A Conversation with The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne – HuffPost 8.23.13
Mike Ragogna: Hey Wayne, how are you doing?
Wayne Coyne: I’m good. I’m gonna be sitting here doing some coloring and stuff while we speak, maybe some doodling.
MR: Will this said coloring and doodling perhaps become the sequel to your current comic book, The Sun Is Sick?
WC: Well, seeing how easily I set it up for you, we can do this! It’s true though, I never thought about it very much, it’s not really multi-tasking, I think people overplay that, but this idea that I’m doodling is like a busybody something to do while you’re talking. But it is wonderful how these sort of subconscious, whatever you want to call them, these automatic drawings that you can do sometimes really are great little unexpected creations. You just start off doing something and while you’re not thinking about it, you’re doing these moves and doing these moves and before you know it, you’ve got this great little picture. We’re not doing long interviews, I can be drawing on the same thing several times in a week. It’s meant to just be f**king just kind of absurd that I get to do, but then it turns into stuff and after I’d get done with an interview, I’d be like, “Oh, that’s cool, I should draw a couple panels and connect those together and see where it goes.” That is certainly how the other one went and this one was already going because I didn’t really know I was going to stop and do the other one. I just kept going and George my computer guy suggested, “Hey, you’ve got to stop! It’s going to be too long, you don’t want it to be one of those god-awful long graphic novel things,” so I was like, “Okay,” so I stopped and now I’m working on the second one.
MR: Well my heart would be sickened, sickened I say, if you weren’t working on another. Or some experiment with the group. So, I imagine there’s yet another album up your sleeve, right?
WC: Well we started talking about that just a little while ago and we’ve actually been recording the beginnings of that just this week, just starting on Monday night when I got home from Los Angeles. The group was here, there’s a group we’ve known for a little while now called Linear Downfall, kind of an apocalyptic name, but they’re a really young group out of Nashville. We’ve done some recording stuff with them in the past. They’re insanely good musicians, not that that was the priority, we just wanted to get another flavor that Steven and I felt comfortable with. We’d been around them a bunch so we just invited them out so they and maybe a few other musicians would be this new weirdo ensemble that we at the moment are calling Electric Worms. Any time you get to make music, even with a group that we’ve had as long as The Flaming Lips, any time you get to explore and see what happens, that is a lot of fun. So that’s kind of what we’re doing.
MR: Nice. And of course you’re coming off your latest album, The Terror, that has a theme I’m having a hard time believing–feeling hopelessly hopeless. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Not from the Archimedes of rock!
WC: [laughs] I don’t think it would be like a state of mind that we persisted in. I think there is something about the way that Steven (Drozd) and I both work on music that sometimes we’re just going with however we feel. A lot of times, you can feel a certain way for a certain part of the day but then your mind says, “Hey this is no big deal,” and you just move on with it. But Steven and I remarked that we liked this kind of music that is in that mood, where it doesn’t become optimistic. When you’re working with someone that’s as good of a musician as Steven, it’s easy to do emotional creations. What I mean by that is I’m not a very good musician, so when I write songs, I get what I get and I make up a lot of stuff in a certain simple area. When working with Steven, there’s no limit to it, so oftentimes, if it starts off optimistic, it become kind of explosively optimistic. These things, I think, almost sort of explode into optimism. There are other times where we’re making music and we’re not trying to be optimistic or we’re just in other moods and we end up really liking that and we have to kick ourselves and say, “Now let’s not make this into the grand epic happy ending.” I think that’s mostly what we did with The Terror. We just hunkered down and said, “Let’s focus on this thing even though it’s probably not…” If you were around us even on those days you wouldn’t think, “Oh my God, they’ve gotten gloomy and sad and don’t seem to be able to get out of it.” It’s really just a type of mood that we really like in music and thought we should focus ourselves and do that because I know that we wanted to do it. So that’s my take on it.
MR: Okay, well with titles like “Butterfly, How Long It Takes To Die” and the title track, mission accomplished. Hey, was there any moment during the process when you heard what you recorded and went, “Oh God, we went too deep”?
