Interview: Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips Talks To The 13th Floor!
We here at The 13th Floor are very excited to bring you this fascinating interview with Flaming Lips front man Wayne Coyne.
The band’s new album, American Head, has been called a return to form…and it is!
So imagine our excitement when we were offered an opportunity to talk to Wayne Coyne. As you’ll hear and read, Wayne was in a very chatty mood, going deep into the making of the new album, with The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda and touching on everything from politics to religion to family and drugs and of course, music.
So do yourself a favour and spend some time with us and Wayne Coyne. Then listen to American Head.
Listen to the interview here:
Or, read a transcription of the interview here:
M: Obviously there’s lots of stuff going on in the States as far as current affairs and debates and elections and things though, if you have anything to say about any of the stuff that’s happening?
W: Well, I mean, you know sometimes the news of America, most of it you can’t believe how stupid it is, I think that’s what the front page has become about American politics, is you can’t quite believe how immature and stupid it is, and yet it keeps getting worse. So yeah, it’s embarrassing. But you know I don’t really feel like Donald Trump represents me. You know, when I go to New Zealand or Australia I don’t walk around thinking I’ve got to apologise to everybody because Donald Trump is such an idiot, I never think that. I think people can say he’s the president and you’re the guy in The Flaming Lips. And I don’t feel that way about people from other countries, I don’t feel like, oh your ruler or your dictator or your president is an asshole so what do I do. And most of the time I don’t ever even think about Donald Trump.
I mean I just, I’ve never cared that much… I mean I vote and I try to be as involved in, especially in my local politics here because these guys are really the ones, you know that are helping me in my neighbourhood. The president really doesn’t have that much effect on my life, so I never think about that much, I mean I vote every time there’s an opportunity to vote on anything I can. But I try to remind people, it’s like, he’s the president, who cares? It’s supposed to be a show you know, it’s supposed to be a stupid show. And as much as I like Barack Obama I mean I still feel the same way about him, I’m glad he’s a great speaker and he seems like a really cool man with integrity or whatever, but he’s the president of the United States, there’s a lot of channels that have to go right before anything can get done. And so I really spend most of my political time just with my local guys. I know the Mayor of Oklahoma City, I know him, he’s my friend, we help each other. If the sewers in my neighbourhood are fucked up I have four guys that I can call that are gonna help my neighbourhood, that’s good enough for me.
M: Alrighty, well that’s good enough for me. So we’ll go from American politics to American Head, how’s that?
W: Yes, yes.
M: So the record’s been out a little while and there’s been a lot of people writing and I’m sure you’ve been talking to a lot of people about it, and I’m wondering with the hindsight of a few weeks how are you feeling about the way it’s been received, does it change how you relate to it with all the hubbub that surrounds a release like this?
W: Well, I mean, you get used to being thick skinned about no matter what you do. You say “Well I don’t care” if people don’t like it or whatever, you sort of have that mentality. And it’s not very often that you have to get used to people loving you. So that part of it is what I’m always ready for, to be defensive or whatever, and to just accept people’s opinions, and that’s fine. But when people love you so much and say, that part of it is, as much as I wish I could be indifferent to it it is absolutely wonderful. And I do try to read everything that people say. I mean I know a lot of music writers and I wanna know, I mean I read stuff that they do even when they’re not writing about The Flaming Lips. And so I wanna hear what people think about it and there’s lots of stuff that you can find out there you know.
And so yeah, I mean it’s absolutely wonderful and you just go “Wow.” It’s happened to us a couple other times where you really are just, you know part of us has already moved on to the next thing. I mean that’s just the way the world is. I mean we finished this album last January and we’re just creative people so we just keep creating stuff, we don’t just stop and say “I hope the world notices that one” and “What do we do now.” But it’s absolutely wonderful, when you know that you’ve connected with people and you know that they’re relating to the things that you’re singing about. And even in these strange, worrisome, sad times I think this record has… if I could just say this…if we didn’t make this record I would go get it and listen to it, I’d listen to it while going to sleep and stuff, cause it’s just a great, gentle, flowing, very melodic, it’s got these great sort of unexpected melodies, but they’re unexpected in a good human way, and it’s easy to feel this record. And sometimes we don’t do records like this, because they’re tough records to make.
M: I can imagine. Once you listen to the lyrics they’re pretty personal, especially from you. It’s pretty dark, I mean there’s a lot of death, a lot of drugs involved in it, but like you say the music itself is very soothing. So how should people approach all that?
