Over the course of their nearly three-decade career, The Flaming Lips have undergone a series of surprising metamorphoses and unconventional detours on their path to becoming an alternative rock institution. So it might come as a surprise to learn they’ve spent most of that time signed to Warner Bros.—one of the most traditional major labels in the industry. As frontman Wayne Coyne reveals in the interview below, that longstanding contract quietly expired at the end of 2010.
A new deal with Warner Bros. is already in the works—more a formality than a question at this point—but for now, for the first time in nearly 20 years, The Flaming Lips are operating independently. And they’ve taken full advantage of this temporary freedom, diving headfirst into a whirlwind of musical output. At the start of the year, the band announced plans to release one song per month—a goal they’ve already far exceeded. Some of these releases have taken on bizarre forms (including the recently released gummy skulls, each containing a USB drive embedded with three new tracks), but all share the same spirit of wild, spontaneous creativity that has defined the band’s career.
Amidst all this activity, the Lips have also launched one of their legendary live tours, bringing their psychedelic, sensory-overload stage show to The National in Richmond on May 15. In anticipation of that show, I caught up with Wayne Coyne over the phone for a long-distance conversation that took place on March 30.
So I just found out this morning that you guys did a record with Neon Indian like a week ago.
Well, we released it about a week ago, yeah. I took it down to some record stores last Friday, I think.
Cool. So I haven’t heard it yet. What are you guys doing on that record?
Well, we committed ourselves to this thing where we put out a song every month. Some of them will be unique formats and some of them will just be 12-inch vinyl records and stuff like that. The very first one was one that we released specifically for iPhones back in February, on Valentine’s Day. This one that just came out last week was four songs; even though we’ve said we were only gonna do one song, it ended up being four songs. It’s just our way of doing something different. Just saying, “Fuck, let’s do some weird music.”
I saw that you named one of the songs after a Minutemen song [“Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Truth Part 2,” named after a song on the Minutemen’s Double Nickels On The Dime.]
[laughs] Well, a lot of people don’t know that, but yeah. We did.
What inspired you to do that?
We’ve always loved that title. That just seemed like one of those call-to-arms kind of things that’s both funny and also kind of a radical truth. [laughs] Specifically, they’re probably saying, “This is just trendy music. Why would you want that?” To me, I don’t think it’s necessarily true—I just think it’s funny that they believed it so strongly. I don’t know if Mike Watt will be thrilled or pissed off about it, to tell you the truth. I’ve known him forever, but I didn’t think too much about that part of it.
It’s an open-ended jam, where we start and stop four different times. Part of it’s live, part of it’s overdubbed—but really, we’re just trying to get this one thing down. And I think it mimics a version of the truth that Mike Watt would be talking about. It’s like: this music isn’t perfect, and it’s better because it’s not perfect. We don’t really know what we’re doing, and it’s better because we don’t know what we’re doing. This isn’t calculated, we don’t know what we’re gonna be. So [the song] is evoking something of that, I hope.
So you’ve got this gummy skull coming out next month. Can you tell me more about that?
We should be getting them in here on Monday. We’re still waiting on the boxes we’ve designed to be ready—they should be done in about another week or so. But yeah, I don’t know exactly where the idea started. What we’re doing this year is kind of an excuse to go back to being an independent group, and our first record ever featured a skull on the cover. Even when it was reissued a year later—this was back in 1984 and 1985—both versions had that skull on them. I’m not sure what happened to it since. It wasn’t a real skull, but it was a good replica I had taken from high school.
This thing we’re doing now… we’re not technically out of our contract with Warner Bros., but our original contracts ran out at the end of 2010. So we’ve been in this weird limbo. We know we’re doing a new deal with them, but it’ll probably take a couple more months. In the meantime, we all got together and decided, “Let’s do all these things ourselves.” That means the gummy skull, the vinyl records, and there’s a stompbox [guitar effects pedal] we’re making. I think we’re also going to have a cereal box with a record on the back. And a thing in the back of Mad Magazine with a foldout and a record.
With Warner Bros., we’d had these conversations over the last few years about what we’d do if we could release music however we wanted. And kind of casually, without thinking too seriously about it, I said, “I think we’d want to release music literally all the time, in all kinds of weird formats.” I probably said something like, “We want to release it inside cereal boxes and candy and machines!” And they said, “OK, let’s try that.”
