There’s little that needs to be said
about Wayne Coyne and his Flaming Lips, but after 26 years and a dozen albums, the veteran experimental rockers keep pushing the sonic
envelope and
throwing one of the best birthday-party-cum-live-shows on the planet.
In April, “Do You Realize??” was
named the official rock song of Oklahoma, but with the
October-scheduled release of its 13th album, Embryonic, the
band seems prepared to move away from the anthems and pull its messy
loud roots to the surface, offering an ambitious double-album that features appearances from Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and MGMT.
Paste: Do you feel like
you have more freedom to explore now?
Coyne: I don’t know, you have
to go in with a lot of confidence, but that gets shattered by the
realities of the songwriting and creating sound and all of that is
an impossible task. Every day you can go in and be like, “This is
going to be great,” and by the end of the day you’re utterly
defeated; by suppertime you’re feeling good and by bedtime you’re
absolutely destroyed.
It is art though; none of it is real. I
mean, these are all, if you’re imaginative and creative, you’ll
come up with a hundred new ideas. To me, that’s all we’ve ever done. I think we do have more freedom now, because if we don’t
get it right, we just keep trying, and I know we have an audience and
we have money and we’ve done things that have worked out in the
past, and all those things give you confidence.
Picasso would always talk about
surrounding himself with other failed paintings while he was painting
just to remind himself that, “Eh, shit doesn’t always work out,
but just keep going.” One out of every 10 things that you do will
be accidentally great and you just don’t worry about those things,
you just keep going. None of us think we’re the greatest thing
ever, or worst ever, we just keep going… I’m not saying I trust
my instincts, but, on some level, you have to work on “that’s
pleasing me, fuck it.”
Paste: Does that tie into
your decision to make this a double album?
Coyne: Totally. I think we
always considered double records were kind of self-indulgent. I mean,
there’s one song on the record where we have a six-minute guitar
solo. I think with our experience of making records and all, I think
we’ve found ourselves, not for the good, trying to get down to the
essence of what our music was, you know, “Let’s make a song
shorter and more precise,” I don’t think that’s always good.
When we would go on for five or six
minutes, I was just like, “Fuck it.” I thought it was cool when
we played it... We’d let it, not be so aware of what we’re doing
or saying, let us work with whatever hypnotic instinct we can, and it
does. There was a lot of that doing Christmas on Mars. There
were times where we didn’t know what the music was doing or saying,
or the scenes we were shooting, what the meaning might be. Sometimes
you’re not sure of what the meaning is, but that doesn’t mean it
doesn’t have meaning. A lot of powerful art can do that. Powerful
art has a way of communicating in an abstract way. It’s clear; you
just can’t speak about it. It’s cool, and I think that we like
music that is unspeakable.
Paste: What was it like
to work with Karen O, she’s on two tracks or what?
Coyne: She sings on two, but she
appears on a couple screaming here and there. She didn’t know she
was going to do that, but I took her voice. The recording we did was
for this song “Watching the Planets.” I don’t know why it
occurred to us, but we were doing this track and I thought, “This
sounds like a song that Karen O would sing,” and we looked at her
schedule. You can look at everyone’s schedule online and know where
they are immediately. And we knew they were on tour, so we e-mailed
her a song. I don’t know if we had her e-mail already, but we had
played shows with her, so we made a few phone calls; it’s not like
we’re best friends.
Paste: But you know
people who know people who have e-mail addresses of people…
Coyne: Right, I could walk up to
her and be like, “Hey Karen O,” and she’d say, “Hey Wayne.” So we e-mailed her the song, and she was like, “Oh, this is a great
song, I’d love to work on it,” and she said, “Give me a couple
days and I’ll go through the song and think of a few things to do.”
I think we called her three to four days later
and she was in a hotel in, I think, Milwaukee, and me and Dave do
this sort of stuff all the time, where we set up a phone line and
he’ll record over the phone and I’ll give direction and she’ll
be listening to her iPod and sing at the same time… On the one
song, “Watching the Planets,” she’s singing and harmonizing
with me and Steven. And then it’s just a big group of us doing a
big conquering tribal, you know, chant thing.
Then there’s this song, “I Could Be
a Frog,” that, at the end of this session we were doing for the
“Watching Planets” song, she suggested that she do more of a
freak-out and maybe I would like that for the song, and I said,
“Well, yeah, just do whatever you want to do.” But it was so
great that I ended up thinking, “I’m going to make another song.” I built this other song that sort of sounds like some version
of Sonny and Cher where I’m Sonny and she’s Cher and I sing this
kind of dumb love song and she makes these animal sounds in the
background and it’s just awesome.
