Flaming Lips
Wayne's World
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NATN: When did you guys actually go into the studio to begin working on this album? How much of the material was in working order beforehand? And what are some examples of things that only took shape in the studio?
Wayne Coyne: Well, I think we were getting ready to do a remix of [The Soft Bulletin track] "Race For The Prize" with Jonathan [Donahue] from Mercury Rev. He was up at the studio doing some Mercury Rev stuff that would end up on All Is Dream. We were trying to get someone to do a remix, and Jonathan said, "well, let me do something!" We all went up to [producer] Dave [Fridmann]'s. I didn't know what was going to happen and I wasn't going to worry about it too much. But anytime I get to go up to Dave's, I come armed with possibilities. A couple days before that, I had come up with a song. We went into a studio [in Oklahoma City] and did some pre-arrangement. Because a lot of times with Dave, we'll end up recording like 100 things. Then he'll say, “OK, what do we have here? Let's sort this out.” So I thought we'd do a little pre-sorting before we got up there. So we had this little song that ended up being the song "It’s Summertime" on the new record. We thought it would be this little thrown-together B-side that would go with this "Race For The Prize" remix, if it turned out that we'd release it. Me and Jonathan ended up just talking and reminiscing and doing more of that than actually mixing, and no one was all that interested in this "Race For The Prize" thing. So this other song that we were going to put with it, everybody started to really like it. We thought it was weird, nice little song with electronic drums.
We didn't know it at the time, but that started to signal the winding down of The Soft Bulletin. You never know how long records are going to go. Sometimes they're over in a couple of months, but an album like Transmissions From the Satellite Heart went on for years! We'd run into people and they'd be like, do you guys have a new record out? And we'd say no, it's still "She Don't Use Jelly." As that summer rolled on, we started thinking we were starting on another record. In the way we do records, I'll just have an idea for a couple of songs and we'll book a couple of weeks with Dave and start to work on stuff. You never really get the feeling that anything is a “record.” You just think, well, we have these songs. Obviously we're a band and we put out records, so eventually what we do will be on a record, but you don't ever get this momentum of what you're doing until you have 10 or 11 songs going. I think the best thing about the way we go about making records is that you can work on something. Well, look: you're a writer. You come up with an idea and you think it's the fuckin' best idea the whole world has ever fuckin' thought of. You become obsessed with it and you're in love with it. I think this is the essence of what makes an artist paint a picture and a normal person just think it in their heads. It's the ability to become obsessed with it. It must exist! Songs are the same. So, we'll do a song because I'm obsessed with it. And because it takes us so long, we do the song and move on to something else. With any luck, we become obsessed with a new song. Then we can listen to the old song that we were so in love with and suddenly it feels like another band. Some band did a song. Then we can really look at it and decide if this piece of shit is any good or if it moves us. Instead of it being like listening to our own selves, we're just listening to it as music. That's when we really start to get somewhere. We hear things and we say, “gee, that's too long.” Or, “that arrangement is boring.”
"It’s Summertime" began as six-and-a-half-minutes long. It shows the depth of this self-involvement. We just kept playing it and thought it was so great. When we revisited it in October 2001, we thought, “fuck, that thing is too long.” It's boring after awhile. We totally revamped it and changed it up. It was as if we were remixing someone else's song. That's the best thing that happens to us. We can be meticulous. I can see where people get those Brian Wilson comparisons, you know, the nuts loose in the studio doing crazy things. But then the rational side of us kicks in, because we don't actually want to be like Brian Wilson. I don't mean that in a bad way. I want to get this perspective of, is this music actually entertaining people? I don't make music because I have some message to tell the world. I am making music for the reason I listen to music: I want something pleasant to listen to while I'm driving to work. I don't need my fuckin' life changed by some retard. In the end, that's what I want our records to represent. I'm all for weirdness and eccentricity, but I also want people to listen to it with some urgency.
NATN: Can you think of other songs that were turned inside out in that way?
WC: Let me think. I'm just trying to go through them. "In The Morning Of The Magicians" is a good example of this eccentricity being re-evaluated. That to me is one of these absurd songs that you can't even think of. You just have to hope something good happens. I go in with this typical, vaguely philosophical question about what is love, in this sort of sappy, Roberta Flack-esque kind of arrangement. But I don't really have anything to piece it together. I had this other little melodic piece that went with the beat. [Group member] Steven [Drozd] says, “why don't we put these things together?” He would use his skill of arrangement in music to kind of connect the two. That's where I think some of these things that we do really have a uniqueness and jump above just being the clowns with a lot of production money. Steven will never admit to this, but I've been around a lot of musicians with a lot of talent, and he is one of those magical, Stevie Wonder-kind of guys who makes music the way you and me drink water. He took this little piece and the Roberta Flack ballad with this “dawn of mankind” little theme he can do, and suddenly it becomes this epic thing. Even though we feel like it's self-indulgent and doesn't really make any sense, when we re-evaluated it later, we think, “my God. That's weirder than anything we would have ever thought of.”