W: Well, I mean I think that’s part of why it can work you know, I don’t think you can sing about something that’s too brutal and too ugly and then make the music and everything about it ugly too, it’s just no one is gonna wanna listen to that. Even no one is even gonna wanna make something like that.
So I think there is, it’s not a formula but there are certain storytelling elements, you can start to make music that is like telling your story, and then the music itself sometimes does evoke so much that you do start singing about melancholy things from your past. I mean, the song Dinosaurs On The Mountain, it almost seems like you know I’m gonna sing about something like that, you know I’m gonna sing about something that’s kind of melancholy and it’s kind of lost and it’s from my childhood but yet I’m still a grown man and I still have wishes about it. You can kind of tell that just from the way the… and so sometimes I think we’re making music and while we’re making the music and while we’re coming up with it, it’s letting us say more and more cause that’s the type of format that we’re in. It almost means that you have to say something, it’s just set up that way. And we like that it’s helping us sing things. But I don’t ever think it’s uncomfortable to sing about my brothers and my mother, I mean for me it’s not. It’s far enough away now, I mean my mother’s been dead for a long time, so I’m able to sing songs about her now cause if she was alive she’d get mad at me and she’d be embarrassed.
M: And just in general, is it a good thing to be kind of, nostalgic and sentimental and looking backwards rather than forwards when you’re making music do you think?
W: Well, I mean, I think those are terms that people use to sort of say “Oh you know, this music”… I don’t know, who would it be, Phil Collins or Michael Bolton or something. But no, I mean for me, and I think for most music lovers, if you really get down to it, sentimental music has the ability to… you time travel through music, it’s magic, and if you’re old enough, you have different places where music can take you that absolutely nothing else in the world can do that until they make a time machine. I mean I think the music has the power to do all that. And I don’t necessarily know if it’s looking back…everybody is singing songs from experience compared, what happened to them out of the minds that they have now.
I often say that I wanna listen to an old record but I want to hear it with my new mind, you know what I mean? Or I’ll read a passage out of a book or something, I want to reread it with my new mind, like what I know now. And I think that’s what we’re always doing with our music, is saying “I want to sing about this thing but I want to sing about it the way I am now”, and see if I can just get a little deeper and a little bit more knowing about this story which really is just knowing about yourself and knowing about your family and stuff. But when you do that you really are evoking a kind of universal sound. Everybody thinks about things from their past, everybody wishes there were things that they could change, everybody wishes that they understood why did I do this, I should have done that, and when you can capture that in music it’s an amazing amazing thing. Those simple human regrets and joys… that’s what music is you know.
M: Right, right. Now you mentioned your mind, and I’m concerned about it, because drugs are mentioned quite a bit, Quaaludes and LSD and weed, and having not partaken that much myself, but I’m thinking about it! I’m wondering do you regret the amount of drugs?
W: Did you say you’re thinking about doing more of them now?
M: Yes! I just turned sixty-five and I’ve told everybody that I’m ready to go now.
W: Right, I think I would be in exactly your category, I mean I, especially when I was young and my older brothers and their friends would do just drugs all the time! I mean I really was angered about it. The very first song on the album, Will You Return / When You Come Down, it really is a combination of stories from Steven’s (Drodz, band member) childhood and mine, about our brothers and their friends being on drugs and having car accidents and getting killed, and the fallout of all these horrible things, and I was lucky that I was young enough and resilient enough…I didn’t wanna do drugs because I saw how messed up everybody was. When there was a couple of car accidents that happened and our friends got killed, and this was when I was very young, you know I’m only thirteen or fourteen, I blamed these drugs, I blamed people being too fucked up on the drugs.
And then the guy that died, his girlfriend was pregnant and she killed herself and she was only fifteen and again I blamed the drugs. And now I don’t, I feel like I could have and should have been more empathetic, I should have tried to understand it more instead of just being angered about it, and I think that’s why I wanted to sing these songs this way and say these things because I don’t feel that way now. I really wish I could have just been with them. I didn’t even want to go to the funeral cause I just was like this is just… but when you’re thirteen or fourteen you don’t know if every friend for the rest of your life is gonna die in a car accident. It was a small time, it was a short time when all these very intense things happened and luckily my older brothers did get smarter and they did get more cautious and they did pull out of it. But there’s a lot of people who didn’t, and even on Steven’s side in his family and his friends and stuff a lot of people that didn’t. And I think that’s why we sing about it. I think we felt like we were right back then, but now we realise we were wrong.