Paste: And the kids from
MGMT?
Coyne: They did their first
record with Dave Fridmann at his studio, and they’re going to
attempt to do their second one. We were working on this song and
didn’t really know what it was going to be, but Dave Fridmann was
talking to MGMT, and while he was on the phone with them, I got on
the phone with Andrew [VanWyngarden] and said, “Hey we have this song, would you
guys want to sing on it? And we’ll send it to you?” So,
knowing that they were going to sing on it, I just went in and made
up these lyrics and this melody that I thought if I could do a song
with MGMT, what would it be like? I sent it to them, and I think they
worked on it in the middle of the night; I think they started working
on it at midnight. I think it’s not just Andrew and Ben [Goldwasser] of MGMT,
but their whole group is sort of doing stuff with them, and I think
they set up a microphone in the middle of their room out there, and
they all ran around it screaming and throwing spears at the
microphone or something.
It’s a very inspired track, and when
they sent it to us, we literally lined up our track with their track
and just let it go. Everything they sang is on there, there’s a
very small bit in the middle where they, I don’t know if they were
aware of it, but they broke into Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine
Man.” I don’t know if they realized they were recording, but that
part we didn’t use But everything else they sent us is there.
In the spirit of what we were doing,
it’s calamitous, it’s inspired, it’s freaky, it’s drug
damaged, and it’s wonderful… They’re just a lot of fun to just
do stuff with, and they bring their imagination to it.
Paste: Have you felt the
scrutiny heavier as you’ve been creating this album? Does it bother
you that people are always wondering what Wayne Coyne is doing on any
given day?
Coyne: Well, you get a little
more used to it, in a way it does make what you’re doing feel more
connected to the time when it’s created. Even when we made Zaireeka
and The Soft Bulletin, even the late '90s and 2000s, you’re
sometimes making music and a year later people are hearing it; you
just get used to that.
I would long for the days where you
could just make some music and by the end of the week everyone can
hear it. In our scenario, that never happens, because you’re making
records and you’re marketing them and you’re producing them and
it’s a long process, and some of our records have taken years in
between.
I was kind of glad that this,
especially this new record, has fallen into this new way of...I could
make a track now, and in 10 minutes from now, it’s out in the
world. Especially the way that these tracks have been released, we’re
just now starting to learn how to play them, and the audience is
like, “That’s my favorite song, can you play it tonight?” It
adds energy and urgency to what you’re saying, what you are doing
right now. That I like.
If your mind is active and creative,
the things that your interested in right now is who you are, and I
tend to like it. I don’t mind the scrutiny… People say you’re
great all the time, and that’s nice, but it’s not as potent as
people really having something to say, “I like this, but I hate
this,” and I think that’s the power of the internet: It lets you
have an opinion. I mean, sometimes just because you love a band
doesn’t mean you have an opinion. Don’t get me wrong. I love that
people love what we do, but I like having it go both ways, I want to
know what people think.
Paste: There were some
political undertones to the last album. With this album, is there any
type of vein that you find yourself coming back to?
Coyne: I’ve been asked that
question a lot because with the last record we had things on there
that were based off of Bush. It must be some type of invisible
compliment by which we feel that Barack Obama has things in control. Now that he’s in office, we can be self-indulgent artists again. To
have to be so aware of what you’re saying, when you’re doing
things trying to speak about the state of the world, it’s hard
because you want your mind to be intuitively free to just babble on
about whatever comes into your head, and I supposed Barack Obama has
let us do that.
Of course, you’re always aware of war
and horrible shit that’s happening in the world. I think
that’s what dumb musicians do: They’re like, “Now I have to
make a stand,” and now I don’t. Whatever his job is, whatever
Barack Obama has to do, he’ll do, and I don’t have to sing about
it, and even though I’m concerned about it in my life all the time.
Paste: Have you felt any
of your idealism or hope for what Obama has brought to the White
House lessen with some of the more pragmatic storms that have been
going on in the last months?
Coyne: No, I don’t. I think
he’s so smart, and so cool and so realistic, sometimes just to hear
him speak, you’re like, “This is what a president is all about.”