When you're doing it, it's like any kind of analyzing. Writers do this sort of thing. You come up with a line and think, “my God - where did that come from?” You take the words and say, “that's my creation.” But if someone were to ask you where it came from, you'd say, “fuck, who knows.” We want that to be our entire record. We want to edit all the things that took skill and production and time and thinking. We want the whole record to be these connected pieces. When we re-evaluate stuff like "In The Morning Of The Magicians," none of these things really connect in our ideas, but when you hear it all come at you as a piece of music, it evokes really some other world. You're connecting things that aren't really connected. We say, “wow, let's keep that, even though it doesn't make any sense.” We think that is superior to something we would think of that makes sense!
NATN: Is there a concept here? There are connected threads with things like the random audience noise and the announcer's voice.
WC: Yeah. The audience stuff, we first did that on a B-side called "Funeral In My Head." A lot of times we do depressing songs and people will hear them and say, “oh, that touched me.” And that's sweet. But I think this song stays depressing. It's six or seven minutes long. You could wake up and say, “what a great day! I'll put on a Flaming Lips record,” and this would ruin it for you! So in some way we decided not to put it on the record. Not because of that necessarily, but because it was another long song and we had plenty of them. This song was so depressing. We were thinking of Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive. I always have thought, even when I was young, that the audience was fake. I don't know what he's doing on stage, but he's doing some guitar lick that to my mind is not worthy of applause. And people are just going ape shit. When I was young, I thought, this is bogus that he's putting this in there and making the audience think something exciting is happening. But my next thought was, this is awesome. The audience is infectious. Not even the guitar part. In your mind, you think something amazing is happening. Hearing an audience do that sets off some primordial reaction in every human that isn't drug-damaged or retarded. I've been at concerts where I think it's bogus but the audience loves it so much that eventually I'm excited!
So this depressing song had these slow melodic passages in it and we put audience over top of these, so it plays and in the background you hear these drunken Lynyrd Skynyrd-type fans yelling "woo haa! yeah!" Somehow even for me, it lifted it above seeing graveyards and storm clouds and a hearse. It was like putting the hearse in the concert hall, and suddenly it seemed endurable or something. We thought we'd try putting it on some other things to see if it evoked a mood. It certainly does that on "Fight Test," where you have the weird announcer and then the narrator talking about a fight. Without that, it comes across as some kind of Cat Stevens...
NATN: I’m so glad to hear you say that! The vocal melody is so familiar.
WC: Yeah! It's "Father And Son." It's a great song. When I did it, I didn't know that song that well. My brothers all had his records so I knew it somewhere in there, but when I played it for Dave Fridmann, he was like, “wait a minute -- that's another song!” So we molded it to be more of an, oh, you know, an homage or companion to that story Cat Stevens tells. It's like, picture Wayne telling a story about being the father and son at the same time! He accepted it in that way, like, OK, if you're going to rip him off, let's change it up so it's you ripping him off and not the production team. You can see where those little elements trigger something in your mind. It's not a note. It's an atmosphere just injected into what was already an atmosphere.
NATN: Something like "self-relfected inner sadness" isn’t usually evoked by summer. It seems like a lot of the lyrical content here is more outwardly sad than on The Soft Bulletin.
WC: Well, the line in the "Summertime" song, where it says, "when you look inside / all you'll see is a self-reflected inner sadness," that's why the next line says, "look outside. I know you'll see that it's summertime." I know from my own experiences. When my father died, it took him six or seven months to die. It wasn't something that happened overnight. But the worst part of it really was a month before he died, this inescapable reality of him going to die -- and him still being alive -- set in. This is the equation that is always the relief to me. When someone is alive, you have to picture them dead. This is unthinkable. It destroys the way you think, because inside your mind you're seeing them dead, but outside, where you have use of your eyes, ears, smell, and touch -- your brain is meant for those things. The stuff you build internally is always exaggerated. So here I am thinking of my father as a dead man whereas my eyes and ears see him as a living man. This is where you go into this bad state. But after he was dead, the reverse was true. In my mind, I pictured him when he was young, alive, and vibrant. In your mind, it's pleasant. But when you do this thing where it goes the other way around, it's almost unbearable. My advice to people, no matter what it is that is disturbing them, is go have some experiences -- join with it, where you actually hear, see, feel, taste, or touch something. This eventually gets the flow from it just being an internal thing to where it's a combination of both.
