Grammy Award-winning band The Flaming Lips recently released their 16th album American Head.
The band's been together since 1983, and its frontman and driving force, Wayne Coyne, has made a lifelong commitment to pushing boundaries in music, art, and general strangeness.
Music 101's Charlotte Ryan spoke to Wayne about the band's incredible longevity, fatherhood, and more.
The Flaming Lips are prolific, and their albums diverse, but their new record American Head has been compared to some of their most popular releases: Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. It's also been described as 'accessible'.
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"We make a lot of records and do a lot of weird stuff," Wayne says, "And we love this type of Flaming Lips album because it's easy to sing these songs, and you really really feel the songs. But they're hard, hard, hard to make, and it's stressful, and you do work very intensely to make the whole thing one good rolling vibe.
"If we were a group that made an album every five or six years, most of the albums we'd make would probably be like American Head, but we make a lot of music. Sometimes we put out one or two albums a year. So we wouldn't like to put out an album like this every time, because the other types of albums we make we learn so much from, we do a lot of experimenting and it's fun and it's crazy, and it's not under so much scrutiny - mostly from ourselves."
The Flaming Lips are known for their fantastical live shows, which have variously included confetti cannons, laser pointers, dozens of large balloons, dancers dressed as aliens, yetis, fake blood, and even Wayne appearing from a giant alien mothership.
The new album has been described as a shift in identity for The Flaming Lips, with a return to their American roots.
Photo: Supplied.
"We're really just some weirdoes who like to record and write songs, it's not like we have a set thing that we think we are. But sometimes we like to be characters.
"In this album we used Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as kind of a model. It gave us a palette of sounds to work from, and even the way the songs could be structured.
"These are the types of songs that I think anyone could hear and think, 'What is that? These guys sound like they've been through something', and then once you examine what the lyrics are saying, it just becomes a bigger more enjoyable couple of minutes."
Wayne says much of the new album came from a string of "intense conversations" between him and the band's guitarist and keyboardist Steven Drozd.
"Steven and I have been doing podcasts for a couple of years now. We'll pick a song and dissect it on the podcast, and it'll make us tell stories: 'What did you mean by this, and what did you mean by this?' It sort of goes all over the place.
"In that way it got us more comfortable with telling each others' stories, combining our pasts, our stories and our pain. They're far enough away now that we can sing about them. It's kind of mythologising them... it's evocative."
Wayne Coyne in Milan, Italy in 2018. Photo: AFP
Wayne says the way Covid-19 has slowed much of the world down has given the band the benefit of time.
"You spend a lot of time travelling the world to play shows, and sometimes you're only playing for an hour and a half one night, and it takes you four days to get there. There's a lot of time spent in airports, soundchecks, you know... it's a lot of time that you have to be on the go. So I was very relieved to not have to be on the go.
"We've had lots of time to think about what this album could be about. I think I'd lost my ability to judge how valuable time is with art.
"Sometimes there's such a rush of deadlines and things that you must do, that you do the best that you can and you try not to look back too much. I'm very glad to have had more time and more consideration of what could happen, and what colours could be used, and what pacing could be used.
"I hope it doesn't happen to the world again, but it was good timing for my situation."
