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When you are sixteen years old and working at Long John Silver’s and lying face down on the floor certain you’re about to die, while a man holding a gun screams at you to stay the fuck down as he robs the cash register, the constant proximity of death is seared into your brain in a very personal way.

That sixteen-year-old was Wayne Coyne, and although he didn’t know it then, that encounter with death – and every subsequent one – would stick in his imagination, seep through his sub-conscious and come out of his body as art.

Of course, the 48-year-old singer of the Flaming Lips doesn’t feel very comfortable discussing art.  In fact, every time he uses the word, he makes sure you know that he knows that it’s all just a bunch of bullshit.  But, the fact remains:  Coyne and the Lips are responsible for elevating pop music to the status of art – whether it be with an album that requires the listener to play four discs on four separate stereos at the same time (Zaireeka) or with one of the greatest musical creations of the twentieth century (The Soft Bulletin).

By now, the story of the Lips’ humble beginnings in Oklahoma and their decades-long toil in relative obscurity followed by hard-earned and well-deserved recognition has been driven into the ground.  So have the tales of their unrivaled work ethic and everyman populism.  All that really needs to be said, then, is that more than twenty years into their career, the Flaming Lips still have the capacity to be weirder, more expansive, more interesting and more daring than any band on the planet.

For proof, look no further than their new double-album mindfuck, Embryonic.  It is the band’s darkest work to date, and among their best.  The songs are kind of like electrons – one can never pin them down with complete certainty.  They exist in a cloud of probability, not fully formed, inviting the listener to pour him-or-herself into them.

Coyne recently made time to talk to Thriller about Embryonic, the band’s remake of Dark Side of the Moon, and all other things Flaming Lips.

*For a Grooveshark playlist with the Flaming Lips’ new album, Embryonic, email THRILLERMAG@GMAIL.COM*

I notice a theme running through all of your work:  Love and Death.  There’s this mixture of kind of loving, childlike wonder, but at the center of that is always death – whether in titles like “In a Priest Driven Ambulance” or in songs like “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate,” and “Waitin’ for a Superman.”  And, it’s one of the reasons I think “Do You Realize??” became such a big song, because it has that perfect mixture of love and death.  Is that something you do consciously?

Well, I think probably anybody who does any kind of art, you’d think that there would be some of these big universal themes:  Sex, drugs, love, death, power.  I think all of those must play into everybody’s sense of, “Here’s who I am, and here’s what I’m afraid of, and here’s what I believe in,” sort of shit.  *CLICK TO LISTEN* I mean, I definitely think that the awareness of death has, in some ways, probably helped me most in my life.  When I worked at Long John Silver’s, when I was sixteen, we got robbed, and I remember lying on the floor certain that I was going to die.  I wouldn’t have known how much that was going to leave a permanent fold in my mind, because you don’t know when you’re twenty years old that you’re going to be making records when you’re almost fifty.  You just think you’re only going to make one, and no one’s going to give a shit, and you’ll just be on with it.  I think the more that you have to make art – and I know this sounds kind of pretentious, but I don’t mean art in a pretentious way.  I mean, I accept that I’m an artist, but I’m not proud of that.  This is what I do, you know – what the fuck?  But I think any time you have to make art, you can’t predict and you can’t plan for . . . I mean, being in the Flaming Lips, we’ve had times where we have sometimes it seems like years to decide what we want to do.  But we really don’t.  A lot of times, it’s like, “Fuck, we have to do this thing, and we have to do it right now.”  And you do end up, if you’re lucky, making these things out of the subconscious shit you just have with you all the time.  You don’t really dream of stories, and plots and colors.  It is always kind of immediate.  I think you’re right – I’d love to be psychoanalyzed, but I don’t actually believe in it [laughs].  But if you could see something in all of that, I think it’s the awareness of not just your own death, but that other things around you will die, but the happiness and the magic in your life, you’re the one who makes all those things.  I mean, someone was telling me a story about how seeing the wonder in the world is harder than it appears.  I forget who it was, but they held up a glass of water and were like, “Water.  What the fuck?  How amazing is this?”  You know what I mean?  But, we could spend our whole life looking at insects, and spider webs and glasses of water and be missing out on another aspect of life.  It’s a motherfucker [laughs].