This girl we knew died. The death came to us in kind of a weird way. I was thinking about her when I was doing a bike ride. A couple of times a week I'll ride my bike 25 miles out to the lake and back. This was a really nice, beginning of summer evening. I was getting kind of depressed about this woman being dead. I realized I wasn't being destroyed by it because I was doing all this stuff I loved at the same time. Instead of the death dampening how good life was, it went the other way around. Look how good life is! It took away a little bit of the sting of the death. To me, that was the good news. That's what I think is worth singing about. So even the idea of "all we have is now" -- I could see a young person saying, “how fuckin' bleak is that!” But to an older person to say "all we have is now," it gives you a sense of... yeah! We're not going to wait for life to come. We're going to take every moment and enjoy it now. It can be empowering instead of saying, “fuck, what's worth living for?”
But I don't want these things to come across as some sort of self-aggrandized philosophy. This isn't my philosophy. This is the way it is. I'm not telling you to believe in this. This is the way it is, and everybody arrives at this somewhere along the way. I have arrived at this and if I was optimistic before, maybe it because I didn't know anything.
NATN: So do the good guys escape by balloon to Utopia at the end of the album?
WC: [Laughs]. That would sound good! That's why I think we put it at the end, because it sounded like the end of some adventure where they drift off. I think what I like best about it is that it ends the way a movie does. A lot of times you'll see a movie and you wonder what happens after the end, like with "Raiders Of The Lost Ark." It's like, okay, everything worked out. But now what? I always like that you leave the theater not knowing. The song ends and you can say, “oh, the adventure ended and everything worked out for our heroes.” But at the very, very end, it does this trail-off that gets slightly reflective and sad. That's the part that makes you say, “well, yeah, but then what?” Then the saga of the Flaming Lips trying to confront the universe continues [laughs].
NATN: The last time we talked, you were saying how much you liked Yoshimi from the Bordeoms’ last record. What was her involvement in this project?
WC: You're one of the few people that actually knows that, and knows how much I liked her record. As we started to make this record, we thought that of all the musicians we know, she is just weird enough that it would be fun to do something with her. We had a couple of tracks we didn't know what we were going to do with. There was stuff we were going to use for the movie and some we were making up as we went. She was touring around America last spring and we thought we'd spend a day in the studio with her somewhere. She's so weird and can do anything that we didn't really feel like we needed any preparation. We know her from the Boredoms and from Lollapalooza. She said she'd do it. She didn't care what it was. She did weirdness and played trumpet on three or four tracks. We didn't know exactly what tracks we were going to use until the very end. A couple of months ago, we started choosing. I had already titled the record from the song "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots." I'd never done that -- titled a record from a song that's on it. We did that without giving it much thought as to whether Yoshimi was actually going to be on any of the tracks. She's not really on that track. She's on "Part II." We didn't know at the time what we were going to use. We did wind up using a couple tracks where she's screaming and stuff. Now she's on the record and the record uses her name as well. The Yoshimi in the songs is really my idealized version of this crazy little Japanese gal.
NATN: When you guys are working up these elaborate songs in the studio, are you ever thinking ahead to how difficult it will be to reproduce them live?
WC: We don't think about playing. We just think about creating a song. Because of the way we did it with The Soft Bulletin, where we took that approach for the record, we panicked when it came down to playing live. We had abandoned that idea totally, like, “fuck it. Let's just do whatever music we want to do.”I thought in this day and age, we can take that with us. Say if you're a painter. You spend years doing these paintings. But people wouldn't expect you to show up in their town and repaint these paintings real fast [laughs]. That might be worth watching! But it wouldn't be very good, because it takes you a long time to build these things up.
So I thought, why don't I use this analogy? I'll take my recordings with me and they'll play behind me. I'll do something in front of them. Maybe it won't be like what most performers do, but I'll do something that's entertaining, just the same. That's the approach we feel like is the only way we could truly do the songs the way people hear them on the record, without having to go the trouble of having 200 different people up there. It's a waste of time. I still love the absurd story of Milli Vannilli. Once people found out they were fake, people were like, “we don't like this.” To me, it just seems absurd. The idea that we'll be bringing our recordings with us to play is part of the deal. It doesn't mean we won't do songs without it. Steven won't play drums on every track but he will play on some. That was always our dilemma, because on some songs, him playing drums is really the star.
