The Flaming Lips

Mon 22nd Aug, 2011 in Features

The Flaming Lips are surely one of the most innovative bands to come out of the 20th century, and have embarked on a year-long project of putting out at least a song a month. So far they’ve released a USB gummy fetus, a joint EP with Neon Indian and a song in ten parts where you and ten friends load up each part on your iPhone. Band mastermind Wayne Coyne talked to FasterLouder ahead of the band’s trip down under in November.

Hi Wayne. So this is an especially crazy year for you… what’s planned for the rest of it, can you give anything away?
Well I think part of it includes coming down to Australia and playing these shows, but yeah it does seem crazy, I don’t think about it too much because I love the way you get through being overwhelmed, you do one thing at a time and you do that, and then when you’re done with that you’re onto the next thing.

At the beginning of the year when we started this thing where we’re going to do three or four songs every month and we saw how many shows we were going to play and all these different objects that we were bent on creating, I would definitely have moments where I’d wake up in the middle of the night and scream and go “Oh my god!! What the fuck!!”

That’s not all the time, you get used to it, some things you think are going to be overwhelming and take a long time, go very quickly. You think “Oh, that was easy.” And other things aren’t. But I kinda knew that. I kinda like the uphill battle. I like doing the things that are new, the things we don’t know the answer to yet.

I guess that would bring out the best in you if you’re put under this pressure?
I think so, yeah. I think it does for anybody that gets put in this situation. It’s no surprise, especially with bands, and maybe it’s this chemistry that happens between intense people. When we look at bands, every band that’s ever done this magic of great records, and I say magic because when they’re really great we don’t really know what the fuck happened, they’re usually doing a million things at once. They’re usually having sex with five models, they have penthouses, they’re on tour, they’re making five records with ten producers, and then yet they make these fucking amazing records. And you go “How did you do it?” and they’re like “Dude I don’t know, I don’t remember.”

And I wouldn’t say that we’re doing that on purpose. I think for us, we’re a really lucky group, we work with a lot of cool people who have a lot of energy and we have a lot of opportunities. So you just start doing things, and before you know it, what you thought was going to be a day where you did two things becomes a day where you’re doing ten things. All these other people say “Hey Wayne, do you want to do this, do you want to do that,” and I just say yes to things, and I feel like I’ll find the time.

Is this all this stuff going to culminate in anything, are you going to do a super record that has five discs or a documentary or something?
I think so, I’m hoping by next April that we’ll look at this giant big year of exploding, for good or bad, creativity, and put this thing all together and see. I imagine it’ll be 40 songs or something, if we put it all together, a lot of it still is unknown to us. But even if that isn’t the end product, if this way that we’re doing things now where, if you saw us last month play somewhere, this month we have a couple of new songs we could be playing. Instead of it feeling like there’s a record and you’ll go out and play that for two years and then you’ll stop, somehow get it together again and then have another record, this is a way of not getting too collected. You just do it.

For example we’re going to put some music next Tuesday that we just got finished doing Sunday afternoon, the Sunday that just passed. And I mean we’re not insecure, we’re insecure like normal people are, but when you do something you think is great, if you have enough time you look at it and go “Oh boy, I don’t know, what is that”. This is kind of like getting a tattoo, you’re gonna get it, you’re gonna have it, and if you regret it in a month from now then too bad. A lot of music isn’t done that way, a lot of music you can sit around and think about it, remix it, fuck with it, and change it. This way of doing music now, we have to put it out.

We’ve made this obligation to ourselves and to our fans and to our way of being that we have to make this music and we have to find the time, and it has to be good. Well I hope it’s good. And you can find the time, you can find the energy. It makes me go “What the fuck were we doing all these years, why weren’t we doing this?”, and part of it is I feel obligated to the Flaming Lips audience. They’ve given me this fucking great life, this great freedom, to do whatever I want to do. They say “It doesn’t matter if you fail Wayne, don’t worry about it, you’ll keep trying, you’ll find something”, and I take that to heart, I take it as seriously as you could take it. I don’t know how long it’ll last, so while it’s here, I fucking go for it.

What would you be doing if you weren’t in a band, would you be Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Accountants or something?
I don’t know if I’d be able to amass this way that I’m a leader of this thing, that for me wasn’t something that I wanted in the beginning. In the beginning you’re just this silly artist, you’d just be sitting in a corner either playing music or doing a painting or doing a drawing, or whatever. You’re not really concerned about having a machine that you can control or that will help you dictate your every whim. I don’t think that would have been part of my personality, but as I’ve gone along, being the leader of the group, being able to be successful and do more and more things, I’m the one that gets to head it up. That wouldn’t be part of me at all. But I think I’d just be a ridiculous artist. You’ve probably seen those artists that build castles out of tin cans in their back yard?

Yep
That’s me. You’re just obsessed. I’m not proud of that, I know that I’m obsessed, I know that it’s really why when I announce that we’re going to do something, people are like “I know you will Wayne, because if you don’t do it, you’ll kill us all in the process.”

It has its own inertia that I’m not really responsible for, I don’t ever say “I have an idea”, I’m like Cocteau, he said “an idea has me”, and that’s definitely me. I’m just a slave to this bigger machine. This machine says “Here’s what we should do.”