WC: I think that when we did the song that we ended up calling “The Terror,” we didn’t call it “The Terror” in the beginning. A lot of times, you’re just doing a track and you don’t know what you’re going to call it. When we were doing the track I accidentally–and I say that as true as a person can be–I accidentally said the line, “We don’t control the controls.” Part of that, to me, seemed very, very true. You have to remember, we didn’t know that we were optimistic. We never really thought about it much, we realize that now that we go back and listen to our music and the way that we are, we go, “Oh, I think we are that way.” But we didn’t always know that. We’re really striving, we’re trying to say some internal thing and I think with us, given enough time, this optimism comes out and our music shows that. It wasn’t that we thought, “Oh my God, we’ve become these old, bleak motherf**kers,” we just knew that this is part of why we’re optimistic. If you really are happy all the time, this idea that you’re optimistic, I don’t know if it would matter to you, because you wouldn’t see any reason to have any other state of mind. I think when you have experiences to show you that the world is unfair and full of pain and there’s a lot of suffering and it’s not always your suffering that causes you pain, it can cause you trouble. So I think it’s that, there are parts of us that say, “Let’s sing about that.” But that line, “We don’t control the controllers,” I think that freed us up to talk about just this side of our nature. I talk about this a lot, I don’t really know–even this desire I have to do art, when it works and it communicates and all that it looks like, “Look at Wayne, he’s hard at work, doodling a thing!” But part of me is not really sure it’s something I’m responsible for. It may be part of this just innate nature of mine to do this. By following that urge, all this stuff happens. But I don’t know. We don’t really get to know how many of the strings of our lives are pulled by us and how much are pulled by what we’re made of, our own past and our own DNA. I’d say lots. How do we say, “This is my favorite food?” Is that something we’re doing with our thinking mind, or this something that’s not of your own control? I think that’s what we’re getting at, this dilemma of love and pain. We’re not the only ones that feel it, but there are times where we feel like, “Let’s not skim over that, let’s explore that.” I think that’s what we tried to do as a pair. We tried to stay in that tone and explore that.
MR: What was going on when you finally had all your doodles together and you realized, “I have a completed project”?
WC: Most of the comic is just random doodling. Whatever I feel like is going to happen, as long as I feel like drawing it, is going to happen. The characters in the beginning weren’t characters, but the more I drew this blind girl–and I have to tell you, it looks like a story but it wasn’t a story at all when I started. I just drew stuff and said, “Well, what would happen next?” and then I would just draw whatever happened next. The idea that there’s a blind princess that runs around naked and has a deformed baby and it’s a giant eyeball, it didn’t occur to me that that’s some connection. It was just something I liked to draw, and then in the next panel it occurred to me that maybe through some metaphysical power of love, if she’s able to love this hideous, deformed thing, she’ll have super-vision because she’s seeing through the eyes of this little creature that loves her. Then it becomes kind of fantastical, like a lot of comic books are. I didn’t consider that in the beginning at all, but then as I went I thought, “Well, it seems feasible” or whatever. But I didn’t conceptualize in the beginning and think, “Oh, what a great concept,” or even if it is a great concept I just thought that they tied together. So you have to forgive that I’m being honest here. I don’t really know what the f**k I’m doing, but I can definitely connect things afterwards. And when the guys with the see-through tops of their heads, the brain guys, started doing all this stuff and I had the scene where they go and rescue the sun, I had that first. That was the first scene I drew about them. I’d drawn all the other stuff before I drew them. One day, I just drew them starting to rescue the sun, and I didn’t have any idea what was going to happen. I drew them and I went over the hill and I thought, “What the f**k do I do now?” And as I was drawing them battling the giant Death character or whatever, I started to care about them. I think that’s really what it is. I don’t care about them until they start to do things. Then they started to do things and I started to worry about them and care about them and care about what they said to each other. Once I started to care about them, I thought, “One of them is going to die,” and I made him die, and I thought, “God, what is going to happen here?” Those panels are not the most fantastical looking ones because they’re telling the story, but there’s the one where the giant brain is sort of just staring about having to leave his dead friend who he tried and tried to help but he knows he’s going to die and he has to leave his friend and he kind of just stares there, even though he’s a giant brain that we’re kind of giving some kind of emotions and some kind of way to get around with his arms and legs. But it really is a powerful drawing. So out of that story and its momentum, we jump to that. I like that a lot even though it wouldn’t be something that I’d doodle while I’m on the phone with you because you’ve got to kind of connect things and think about stuff. So it starts with a doodle of nothing and then if I keep going on it, I start to care and then they do things and when they start to do things, they grow a heart or something. That’s why that comes about. And I want people to care about them.
MR: So let’s talk about Moby’s new album Innocents. You’re on a track called “The Perfect Life.” How did that come about?