NATN: Do you think you’ll ever return to the concept of giving out headphones with the soundboard mix for people at the shows?
WC: The headphones have always been meant to appeal to the hi-fi element of our audience, which I know is there. They always struggle at concerts. They say, “aww, this room sucks. The acoustics suck.” I try to tell them these are not concert halls. These are rooms for people to drink beer in. There's a band in there, but it's not for the band. That's what concerts are for. Big rooms for people to get drunk in. That's the way it should be. The headphones let you be a hi-fi guy without having to deal with the reality of putting on concerts. It's not very practical to do everywhere and in some ways it a hassle. I still want to do the headphones, but only in certain venues.
NATN: Can you talk a little bit about the visual component of the Flaming Lips’ live show?
WC: The way we've been presenting the show, accidentally the most powerful thing I stumbled upon was instead of there being a screen with random psychedelics regardless of the content of the songs, each song has a little mini-move that went with it. It saturated what I think is the feeling of the song for the audience. It gives them more than me just singing it. I didn't know how powerful that was until we started to do that. We started to play songs from The Soft Bulletin before it was released. We'd play "Waiting For A Superman." I had grown men weeping in the audience. I knew it was something about the song and the video and the atmosphere having power. As we went along, that was the element we kept exaggerating -- each song having that heightened experience. It does require a lot of pre-production.
NATN: What about your various other film projects? What’s going on with these?
WC: "Okie Noodling" was done by Bradley Beasley. He's the guy I've done virtually all my videos with. We've been making movies -- his and mine -- since 1991. In the back of our minds, we said we'd make a feature film. He has done a couple of documentaries and "Okie Noodling" was one of them. It's about these weirdo guys who live a little south of Oklahoma City. They don't fish with rods and reels. They go to these catfish holes where catfish are sitting on their eggs. They stick their hands in these holes and jam it into the fish's mouth. I think it's kind of brutal. These catfish are just sitting there. Bradley asked us to do some music, which sounded like a crazy scenario. He'd kind of dictate a little bit what the feel should be. Some things we had pointed to were Glen Campbell, Duane Eddy, or Elvis in the early '70s. That kind of epic soundtrack kind of stuff. As we started to make what wound up being the Pink Robots record, we were really going into the computer world and experimenting with what we could do with all this junk. At the same time with Bradley, it was more about acoustic guitars, banjos, upright basses, violins, and harmonicas. We were going both routes at the exact same time. I really think one informed the other. We hadn't really done that much acoustic music in a way. Doing it with Bradley, we realized it could be thick and sophisticated. On Pink Robots, we had elements of that stuff that really is a precise sort of pop/country trip and electronic stuff blasting each other at the same time. Instead of blending it together, the computers sound like they're from outer space and the country sounds like its from Texas, you know? Not making one sound like the other.
At the same time, me and Bradley hadn't really discussed when we were going to do it, but the idea of doing a feature movie had been in our minds since about 1996. We knew we'd get an opportunity. After the relative success of The Soft Bulletin, I started to think that this sort of attention goes away pretty quickly. I thought, in this couple of years I have between The Soft Bulletin and whatever failure is up ahead of me, I'd go ahead and do some things. With this inertia I have of people wanting to help me do things, maybe I can get a record done, a movie done, and a couple of soundtracks. Three years from now when everyone has forgotten about me, at least I'll have used this time to do something, instead of sitting here saying, “oh, people think we're great and isn't that fun.” Like a fool, that has happened to us in the past. You have this period of celebration and we'd get confused. We couldn't relax. This time I didn't relax. I'm glad they like what we're doing but I'm going to do some stuff. If the Pink Robots record fails, we don't ever have very long of a slope down. The failure mark with the Flaming Lips is kind of like, within six months of our record coming out, it could all be over for us. We're always just struggling to make it work. I wanted to start the movie before too many bad things happened, honestly.
NATN: So what is the progress report on this other movie?
WC: I've got about 30 minutes of it done. We do it the same way we do songs. A lot of bands go into the studio and do all the drum and guitar tracks. We don't. We go in and do one song at a time. If it takes us three weeks to do one, we finish it all. We master it. We do the same thing with the movie. We'll shoot a scene, even if it's a three-minute scene. We edit it, put sound to it, put music to it. It's called "Christmas On Mars." That gives you a lot already. There are these astronaut/scientists living on Mars and celebrating their first Christmas. We guess this is in the future, but it doesn't really matter. Since they're all scientists and rationally minded people, they don't have a mechanism for belief. This idea of what Christmas represents to a bunch of cold scientists living on another planet is kind of weird. They're going to celebrate Christmas but in the meantime they've all started to go kind of crazy. We're calling this craziness the dark cosmic melancholy. Where do you derive meaning in your life when you're forced to look at this cold, sort of scientific reality?