M: Do you worry about the perception of glorifying it and encouraging people? I mean, I don’t know one way or the other anymore but…
W: No, I mean I don’t think most people are even gonna know what a Quaalude is. I mean you may know, but I don’t haha. Most people aren’t gonna know. And I think it’s long enough ago that we’re kind of evoking a mysterious past that could have happened or could be a story or could be a bunch of made-up stuff. I mean I remember listening to Strawberry Fields Forever you know, the Beatles song when I was eight years old, I didn’t know what stuff they were talking about. But I knew they were talking about something from their life and I thought “Man that’s fucking cool.” I didn’t really think about what all this stuff meant, I just thought it sounded great, so I allow that that could happen with our music as well. Though I’m singing about something that if you put me on the witness stand I could tell you the truth about it, but in a way I’m kind of singing something that it’s a time and it’s a place, so it could be any time and any place, that’s what you want.
M: I was thinking of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds myself, but there you go. You remember what a big deal they made about the fact that it was LSD in the title, kind of, if you thought about it long enough..
W: Well, which I think is very cool, I mean I think that just goes to show how cool of a song it is. I mean a lot of songs you probably wouldn’t listen to them more than once and say “Well if it’s about LSD, I don’t care cause it’s such a dumb song,” but it really is, by anybody’s standards, it’s an amazing, amazing song and amazing production and it’s amazing lyrics, and even the fact that people say it has LSD in it, I’m like “Well if that’s true that’s cool,” even if it’s not true it’s still wonderful, so yeah.
M: Yeah. Now, you’ve got a guest in on the album, Kacey Musgraves, and I’m curious as to how you kind of roped her in to working with the band, did you have a previous relationship, do you know each other?
W: Well “roped” is a little bit of the right word. Steven’s younger daughter, I think she’s twelve now, she loves, loves, loves music and she’ll latch onto something and just listen to it every day, so for the past two years, this going back a year or so, she was listening to Kacey Musgraves almost exclusively as they drove back and forth to school. So Steven, through the daughter, knew all the music that Kacey had done, and he quite liked it, and we were liking her anyway. I mean we really do love her voice, and she’s just got a great style about her, she’s a songwriter herself and her songs are great, her lyrics are great. But we didn’t know how we were going to reach her, I mean we knew plenty of people that knew her, we knew plenty of people that played in her groups, but it was a little bit like “Why don’t we just talk to her?”
And then, not this summer but the previous summer, they played a big American festival called Bonnaroo, and on the Saturday night slot when they played their encore, to this big festival on the Saturday night, they did our song “Do You Realize?” And so, in the middle of the night I’m getting texts from all these freaks that are there saying “I can’t believe it, Kacey did your song!” So I think that was, I mean, I couldn’t go back to sleep for a week, I was like it’s just too great, it’s too exciting.
But that gave us a little bit of a hint that if we could reach her she might be receptive. I mean you don’t want to reach someone and then say “Hey do you want to sing on our song?” and they’re like “No, I don’t like you,” I mean that’s tough. So we kinda knew that she’d liked us. And I think we knew that she would…she was up for like “Yeah send me song songs, let me see what I can do,” and she responded really well to the first couple of things, and so we knew that we were moving towards knowing “Okay we have a night where we’re going to be recording with her and we’ll get our music ready” and all that, and when she shows up we’ll be ready to go for a couple hours.”
But that’s why when you use this word “roped her in,” it’s like, I was wanting to come up with one more track, because once I knew she was going to do it I was like “Well let’s see if we can get two or three out of her, and see if that would work.” So we came up with this, it was just an accidental sort of song that we came up with, Steven was writing an intro to a song and I kept hearing it as just a new song, and then that became the God And The Policeman song. And so I just made it up thinking “Well maybe Kacey would sing this,” and so we put Steven’s vocal in instead of where Kacey’s was, and we sent that to her and said “Do you want to do a duet like this?” And she responded immediately like “Oh this is my favourite, this is great, I want to do this.” So, like bam! So just sheer dumb luck that she was up for it and the songs happened and she was available, and man.
