The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne – HuffPost 8.23.13

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists today?

Wayne Coyne: 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.