults at that time. It seemed like more of a real gig for us. That's how we got into it. We weren't planning on being children's artists.

How is the songwriting process different for your regular They Might Be Giants records versus children's records?

It's not drastically different. There are a lot of similarities. We bring very much the same attitude to the kids' stuff. The main difference, I'd say, is we possibly don't dwell on death imagery. There's less, what we would consider, inappropriate stuff. But the typical vibe and the range of subjects are not that different.

When you do the Disney shows, are you going to sneak in They Mighty Be Giants hits for some of the parents who are there?

Yes, we do do that. The other thing that probably sparked the idea of us doing kids records in the first place is there was a general perception that we were a band that was OK to play for your kids. So there was already an interest among kids for some of the songs we had done for adults like "Particle Man" and "Doctor Worm" and stuff like that. We generally play those songs at the kids' shows as well. Like you said, it's something to keep the grown ups interested and maybe sort of cross promote.

I noticed you're playing a handful of shows in September through January. Are those going to be children's shows or adult-oriented shows?

Generally, the shows in the fall are adult shows. We're playing a bunch of shows in New York at a club which is a refurbished version of a club we used to play at in the '80s in the Greenwich Village in New York. It now has the difficult-to-say name of Le Poisson Rouge, which means "the red fish." It used to be called The Village Gate. I played there a lot a long time ago. There's sort of a homecoming feel to it. Those are adult shows. We'll be playing warm-up shows in various places around New York--in like Massachusetts and Washington, DC. That's basically what's going on.

Tell me a little about the 2007 album "The Else." How do you feel it fits in with your catalog?

I haven't done all my research on this but I think "The Else" was a spike in popularity for us. That partly represented people who hadn't been paying attention to us, who [hadn't taken] notice, and there's probably some new fans who got interested in [us at] that point and maybe felt like it was better than the last couple They Might Be Giants records. I don't know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult, but it was nice. Part of it was we felt fueled by working with new producers and working in a new situation. We recorded half of the record in California and half here in New York. We were shaking things up a little bit. It wasn't our usual routine. We had the Dust Brothers producing us. It was an opportunity for us to do something different.

What was it like to work with the Dust Brothers?

It was really fun, but it wasn't at all what we were expecting. We are roughly the same age as those guys. We obviously had a lot of interests in common. But we didn't really know them personally until we worked with them. One track was remixed by them in the early '90s. That was a great experience for us because it seems like, without having really met them or gotten to know them, they seemed incredibly generous and thoughtful considering they were taking tracks of ours and remixing them. We have had other experiences of people remixing it where we got it back and thought, "What were they thinking?" With the Dust Brothers, it was clear that they had all these ideas and had all these really interesting, completely different takes on the tracks. It was really kind of a different experience. The thing we were not expecting was [that] they work very differently from us. They work very slowly. They're very deliberate in the way that they work, even though there's something inscrutable about the decision making. They knew what they liked. When they came up with something they liked, they were sure of it. But they were listening to things very differently. That's what's extremely valuable about working with a producer--they have some completely different [ethic] that you don't have. If they were thinking exactly what we were thinking, there wouldn't much point to it. It was a challenge for us to think a new way and give up control of what we were doing to these guys and trust them to come up with things that are cool and interesting.