And I really can’t quite believe it that it happened, I mean sometimes it’s just like you’re just trying and trying and trying and you don’t really know if it’s going to work. And when I hear the song now I’m just like “Oh my God, Kacey Musgraves is on this track, that’s amazing.” Yeah, it really is, she was the only person that we were really trying to get. We have another friend of ours, Micah Nelson, who is one of Willie Nelson’s younger boys, and we’ve done some music and stuff with him. He’s on one of the songs as well. But we knew he wanted to, cause we talk to him all the time and we’re all buddies. So trying to get Kacey just one of those funny things, there was nobody else that we wanted. And then she said yes, and we were kind of like “Oh, oh.”
M: She’s also on Flowers Of Neptune 6 I believe, which if my understanding is correct, is that a song that Steven started out right?
W: Right, I mean you know for the longest time that harmony that she’s doing would have been Steven’s harmony. But Steven, he wanted it to be Kacey, I mean we were singing it and sort of shaping it like if she wanted to sing that too, it would fit really well. But this is just one of those great sort of melodies that is, for me I still think of the song as three separate little melodic bits there, and that’s just one of those things that man… Steven will come up with these things that have that sort of connection, and he’ll sort of be like “I dunno if this is working, what do you think?” and I’m already like “Dude, it’s gonna work.” It’s so evocative to me and it just starts me thinking I already know what I’m gonna sing about, I already know what the characters can be, I already know what it could be. And so that’s probably one of the top three or four that he’s ever come up with, that’s just like “Oh man” you know, that’s so unique, so much Flaming Lips, and it’s so memorable and so emotional and just like, man. And Steven and I do, we call these little types of melodies and things, these are like gifts from the Gods Of Music, and we know that they only give out one or two a year, like you get one and someone else gets one over there, and so when you get it, such an amazing, amazing emotional melody like that, we make a promise to the universe that we will not screw this up, we won’t take it lightly and we’ll make it as precise and as juicy and as perfect as we can. So that’s the other part of it, and that’s why I don’t think we’d want to make records like this all the time, they just have a high intensity.
M: You and Steven and Michael (Ivins, bassist) and to a lesser extent David Fridmann (producer) have been working together for a very long time now, and has that relationship between you guys changed much? Do you have the same kind of interaction, are you coming from the same places now that you used to?
W: Well, I mean, that’s a good question, and I first started to work with Dave Fridmann a long time ago, 1988…I would not have been as aware of what I’m doing, back then I probably would have thought I know how to write songs and I can play a little bit, and I can sing a little bit, and the rest of it is kind of gonna be up to technology and noises and stuff that make it all work.
And he was very keen to be like “Whatever it is you guys want to do, I’ll help you do it,” and he’s got a great, great ear for dynamic sounds, and he knows how to make a mix really fat and loud and get rid of all the clutter and all that. But as we would go along…now it’s a long time that we’ve been working together…as we would go along he would be more in there, even when we were coming up with the songs, saying “Here’s how this could go,” and he would have a little bit of say in “Let’s make this faster and maybe cut out this third verse,” so more and more having another opinion about “I think this part’s working but I don’t think that part’s working,” and so, as we’ve gone along, I think more and more we can do it now without even having to say much to each other. I just know, I can feel the guys in the room are excited and they have an energy and they’re leaping on to whatever we’re doing, or they’re not, and when they’re not I keep working until they are, but when they are I know something here is working.
I mean ultimately for good or bad it’s my decision in the end. When things are going good it’s not anybody’s decision, it just is already decided because we know it’s working or whatever, but when you have to make a decision and no one knows what to do, then it’s gonna be me. And so I like it when it’s easy to decide, and I want everybody to like it and understand it and be part of its creation and part of what’s making it good.
M: Now the album finishes off with a song called My Religion Is You, and it seems to me that a lot of people that I know that have kind of entered, you’re about fifty-nine I think, I’m sixty-five…
W: Yep, fifty-nine yep.
M: A lot of people seem to return to religion when they start to get a little bit older, and you had a little experience at Catholic church or school from what I understand, so I’m wondering what your view on all that is, has it kind of seeped back into your life at all?
W: Well, no, but the more experiences you get and all that, I mean I don’t know your life, but I’m just saying for me I’ve never really needed…I’ve never been in a situation being like, your family burned up in a fire…you know there is just no answer for some things in the world. And I can totally understand why this type of accessible religion exists, and I would say to my mother all the time, I was young, I mean it was only like first or second grade, it wasn’t very long that we were in Catholic school, but there would be a lot of gobbledy gibberish about Jesus dying for your sins and stuff that I still don’t quite understand what they mean by that. And my mother knew that we just weren’t a family that needed that, we had a stable, beautiful, cool, smart way we grew up, we weren’t in turmoil and tragedy and uncertainty. And she said “Well you know, religion’s for people that don’t have anybody that loves them.” They know God loves them and they know Jesus loves them cause they don’t really have a mother and they don’t have a dad, and they don’t have brothers. And I think that’s probably true. But I would just say, especially when I was younger, if my mother and dad and all my brothers and stuff had died, I probably would be searching for something.