That being said, I feel like Embryonic is your darkest album ever.  In songs like “If” and “Evil” and a few others, I actually hear some pessimism, which isn’t something I’m used to hearing from the Flaming Lips.  Am I wrong?

*CLICK TO LISTEN* I don’t know if it’s pessimism.  I try to be realistic.  As much as anybody would say that we’re optimistic, I always say we’re not even optimistic.  I think we’re realistic.  Realistic meaning that, yeah, we’re aware that pain and suffering, in the end, will defeat us.  We can’t just overcome that because we have a good attitude, and I know that.  A lot of things in life, you can change it just by your perception of what it is.  But, we’re not ever going to pretend that it’s all that way.  I just know from seeing my own friends and relatives die, and even my own pain and suffering, I know as much as I’m lucky and I’m energetic and all that, that’s all pretty diminished when you’re struggling with physical pain.  It wasn’t that we weren’t aware of that with previous recordings, but I don’t think we’re always channeling the dimensions of our life.  I think sometimes you just write dumb songs, and you don’t really know what they mean.  But, I would say with Embryonic, there were definitely a couple of powerful moods that we stumbled upon that we secretly were like, “I like this, and I know it speaks to an aspect of the Flaming Lips that we don’t delve into a lot.”  Once we stumbled upon these, we kept exploring this new weird area that I don’t think is devoid of optimism, but it is definitely a bleaker mood.  But, in a sense, I don’t want people to think that I’ve changed.  I think my outlook, if anything, is broader, that I can even see how aspects of pain and suffering, without that, we don’t get a glimpse into life.  So, it’s almost like we have to be overwhelmed by some of that before we can see the wonder in everyday life.  Again, it’s just a motherfucker [laughs].

You said you were delving into some new moods with this album.  How would you describe those moods?

Well, we – especially me and Steven [Drozd], I mean, we’re the main songwriters in the group – we would run into this songwriter’s curse, where you’d sit there and think, “Oh, I’ll just write a song, and I’ll come up with a couple of chord changes and a melody, and we’ll attach some sentiment to that.”  And that’s not to say that that’s bad.  I know that we found ourselves doing that and not necessarily being thrilled by it or bored by it, it just becomes like, “Hey, that sounds cool.”  But, we also would do these free-form jams, which we did not think would be very productive.  After we would get done with them, we would literally be thrilled.  Even though we thought it kind of sucked, we thought, “Man, that was a lot of fun.”  I just knew that our energy started to push us into that sort of thing because it was new and strange, and it got us away from having to think with the front of our minds about songwriting and let us play with music in a subconscious area of our minds.  And I know that sounds like bullshit.  But, it’s a difficult thing to do because you want to be aware all the time of what’s happening, but music plays with an area of your mind that is really kind of impossible to go to on purpose.  It’s a strange dimension – I know it is for me, anyway. *CLICK TO LISTEN* I can only really glimpse the true glory of creations while I’m fucking focusing on something else.  So, I think while we were focused on these songs that we thought we were making – we knew we were making them, as I say, with the front of our conscious minds – I think our subconscious was just back there fuckin’ freaking out.  So, with Dave Fridmann’s help, and a lot of encouragement from everybody around us, we kept following that saying, “Yeah?  Should we do that?”  And people would say, “I don’t know if you should, but it’s wicked to listen to.”  I don’t know how we did it or why we did it.  It wasn’t as a rebellion against the music that we had done previously.  We don’t really think like that.  We just were taking whatever pleased us at the time.

Another thing I noticed on Embryonic, is that there’s a lot of lyrics about deconstructing the ego.  When you put that with all of the astrological signs in the song titles, I’m not sure if those are just throwaway things or if there’s some grander message you were going for.  I mean, it’s kind of a very Buddhist concept of deconstructing the ego . . .

Totally, yeah.  You know, a lot of philosophical things, they are abstract in a way.  You really can’t ever be them, exactly.  The minute you become them, you’re going against something else.  But, I can say for sure that these ideas of believing that your life is really driven by some cosmic entity – the stars, or whatever – I mean, part of me knows that that’s just completely bullshit.  But, part of me wants to believe that we are, in some way, a slave to something.  Instead of everything in our lives necessarily being about, “Here’s what I want.  Here’s what I believe. Here’s what I think is right, and I have the power to do it.  Fuck it.”  There’s a surrendering. I know it sounds stupid and very hippie-like, but there are times when I just like standing with trees, and dirt, and with my dogs and animals.  I’m not more powerful than a tree or my dogs; I’m just one of them.  Those things, I think, can add little nuances to expression that are really unspeakable.  And maybe that’s why I think this kind of music is kind of . . . I mean, words like “animalistic” or “primitive,” they don’t really do it justice, but they hint at something that is less contrived.  But, at the same time, I have to say there are elements of Steven’s playing – I mean, sometimes I’m playing a very simple, dumb riff.  But, Steven is playing these very dense, strange, advanced chord structures with this real subtle sound, and it does shape what your mind is thinking.  It’s almost like putting a spice on a piece of chicken.  If my bass part is the chicken, Steven is giving this stuff this subtle flavoring, this subtle spice that devastatingly changes the way your mind is thinking of it.  And, I’m not saying we did that knowing that it would work that great.  We just started to do it, and we liked it, and we thought, “Let’s explore that.”  Every time we’d have this strange, menacing sounding riff, he could place these chords over top of it, and it would give you this air of acceptance or something.  I know it’s bullshit to talk about like that, but it did conjure a mood.

I was surprised by the lack of drums on Embryonic.  About half of the songs on the album have no drums on them, so you get songs like “Powerless” where the whole song is building tension and you’re just waiting for these big drums to come rip your head off, and they never come.  Was that something you did on purpose?

Well, I know.  I didn’t occur to me as we were making it.  We would just sort of go back and forth.  Sometimes to do the drum tracks, it’s just a pain in the ass, because it’s a lot of playing and recording, and everybody has to play together.  And other times, you’re not really all playing together in the same way, yet this thing kind of erupts.  But, I know what you mean.  The drums are either fuckin’ completely wicked or they’re almost invisible.  There’s no real middle ground with this record, which I thought was kind of cool.  I mean, we were using a lot of shakers, and congas, and squeaky bits of things we would find in the studio.

You just mentioned shakers.  This album is the first time I have ever been impressed by a maraca.  Some of the patterns those shakers are playing are pretty crazy.

[Laughs] I know, because we would listen to records that we were not ever aware that there were congas and shakers on them.  I mean, this is bullshit musicians being so narcissistic, only listening to themselves.  For years, I heard records and never considered what was the rhythm track.  But, the minute you hear, “Oh, there are some congas there, there are some shakers there.”  I mean, there are some Rolling Stones songs where the loudest thing in the mix is the shaker, and it’s fuckin’ genius, you know?  So I think we took our cues from this stupid realization – or, not stupid, it was stupid of us not to realize it sooner – and we would just turn them up as loud as you could possibly make it.  Because you’re just not aware how much power a shaker can have in a song.  I forget what it’s called – there’s this little wood block that plays on “The Ego’s Last Stand,” and it changes the whole mood of it.  I don’t know why those little things can make so much difference, and I think we were glad that we were discovering that.  It wasn’t necessarily based in music and arranging, it was more trying to really feel the power of these moods and not – it’s a bullshit thing to say – but not over-think it.  I mean, everybody will say that. *CLICK TO LISTEN* You want to make music that’s in tune and in time, but sometimes it’s this strange sloppiness that works even better.  Being expressive, it’s just hard to do.  When it happens to us, we just fuckin’ grab it and say, “We got lucky there.  Let’s keep it.”

Let’s talk about the remake you did of Dark Side of the Moon.

We’ve already kind of done it.  I think it hangs in the balance now – I believe the remaining living members of Pink Floyd and their publishing company have to decide whether we’re able to put it out or not.  I think they will [editors note:  It was released December 29].

So you recorded it without knowing whether or not you could release it?

Well, there are so many recordings of Dark Side of the Moon out there, I just assume they will.  I don’t think they care that much.  We’ve only been stopped twice, really.  We were stopped by Prince for recording “Purple Rain” a couple years back, and we were warned by Michael Jackson’s publishing people way back in the late-’80s about recording any of his stuff.

What made you pick Dark Side of the Moon?

Embryonic was getting ready to come out – this is back right at the very end of September.  We were doing “The Colbert Report,” and I was driving in a car over to the studio, I think.  And, iTunes always thinks that a group like the Flaming Lips must have like 50 tracks just lying around that we’re not going to do anything with.  They said, “We need seven or eight B-sides for Embryonic.  Could you guys make a little iTunes exclusive EP?”  I said, “Well, we don’t really have anything left over. Embryonic, for whatever it’s worth, is everything that we have.”  And, I swear to God, I said this as a joke, because they wanted us and my nephew’s band –Stardeath and White Dwarfs – to do something together.  I said, “Well, why don’t we just record Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and put that out?”  And I said it without really giving it any thought, just sort of like, “Well, that’d be cool, wouldn’t it?”  About a week later, our manager Scott and iTunes came back and said, “We checked into that.  We think that would be really cool.  Why don’t you do that?”

In the meantime, I had given it a little bit of thought, like, “What would we do?”  And, I know Steven had some ideas about, mostly, how we would do “Money.”  I guess “Money” is the big song that everybody would say, “Fuck, what do you do with that?”  Once we had a couple of ways we could manage and re-do “Money” and not feel embarrassed about it, we thought some of the other stuff should be easy.  We had a couple of free days right before the record came out, and we just went into the studio here.  We called Henry Rollins – he was up for doing the strange little observer voices that are on there.  I’m not sure he was that familiar with Pink Floyd.  I know he knows of the Flaming Lips, and he knows that I’ve spoken about how much I respect Henry, and how much he’s a hero of mine.  Whenever I get a chance to give him a shout out, I do, and I think this was his way of paying me back.

Did you try to be true to the original, or did you put your own spin on it?

We tried to do something as unique as we could.  You know, we’ve played Pink Floyd songs our whole life.  Some of them are very resilient, too.  You can almost do anything you want with them, and they still retain the sentiment, the ideas and the inertia that Pink Floyd put into it.  The songs are just so well written and so well arranged.  I think some of them are complete overhauls, where you’d listen to it and say, “I think I’ve heard this song before,” and then halfway through it, you’d go, “Oh, that’s that fuckin’ Pink Floyd song.”  And then, there are others where you’ll recognize it as the Pink Floyd song a little sooner.  But, I think most of them are pretty good re-workings.  With my nephew’s group, sometimes they wouldn’t know how far they could push it.  I was like, “Fuck, go as crazy as you want.”

One thing that I find interesting about the Flaming Lips is your use of symbols.  You use these things like the nun hand puppet, or the bubble, or the big hands – these things that are theatrical take on a life of their own.  They become symbolic in a weird way.  I don’t think the crowd really knows what it is about them, but they kind of develop their own power.  Do you put that kind of thought into them before you use them?

*CLICK TO LISTEN*I think at first, I kind of put myself in the audience, and I say, “What would I want to see Wayne do tonight if I was eighteen and I was on a couple of hits of acid with my girlfriend?”  Sometimes, it’s just really that.  When I came up with that space bubble thing, I just knew if I was standing in the audience, I’d be like, “Fuck, that was cool.”  You know, there’s a story of the first big stadium show Van Halen did, when they were opening up for R.E.O. Speedwagon or something.  Van Halen was in a little trailer that was parked in the middle of this stadium.  The guys in Van Halen were in this trailer from eight o’clock in the morning while the audience started pouring in.  And, before their show, a fuckin’ helicopter goes overhead, and four guys parachute out of this helicopter, and they’re dressed like the guys from Van Halen.  They land on the field and run inside this little trailer, and from the other side, out jumps Van Halen, they run up on stage and play.  You know, if you’re seventeen years old, and you’re on a couple hits of acid, that’s a fuckin’ great thing.  To me, that’s what rock shows are.  You’ve got a lot of money, you’re supposed to be able to do crazy shit, now do some crazy shit.  It doesn’t mean that it takes away emotion, or impact, or seriousness, but to me, all that stuff is what rock bands – and I wouldn’t say all forms of music – but rock bands are supposed to do that.  I like to do that.  And, I think the fact that we do them over and over and over sets it up to be this kind of ritualistic aspect of our show.  I think we’re just lucky that these dumb things that I like to do, they look cool in pictures and people get a kick out of it.

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Buy these albums now:  Zaireeka | The Soft Bulletin | Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots | Embryonic

Watch this movie:  ”The Fearless Freaks”

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