So when January started, we announced we’d put out a song a month—even though it’s turned out to be more than that—and see if we could find interesting ways to deliver it to the audience. The gummy skull idea really came from us messing around with this skull theme. We had some plastic skulls, we were experimenting with rubber, and we tried bubblegum. Then we got in touch with this guy in Raleigh, NC who runs a giant gummy candy factory—he was already making big stuff. We talked to him, designed the skull and the packaging, and it all just kind of worked out. I don’t know if all the ideas will work, but you’ve gotta try.
Speaking of crazy things that end up working out, what made you guys decide to cover the entirety of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon?
[laughs] Well, I’m glad that you said that it worked out. We were putting out our last record, and when you release these things, you work with iTunes and some of the big online distributors. There was a producer at iTunes who wanted some exclusive tracks—something to make people go to iTunes for the record instead of the thousands of other websites.
We were on the phone talking about it—I think we were actually on the way to The Colbert Report at the time. There wasn’t much time to talk or think or really do anything, but these things have to get done. You don’t really have much of a choice. So we’re sitting in the car, and I said, “Well, we don’t really have any other tracks to give you.” Kind of out of panic, I suggested we do Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, because we love that record, and we’d played a couple of the songs at Bonnaroo back in 2003.
And once I said it, he was like, “Oh, cool. That sounds like a cool idea.” It wasn’t a big or serious decision—it was just like, “Sure, do it.” We only had two days to pull it together, so there was this spirit of, “Fuck it! Let’s just make this kind of our own version of it.”
Some of it ended up being a radical departure from the original, and some of it isn’t that different. We were working with Henry Rollins, Peaches, and my nephew’s band, Stardeath and White Dwarfs, so there was a bit of a “let’s see what happens” vibe. We didn’t expect it to be the greatest thing ever, but we figured, “Well, we’re working with a bunch of freaks—it’ll probably be pretty cool.”
And once we did it, we got to the point where we had to ask the members of Pink Floyd if they’d let us release it. So yeah, it was definitely an interesting thing to take on. Like I said, we didn’t give it that much thought—it was just kind of, “Oh, fuck it, we have to do something,” and before you knew it, we were doing it.
You guys have now been chronicled multiple times, in the movie Fearless Freaks and the book Staring At Sound by Jim DeRogatis. Does being written about in that way, and having people try to get your legacy down, affect your creative process as you continue to be an active group?
Well, you’d like to think that it wouldn’t. You know, most of these things are done by people who absolutely love you anyway, so you’re surrounded by people who are interviewing you about music—and musicians love to talk about music and ideas and shit like that.
For the movie specifically, [director] Bradley [Beesley] was around us. I’ve been making videos with him since the early ’90s, so that was all very normal, and you really didn’t notice it was going on. But once this story gets told—this condensed version of what was 20 years even then [when Fearless Freaks was released in 2005], this story that encompassed Stephen’s family, my family, Michael’s family, and goes back even to our childhood—you look at it, and you’re like, “You know, that’s not really the way it was.”
Something that could take five years for you to realize happens in a moment in a movie. It’s based on momentum and entertainment and drama. But as time goes on, I can say for sure… I ran into a friend of mine who [had been] trying to get his son to watch this movie for a while. And his son was like, “Dad, I don’t want to watch this boring movie about Wayne. I’ve met him, whatever.” He finally watched it, and I ran into him the other night—he’s only nine years old—and he’s like, “Wayne, I think you’re the greatest guy ever after seeing that movie.”
You can’t help but want it to have an effect on people. And this story that it tells… it’s not absolutely the truth. But it’s an entertaining view into a version of our life that I suppose is true.
I think it affects [us], but I would say you kind of want to be affected by things. I want to have experiences and opinions and things have an impact on me. I’m really not sure what the fuck I’m thinking, or what I am about, ever. I want to go somewhere and do something and find out what it’s about. So I would say yeah, but any curious, creative person would love that. You’d want powerful things to happen to you. [pause] My wife is laughing at me.
[laughs] I do agree with you, though. I feel that in my own life.