WC: Well Moby and I have been aware of each other for a while. We did a tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Europe, I think in 1994, a long, long, long time ago before Moby was really known to the world. I think we just liked each other, we kept up with each other, were aware of each other’s ideas. Really, it was him. Out of the blue he said to me, “Wayne, I like the way you sing, do you want to sing on a track?” I said, “Sure, send it!” and he sent it over and we sort of cobbled stuff together. I sang and sent it back to him and I think he made it a lot better than what I gave him. I didn’t think about it too much after that. I think this was last September or October, and then you fast forward and he was like, “Hey, everybody’s really liking this song, we should make a video.” I said, “Okay, sounds like fun.” I don’t really know him very well but I figured it would be something great and it was. We sort of walked around the Latin part of LA downtown and ran into a bunch of characters and they follow us in the end to this giant rooftop helicopter pad party. It’s just kind of an absurd journey.
MR: So he was like a kindred soul?
WC: Yeah. When you’re around people, especially when they’re working and they have to talk to people and deal with people and stuff like that, that’s the real deal. For better or for worse, I think that’s why people are so guarded about what they do, because they’re probably trying to hide what narcissistic a**holes they are. And if you’re not, then you don’t really have anything to worry about because you’re just going along and if things don’t work out, you say, “Things don’t work out, let’s try something else,” and we laugh and have fun and we try to remember that we’re just doing dumb music and this is one of the joys of life–to have ideas and then go pursue them. And you get a bunch of friends together and you try to do it. Now, that being said, I’ve been in some areas where people are just hideous to each other, and I don’t like being around that. You have to be around that sometimes because that’s the nature of the world, but when you do it yourself and you’re surrounded by people who are helping you, it can be a lot of fun and there can be a lot of love and there can be a lot of creative energy and stuff like that that is wonderful. So yeah, to be around someone like Moby and see how he is around people, how funny he is and how much he cares, it’s a joy.
MR: Beautiful. I know I’ve asked you this about four times before, but what advice do you have for new artists today?
WC: Well it’s the same as always. I think you have to pursue what you love and whatever design you have set up for yourself, whatever you think you want to be, you should try to be that. I think that’s the greatest confidence and the greatest freedom that my family and friends bestowed on me when I was trying. They didn’t sit there and say, “Oh, that’s silly that you want to do this thing,” they always thought it was great. Then you get to decide in your own set of circumstances, in your own way, “Is this really great? Is this really what I want to do?” I think if you don’t get to pursue it, you’d probably be bitter about it or something. You’d probably have something nagging at you. So I think if you want to do it, you should just start to do it and then after you do that, you can figure out whether you think you’re doing art, whether you’re doing music, or whether you’re a musician or an artist or a producer. All those things kind of go together. For me, I would not be happy just playing someone else’s music. I want to create my own world like you can see in the comic book. But a lot of people don’t know what they want to do in the beginning. So I’d say you have to pursue the things you love, it probably is going to work best if you love having a lot of experiences, because the idea that you’re a musician, if you’re successful at all, that’s just a very small part of all of this stuff that you would be required to do. There’s so much traveling and talking and things that go along with it that if you don’t like doing all those things, you’re not going to want to be a successful musician because it’s just a torture because you’re not making music very often; you’re kind of just doing a lot of other stuff. I don’t want to tell anybody how to do it. It’s just if you love it, that takes care of most of the bad things that you encounter. I say to people all the time, we already live like we’re rich. If you’re doing what you love and you’re around people that you love and you get to have fun all the time, you’re living like a rich person, you just don’t have any money.
MR: That’s a wonderful answer, Wayne. You never disappoint. So is there anything coming down the pike? Anything we should be keeping our eye on–so to speak–beyond the album and the comic book?
WC: I dont’ know if I’m allowed to say it, but we are working on a song that is going to be in the Ender’s Game epic movie that’s coming out at the end of the year. If the song works out to be in the movie, we think we’re going to pursue making a bit more of an expanded five or six song record that goes along with the theme and the stuff that we did for that movie, which we really ended up liking. A lot of times, people do songs for movies and there are a lot of criteria that you have to follow to make it suit the movie people. We don’t know for sure that’s going to happen yet, but we’ve already done the song and we quite like the mood of it and the way of it, the sound and the theme of it. Steven and I both remarked, “Man, I’d like to do some more music associated with this,” and we think they’re going to let us. If it works out that they end up liking our song and using it and all that, we think we’d pursue something like that. That would be even as soon as November, so I think it could work out. But I don’t know. It’ll probably be another week or so before we know, but I’m talking about it like it’s going to happen, so that’s good enough for me.
MR: Wayne, as always, all the best with this, with the tour that’s coming up, and with everything that’s coming down the pike.
WC: Cool, thank you for talking to me again.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne