The Flaming Lips

[nodep5]

what is everyone's thoughts on the Lips. I haven't heard the Xmas on Mars stuff and I wasn't on this board when AWWTM was released. Are they still anywhere close to making stuff as moving and relevant as Bulletin or Yoshimi. I don't think AWWTM is awful, but for the standard they set, it definetly falls off the radar lyrically especially. Just wondering?

[mjpuczko]

From Rolling Stone:

 

 

 

The Flaming Lips

Title TBD July

 

After the Flaming Lips' Steven Drozd failed to sell his Oklahoma house last year, the band turned the empty home into a temporary recording studio. "We're capturing more immediate kinds of rock sounds there," says frontman Wayne Coyne. "It's different than the computer-generated beats of the last couple of records." The group is re-teaming with longtime producer Dave Fridmann for its 12th LP

[sureshot]

yeah, but from what I've been told WC has a coke habit. so, that might be the "it" to introduce into your life.

 

Bullshit; especially after seeing Steven go through his heroin battle I highly doubt he would touch anything like that

 

In his own words:

 

Wayne insists on one last question. "Okay," I say, "drugs."

 

Coyne replies, "Heroin, cocaine and crystal meth: Don't bother with them, don't hang around people that do them, because its dangerous to be around people who do them." The answer comes easily for Coyne after so many years of reports liberally tossing around the words drug damaged to describe his career. "They're made of horrible substances and hanging around people who do them will get you killed or get you AIDS some horrible shit." Hard shit aside, the rest of his response rings a bit more true for the long-haired commander of troops of magic rabbits. "I think there's other drugs that are left up to the individual. If you're young and you're seeking some intense experiences, there are things like LSD and ecstasy and peyote and marijuana that let you have a subjective, personal, intense moment, and they let you get a little bit braver or have a different mindset. If you don't want to them, you shouldn't do them, but there's elements of experimenting with yourself that I think are wonderful."

 

I ask whether he's touched the stuff. "I've done LSD a couple of times, and I've done some speedy drugs from time to time because you want to keep awake, but I've found the best option for me is to be healthy and be awake," he says, that yellow bottle of Vitamin Water still propped up on the table in front of him. "But I would never want to restrict anyone."

http://www.popmatters.com/music/interviews...ps-060901.shtml

[Orkie]

what is everyone's thoughts on the Lips. I haven't heard the Xmas on Mars stuff and I wasn't on this board when AWWTM was released. Are they still anywhere close to making stuff as moving and relevant as Bulletin or Yoshimi. I don't think AWWTM is awful, but for the standard they set, it definetly falls off the radar lyrically especially. Just wondering?

 

 

Listening to the WAND and Pompeii from AWWTM, they are still very capable. Also, their new cover of Madonna's Borderline is brilliant.

 

I have nothing but high hopes for the new record. This is the greatest American rock band of the last 20 years.

[jakobnicholas]

Listening to the WAND and Pompeii from AWWTM, they are still very capable. Also, their new cover of Madonna's Borderline is brilliant.

 

I have nothing but high hopes for the new record. This is the greatest American rock band of the last 20 years.

 

 

 

Nice post. I agree 100 percent.

[mfwahl]

The Flaming Lips to Drop Double LP

 

-Might be called Embryonic

-Song titles include "Convinced of the Hex" and "I Don't Understand Karma".

-

Here is the more detailed Billboard link

 

http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/flamin...003972098.story

[jakobnicholas]

All digital retailers now have the new 3-song Flaming Lips EP, appropriately titled, "SONGS FROM THE FUTURE ALBUM EMBRYONIC".

 

The songs will be on their album in the Fall. The 30-second itunes teaser for each song sounds promising. I may have to buy these. Here's the song titles:

 

“Convinced of The Hex”

“The Impulse”

“Silver Trembling Hands”

[mfwahl]

All digital retailers now have the new 3-song Flaming Lips EP, appropriately titled, "SONGS FROM THE FUTURE ALBUM EMBRYONIC".

 

The songs will be on their album in the Fall. The 30-second itunes teaser for each song sounds promising. I may have to buy these. Here's the song titles:

 

“Convinced of The Hex”

“The Impulse”

“Silver Trembling Hands”

It's awesome. Convinced of the hex has a very heavy Bitches Brew influence. This little taste leads me to believe this will be better than At War, which I still love.

[jakobnicholas]

It's awesome. Convinced of the hex has a very heavy Bitches Brew influence. This little taste leads me to believe this will be better than At War, which I still love.

 

 

It really is a great tease and makes me excited to hear the whole thing.

 

Pitchfork did an interview with Wayne Coyne during the Pitchfork Music Fest. Wayne talks a little of making the record:

 

 

 

 

 

Pitchfork: So you've got some new ones off your new album, it's called Embryonic?

 

WC: Yeah, we feel it's still new to us…I don't know, it's a bit difficult, even by our standards.

 

Pitchfork: Were you trying to do anything in particular with it?

 

WC: Well you try not to just do the same thing over and over again, which is difficult. I think once you've made one record, you can easily say, well let's just try something different. But after you've made 13 or 14 records…

 

Not that it should be difficult. I just think people get used to doing what the audience likes. We wanted to try some new trip and see if we had it in us. It's not that we're fearless, I just don't think we thought everything else we were doing was that great anyway. What kind of ego would you have to have to be like, "Well I just wrote this song and it's great"? I'm glad the audience likes it, and I'm glad that it lets us be this renowned group or whatever, but I think for me, it's always going into the unknown, trying to do something new or trying to surprise yourself. For the artist, that's where the thrill is.

Pitchfork: So there was nothing like, you weren't going to go into it thinking, oh this will be totally different--

 

WC: Well I think you know what you don't want to do, and I think that's what probably guides most people, and I think we did a lot of that. When me and [drummer] Steven [Drozd] began jamming in his old house…Steven got a new house, a year ago this summer, and he put his old house up on the market, and that was the exact moment the housing market completely fell apart. So his house has been sitting there waiting for someone to buy it, and he has all his recording equipment in his old house, and he has a couple of small kids, real small, so we could never go at like one o'clock in the morning over to his house and start banging on drums and things like that.

 

Well, we were in his old house, and the kids were at the other house, and we were just sitting there, recording on the computer-- everyone does that nowadays-- but we were like, "Let's get out the drums and dick around." And it was mostly just dicking around, and he set up a couple of microphones ‘cause he's got some there, and just out of something to do, we weren't thinking it was anything, we'd jam for like 20 minutes or so and then we'd listen back, and be like, "That minute or two right there? That's awesome! I don't know what that is, but that's awesome!" The rest of it was just a bunch of junk, but there would be a couple of moments where we really got into some strange groove. And then we'd just take that couple of minutes and work on it again, overdub some stuff. We'd collect five or six of those, then went up to [producer] Dave Fridmann's studio, and then once he heard them, then we thought, well maybe we should do this.

 

But that's how it works. Once you know you're trying to find some accidental groove you never find it, and half the time you don't remember it, the computer's on or whatever. I don't think we could have ever sat down and thought, we're gonna play this thing, ‘cause some of it, if you're a musician, you'll hear it and think that it's out of time, and it's faulty. But to me, if you have a computer, you can make music that's perfect by pressing a button, you know, it's not hard to make precise music. It's still very difficult to make music that is unique, or emotional. So in some ways, I think we were trying to get beyond that "Ah, I wonder if it's good, or if it's retarded, or if we've lost our fucking minds" or whatever.

 

Pitchfork: Do you worry about that?

 

WC: Yeah! But you're always insecure, unless you're like, Prince, and you just think you can take a shit and it's gonna be good. You always struggle. For me, once we put out a record, it is what it is. I can't really justify it. I know how much [listeners] give the records meaning. I can write a song and think it means a certain thing, but the power really comes from you. You grab the song and put your life into it, and then it's this mega powerful thing. It's not about me, it's about the listener. You just don't know.

 

But I think people would want to know that the Flaming Lips are not really trying to make some calculation of what we think is gonna be cool, we just do stuff and lose our minds and…it works. It's embarrassing though, you'd think that after all this time you'd figure out how shit works, how to produce records. But you can't, and that's the beauty of it and the danger of it, is you always end up not knowing what the fuck you're doing. But that's what art is! I mean, craft is something different. I'm not against any craft, it takes a lot of skill to figure out how to do some things, but art really is always working completely…new, you don't know what you're gonna do. So I'm lucky, and if we haven't done anything else, I know we've done that. I'll take my beating if I have one coming.

[mfwahl]

 

Pitchfork did an interview with Wayne Coyne during the Pitchfork Music Fest. Wayne talks a little of making the record:

Thanks for posting that. Really good read.