We’re doing the best we can here, we’ve got good people and bad
things happen even when people know what they’re doing, and that’s
a world I can accept, a world where… The George Bush world just
seemed like, “Oh my god, we really can’t let this guy do whatever
he wants.” Eh, you know, maybe we didn’t do anything about it
except complain. Obama is awesome and I
feel a great sense of joy and relief, whenever I see him on TV
talking, I’m just like, “Damn, he’s cool.”
Paste: As someone that’s
been involved with independent music for a long time, you’re right
alongside with these kids who are just getting their break, what do
you see is the biggest problem with the kids coming up now?
Coyne: I don’t know if I’ve
seen any problems; I think they’re really doing it with this do-it-yourself mentality. We were really inspired by that early
punk rock, especially the early American punk rock with bands like
Black Flag, Minutemen and Hüsker Dü that were just saying, “Fuck
it, we’re going to make records like we want to,” inspired by the
idea that punk rock, to us, in the beginning just meant, “Do
whatever the fuck you want.”
It didn’t mean “punk rock” like
Green Day. I’m not putting down Green Day, but punk rock has become
this cliché sound. Punk rock was the thing that said, “Do
your thing,” and I think that now, that thing is always there, you
don’t have to sear it into your mind, that you should do what you
want, it’s all free and available, everything is possible, and I
think that’s a great world.
I think what it says is there was a
time when if you weren’t thinking that you wanted to play music
full time, well, why even bother? When punk rock came along it said,
“You don’t have to be a serious musician. If you just want to
make music for six months and make a fucking racket, do it,” and I
think that’s going on all the time now. I think that people can
just make records in their own living rooms, put it out there, and
before you know it, you’re playing the festivals, opening up for
fucking Animal Collective.
Paste: Did you like that
album?
Coyne: I do… I don’t think
it’s the greatest thing ever, but I think that’s the way that
music should be, just do what’s in your mind, and I think that some
of my favorite music is like that. What I’ve been liking lately is
this group called Hearts Revolution, and I don’t even know
what they look like, but I’ve got them on my iPod and shit!
There’s a band called Cloudland Canyon, and I don’t know if
you’ve heard them, but some of this stuff, you get like one or two
songs, I call them kids, but whoever these types of musicians and
artists are, they’re just following their own, freaked-out vision,
and I think the world is a better place for it.
Paste: A bigger question
as we wrap up, we’re celebrating Woodstock at 40, and as someone
who used to be considered a drug band, and I say that with care…
Coyne: I still think it’s true
in a way.
Paste: ...what do you see as
the role of drugs in our society, and in our music?
Coyne: From my own experience,
which isn’t out of the range of a lot of people across the world, I
was talking to the President of Warner Brothers just last night about
whether we think that marijuana will be legalized, especially in
California where it’s already medicinally legal, I can tell you
honestly, I sold marijuana when I was 16. I wasn’t a big-time
dealer, but I sold it, and made a reasonable amount for a 16-year-old, but in my mind, I was thinking, "This is 1977. You know, in a
couple years, this shit’s going to be legal anyway, what’s the
harm?”
Well, here we are, fucking 30 years
later, and it’s still illegal. I guess in my mind, I know for sure
there are a handful of drugs no one should take. Don’t take heroin,
don’t take crystal meth, these things are too powerful, they
overtake you and you really have to have a determined constitution
not to have those things affect you profoundly, but I can tell you
for certain that my whole fucking life, people around me, myself,
smart people, everyone in my whole life has smoked pot and it’s
nothing. It’s just pot, it’s no big deal, the reason we want it
to be legalized is not because it’s good and it’s great but
people are curious about it and it’s one of the signposts of
exploration in a sort of artistic community.
And what we end up
doing is we tell these sensitive kids, that are sometimes 15 years
old, “You’ve got to go into this drug infested world to get a
fucking joint.” On the way there, someone might say, “Well, here’s
some heroin, want to try that? And here’s some crystal meth,” and
we don’t want that because it’s too tempting and too powerful. Wouldn’t it be great if the horrible drugs were left on the edge of
town with the fucking addicts? You know what I
mean? And marijuana was just down there at the shop where you can buy
records and paints and comic books and all these other cool things
you try when you get to be an adult and you can decide if you like it
or not. For me it should be like drinking beer, there should be some
responsibility, you have to be old enough, but with the right amount,
it’s a great cultural and social thing. I think the time has come
for that.
As far as drugs go, what can you say?
Music and drugs... The drug experience it’s just another way of
having something a little more intense than it really is. I had some
guys on our crew last night, taking some ecstasy and stuff—in the right hands, yeah, let them be free.