In my story, you can't. If you live a life without meaning for too long, you just go crazy. I don't know if that's true, but in my story it is. Everybody on the ship is basically losing their minds. People are killing themselves. Christmas is approaching. Steven plays the main guy. I play the Martian. Steven is the guy putting on a Christmas celebration and trying to prove to people that there's something worth believing in. He's having no luck. Things go from bad to worse: the oxygen generator breaks and people are committing suicide. They don't see any point in celebrating anything, let alone Christmas. Well, the Martian lands, fixes the oxygen generator, and does some magic things people can't explain. For some reason, now they understand the power of believing in the unknown. They don't know why. At the end, they say, believing in something is essential to being. Being happy, a human, or anything. Without some meaning, there's an element of our thinking that isn't connected. That's the jist of the movie. The Martian lands and its a happy ending.
NATN: Do you have target dates for releasing the film and the two soundtracks?
WC: I don't think the "Okie Noodling" soundtrack will actually be released. We may release it little by little as B-sides. And it's available on the Internet if people are desparate to hear it. We did it for Bradley and it might be up to him, although the movie is tied up a bit in Public Broadcasting. It gets a little bit thick as to how you'd remove the music from the movie. We told Warner Bros. we wanted to do it, and they said, “sure, do whatever you want.” If they came to us and said they wanted to release it, we'd do it. But until they or Public Broadcasting are interested, it will just be music that goes with his movie. With "Christmas On Mars," we don't really know what it's going to be yet. If it ends up being music that would be interesting just to listen to without the movie, certainly we'd look at releasing it. Our intention is mostly to do it as a DVD release where the movie plays and the music accompanies it.
NATN: Do you have any guest spots up your sleeve? I know you did a vocal for the Faultline album.
WC: The Blue Man Group called me about doing a thing. I think it works in the same way a lot of things do now. Someone does some recording, sends it to me, and I record on it and send it back. It's not the "We Are The World" sessions, where Dylan and Lionel Richie are meeting; me being the Lionel Richie [laughs]. With Faultline, when we were in England a few years ago, Warner Bros. gave me a couple of CDs by David [Kosten]. His stuff then was even more disconnected than Aphex Twin or these other guys who kind of work as pastiche soundscapes. It's not really songs. He was interested in me singing. He sent me a bunch of stuff but there was one thing I was drawn to. I started to work on it. He had all the music and melody already done. I really just made up a story, the lyrics, and the title. The arrangement and the melody I sing is all his creation. Steven added a harmony vocal and some voice stuff that was not part of the arrangement. David wound up getting Chris from Coldplay and Michael Stipe, so here I am looking like I was in the company of these important singers. I have never met him. Through my phone conversations, I could tell he was trying to do something interesting. The worst thing about working with people is when you have to say, “well, I love how you sing, but I don't like the way you sang my song.” When people approach me, I say, “we'll I do something and if you don't like it, let me know.”
NATN: Weren’t you pondering recording an album entirely of Christmas music?
WC: Here's what happened. We were actually pursuing it and thinking about getting other people to sing songs with us. We thought we could do something unique and different. Even though we'd be singing traditional Christmas songs, we thought it would be within the scope of what the Flaming Lips could do. I think in Christmas of 2000, I actually went to record stores. Just out of curiosity, how many Christmas records are put out every year?
NATN: It's staggering.
WC: It is. Good word. I never knew. Every year there was one called "A Mutated Christmas," which was of the ideas I wanted to do. It had two songs I thought were great. It resembled what I was envisioning. But there is no shortage of Christmas records. Any artist of any acclaim -- huge or not so huge -- puts out a Christmas record. I realized I'm not really sure if there needs to be another rendition of these songs out there. Some of this stuff could actually be interesting, but it will be the 4th of July before you listen to them all and find out! It was a half-baked idea going into it and that just assured me right there that without having some insurance of it being of some stellar quality, maybe we don't need to present any more of that to the world. We wound up doing a single we gave to our fan club. I think in a way it pushed us toward the idea of the Christmas movie. We had already started working on the music for that and I had these ideas anyway. I thought, why don't we just go a little further with this? I do think there will be room for an absurd but sad and nice Christmas movie done by a weird band from Oklahoma! That I think there'd be room for. It wasn't as if I changed focus. One started out as a bad idea and the other idea seemed more interesting -- to do a movie with us in it.
JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"