Yeah, and you want that! I have to say, sometimes I don’t really know what the songs are about. I’ll read someone’s interpretation of it, and be like, “Oh wow, that’s just amazing.” You’re really working from subconscious parts of your mind anyway, and you kinda want to. I don’t really wanna be a logical, smart person when I’m writing songs. I kinda wanna be a freak that has some insight into human nature, and our ridiculous lives. So I don’t know. You kinda want it to come at you as a surprise. You don’t really wanna know what’s going on.
I find that people who got into The Flaming Lips since Soft Bulletin had gotten used to you sounding a certain way because that was all they knew of the Flaming Lips. And then when you guys did Embryonic, they were really surprised and kind of backlashed at it. So I’m wondering, with you guys doing less commercial-sounding music lately, do you feel this backlash at all? Do you feel like people are put off? How does that affect you?
To me personally, I don’t really get that. We’ll always have those records—that’s part of who we are—and those records have allowed us to keep growing and expanding. We do pay a lot of attention to the Yoshimi record and The Soft Bulletin, because we know there’s an audience that has really been impacted by them.
You can only have a Soft Bulletin happen to you one time. It’s not just a sound we were making; it’s really a version of our life. So when I talk to people about it, if they were to ask me, I’d say, “We made that music at that specific time. We can never be those people again.” The things we were realizing, the things we were discovering about ourselves—we can’t discover them again. We can’t be walking into that unknown that The Soft Bulletin represents for us again; we’ve already done it.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not important. I think that record, and a lot of our records, mark such a specific creative moment in our life that I would never want to copy it. It’s a creation that’s better than I am as a person. And for me to sit here and analyze it, and copy it, and try to redo it— to me, that would just take away from the power of something like The Soft Bulletin.
I think the core of our audience are people who love music. Part of our audience is a casual listening audience that connects with music that’s a bit more popular, but the core—those are people who want music to be interesting. They like seeing the artists evolve. So I’d imagine that most of our audience could love The Soft Bulletin and also love something as freaky as Embryonic or Zaireeka. I mean, I know I do.
When I was young, my brothers and I listened to virtually everything. We could love the most popular music of the day—The Beatles, Peter Frampton, whatever was big in the ’70s—and at the same time we were into freaky underground music. I remember listening to Frank Zappa, Yoko Ono, all that stuff, and thinking, this is just music to us. So if that’s possible for me—and I’m really just sort of a normal person—I think it’s possible for anybody.
Do you guys feel like the newer stuff is integrating well into the live show? I feel like the live show really related a lot to the kind of things you were doing in The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi era, and I’m wondering how that all fits together.
I think it really is all the same thing. When we’re making music, you don’t know what’s gonna happen. You have no idea where it’s going to take you. But once it’s made—it’s not unlike the movies and books we were talking about. Once they’re finished, they create an atmosphere, a story.
When we started playing shows for The Soft Bulletin, it really changed how we presented ourselves. We knew we wanted to sing these powerful but delicate songs that dealt with the idea of knowing you’re going to die. Even though we’ve been singing about that since the very beginning, I think The Soft Bulletin really started to humanize it.
So we’re singing songs that, for an older person—I was 35 or 36 when we made that record—they made sense. I was entering a new phase of adulthood. But we also knew we’d be singing these songs to people who weren’t there yet. We’d be singing to 20-year-olds. And here I am, singing about… DEATH.
So we thought, we don’t want to just stand up there—Saturday night—and sing five or six songs in a row about death to a bunch of 20-year-olds on acid. We were like, “Damn, we don’t want them to go home and kill themselves.” So we started making the shows feel more like a party, more like a freakout, instead of this heavy rock show.
We’d done the heavy rock thing since the mid-’80s. So we shifted toward being loud, but gentle. If we were going to sing about death, could we make it feel more like a birthday party than a funeral?
And the more we did that, the more it felt right. We want the audience to be immersed in what we’re doing and what we’re saying, but I don’t want to bring them down. That carried through The Soft Bulletin, into Yoshimi, and even into what we do now.
We start the show by saying, “Fuck, people, this is gonna be the fuckin’ greatest party you’ve ever been to. BLAM! Let’s go!” And I think that opens the door for other emotions in the set. Because we’re saying, “Look, it’s a party. It’s a celebration of life. It’s not about the end of our life—it’s about what we do now that we know we are alive.”
Color photos by J. Michelle Martin-Coyne
B&W photos by PJ Sykes at the National in Richmond, VA