M: You need something don’t you.
W: Well yeah, and so I never put it down, and I feel like if you need it it’s there for you, you should believe in it. I don’t like religion when it says gay people are bad or any of that, that’s all bullshit to me, and I think a lot of people believe that. But there’s a lot of things about religion that are wonderful, to be patient and to be kind and forgiveness and all of those things, they are absolutely true. It’s just sometimes it’s very hard to get the little diamonds separated from all the shitty rocks and dust that is thrown around. So when I say “My Religion Is You,” this really is something that I would have said to my mother, because she would say “Well you know, that’s what religion is, religion’s this thing,” and I would just say “Well my religion is you,” and she would just say “Wayne you would say that.” And that would be great for me. Having that in a song, I think most people that are listening to The Flaming Lips I think would totally understand where I’m coming from in that song.
M: Now, you mentioned earlier that you read a lot of what people write about you guys, and one of the things that I read was somebody was speculating that they felt that it seemed over the last decade or so that The Flaming Lips had kind of lost their way and now they’ve kind of come back to wherever it is that they think they should be. Do you have any reaction to that, do you feel the same way, how do you feel about people speculating on stuff like that?
W: Well, I totally understand what they mean by that. I think for Steven and I, after we did The Soft Bulletin we really were set up right away to do the Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots record, and these are kind of albums that, you know when we were making them they’re just another record. We weren’t young but we weren’t old enough to think “Oh man, we’re gonna be singing these songs for the rest of our lives”, they were just albums that we made you know. But The Soft Bulletin became this album that…we sing it every night, a lot of those songs we sing them every night, well every night that we play, we don’t play every night, but every night that we play, and the Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots record is the other songs. It’s not like we ever stopped being those records. And so I think for the first five or six years after those two records were out we kinda sort of felt like “Well those are us,” and are we gonna try to make another record that seems like those but isn’t like that when we don’t really want to? And we were in a position with Warner Brothers and they were like “People are always gonna listen to The Soft Bulletin, they’re always gonna listen to Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, do what is ever in your heart, and have fun, and don’t worry about it.”
M: That’s nice, that’s nice freedom to have.
W: Yeah, and I think they very much encouraged us to be like, whatever path you’re on that’s the record you should make. And they would remind us, the path you were on that made you do The Soft Bulletin, that was the path you were on that made you do Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. Those weren’t accessible; they didn’t seem like records that should be popular when we made them, that was just the path we were on. You know when you’re in the middle of it, it doesn’t feel like that at all. Steven and I were never trying to make another Soft Bulletin, we didn’t really want to, there was already one there, it’s like this is us, and then in the way that The Soft Bulletin was made it’s like, we were those dudes, making The Soft Bulletin was a bulletin that was happening to us, it was something that we were trying to understand, it was a storm that we were trying to understand ourselves, that’s why we made the music, and so we would never be those dudes again, once we know it we already understand it, we learned it.
But I totally understand what they mean, I for sure know what they mean. And I think this record, even though it’s not coming from the same place, I think resembles that longing and that longing to understand yourself that The Soft Bulletin and some of Yoshimi does. So yeah, I understand that. And we do make a lot of records, I mean there was one year, I think we had three records come out the same year. But we like recording and we like creating, and we produce our own records, I mean Dave Fridmann he definitely helps us make our records, but we’re making them ourselves, we’re writing them and recording them, so I don’t know. And in our defense it’s like we’re not trying to make The Soft Bulletin again, we are purposefully not trying to do that. But I can understand why people would say that.
M: I must say that your plastic bubble thing, you were prescient on that, you’re like a trailblazer for social distancing, so I can imagine that the next time I see the band, not only you will be in a plastic bubble but everybody else will be as well. it would be awesome.
W: Well it’s funny you say that, as soon as I’m done with this call I’m driving down to a big venue in town where they’re setting up a hundred space bubbles even as we speak to do a concert, in about three weeks we’re gonna do a concert, so you’re exactly right. Okay bye, it’s good to talk to you Marty, thank you!
American Head is out now on Warner Brother Records.
