An Interrogation of The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne – HuffPost 10.24.11

Mike Ragogna: Wayne, how are you? How have you been since my last interrogation?

Wayne Coyne: I was laughing the whole time, it’s supposed to sound like this great thing, but the longer it goes, I can’t help but laugh from behind a curtain. Thank you for having me back, I’m good and I’m sitting in the studio as we speak, getting ready to do this song like you’re talking about.

MR: First, can we talk about the six-hour song?

WC: We’ve done the six-hour song, it was something that came out about three weeks ago. Many people are having a good time with it. When we announced we were doing this six-hour song–the reason it was six hours was because it accompanies this strange little toy we put out. I know it sounds absurd to talk about a song being six-hours long, but you can play with this toy, as we proclaim, for hours and hours at a time. So, part of our reasoning was we would make a song that allowed you to play with this little toy that had a strobe light and these spinning discs for hours. I don’t know why we arrived at six hours, we thought it would be a lot of fun…your friends could come over to your house and you could have some sort of experience, all of this in good fun. You would listen to our song and it would be wonderful, right?

MR: Why, of course. And let me plug the name of the song–“Found A Star On The Ground.”

WC: That’s the six-hour song. Now what we’re getting ready to do–because we’re moving along at a pretty good velocity of releases and when we record them–we’re getting ready to record a song that goes for 24 hours.

MR: The hell you say. Just how exactly are you going to do that?

WC: Well, we don’t really know exactly, but having done the six-hour song gives you a little bit of a change of perspective on what you can do and how you can do it. Frankly, because it’s such a monolithic thing, you don’t really worry about every little nuance being perfect. When we were doing the six-hour song, it’s done with a group, but much of it is me and Steven (Drozd) in his bedroom playing and overdubbing and doing it that way. This will be a bigger ensemble and the whole group will be here playing for virtually hours at a time. We will still be doing a lot overdubs and stuff like that, but we have a song that we feel could be a very sad, long, strange journey of a song. The song is about death, it’s going to be released in an actually human skull at midnight on Halloween. It’s got a lot of power in it in the fact that it’s 24 hours long. I’m not sure we’re suggesting that everybody stop what their doing and listen to it for that long–I’m sure some people will, some people like this idea of there being an excursion of sound and you get immersed in this thing. There are many groups and many artists that have done things–music, songs, compositions–that are long. I think everybody becomes curious about what’s possible when you don’t think that this is just going to go for a couple of minutes. What we mean is that it’s not meant to be something that you listen to intensely, like your favorite song that plays on your way to work. This is meant to happen while you’re having other states of mind. That kind of frees you up as a musician, an artist, and a composer. It frees you up to think that this could be something that frees you up to think that this could be something that goes on for 35, 45, or even 60 minutes and still be about music, but not be about this intense, every second counts, sort of composition.

MR: Now, the proceeds for the six-hour track were to be donated to your local Oklahoma foundations. What was the suggested donation?

WC: Well, here’s what happened. We were making the song, which took us about three weeks to make. I have a pretty active Twitter audience out there, so we would have been working on the very beginning of it, so people would be listening and making suggestions, and someone said, “You should have a contest where you could put somebody’s name in the six-hour song, and the winner of the contest will have their name announced.” It made me think that maybe we could raise some money, just another way of having there be things connected to this song. We have a couple of these charities that we’re always trying to make people aware of in Oklahoma City. I would say these are all self-interest things for me. In my neighborhood in Oklahoma City, it’s one of the worst neighborhoods for stray and homeless animals. So, when I talk to people about this, I say, “Any money you give to this goes directly to that and it will help.” There are many animals that are euthanized every day. There’s also an Academy of Contemporary Music, and the C.E.O is our manager. He organizes and is responsible for the way that school provides computers and instruments and a place for young people to explore what they want to do for music. So, both of these are dear things that we believe in and love and want to make work. We announced that for a hundred dollar donation, and we would split the money between those two charities. We would put your name into the song; it’s a six-hour song, so there’s plenty of space. We didn’t know how many we would get, we thought if we had ten, that would be fine; we didn’t know that we would do a thousand names, so we’re lucky that it stopped at about 230, which is still a lot of names. And some of them are in Japanese–it’s a difficult task to get all the names organized and said correctly. I believe it all worked out and I get notes from people saying, “Yeah! I heard my name!”

MR: We were talking about the Central Oklahoma Humane Society and The Academy Of Contemporary Music at Central Oklahoma, right?

WC: Exactly. You can no longer donate to get your name in the song. You can always donate to these things, but I always say everybody should have their local things that they support. So, we had it for a certain amount of time and it’s wonderful. It raised over ten thousand dollars for each of those, and it’s a great thing to connect with our fans. I know it’s our fans because you wouldn’t really know about it if you weren’t a Flaming Lips fan. Some of the names are of people that are yet to be born–there are kids’ names mentioned in the songs that will be born in a couple of months from now. Some of them are in memory of friends and relatives that are no longer with us…many great things involved with it. I know it sounds ridiculous to think that we’re taking a piece of music and inserting these names over top of it, but again, I think anything is possible. It’s not just about raising the money, it’s also about doing and trying new things.

MR: We could go over all the experimental music The Flaming Lips created, but this interview has to end today at some point. Wayne, you’re out of your mind in such an incredible way, it’s really amazing.

WC: Thank you for saying that. If all artists and musicians were as lucky as me, they would do the same things. There are a lot of opportunities and there are a lot of people helping me, but we also don’t always fear that it has to be the greatest thing ever or succeed the greatest way ever. There is a lot of music that can really be wonderful but doesn’t have to be in the Top Ten of the Billboard charts. So, that’s the way we live our lives, it’s just an interesting way to do your art. For me, I’m interested in everything. I’m lucky that it’s about music, and the way we do music in the way we do lets you explore everything. That’s like the things we have like the Gummy Skull, and this song on Halloween where it’s an actual human skull To me, it’s all fascinating and it’s all interesting. It’s leading me down paths of discovery I would never think of if I were just pursuing it as sound and music. We want music to not really be about music; we want music to be the sound of an extraordinary adventure.

MR: What a great line. I have to write that down.

WC: (laughs)

MR: Sean Lennon also contributed to the six-hour recording, right?

WC: Well, in the beginning, when I thought of the names being announced…this is a strange coincidence, but I’m fifty years old and when I’m reminded of this music when I was young, one of the songs that me and my brothers would play all the time would be “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which was the pinnacle of John Lennon’s psychedelic creations. Well, at the very end of the song of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” he does this strange announcement. We all know now since the song is called “Strawberry Fields Forever” and he’s saying cranberry sauce. We were young and it was a part of this mythology that Paul McCartney had mysteriously died. If you want to think or hear John saying this, it sounds like he’s saying, “I buried Paul.” This is a very strange connection to make to John Lennon’s actually son. We spoke about it briefly and Sean is a very wonderful, open-minded, creative person, who, when I told him, said, “That’s just great.” He’s crazy like that. When I told him that was my reference, and I told him to act like he’s this voice from beyond reading a list of people being abducted by a UFO or something like that, he giggled the whole way through it. We did it over the phone, I called him at his studio that he was working in, and we did it mostly in two sections. He would slash them in 45 minutes at one o’clock in the morning one night. I would send him the list and he would go through some of the more difficult ones. Luckily, he’s familiar with a lot of Japanese names–his mother is Yoko Ono. The ones that would be difficult for me, he got right through them. It wasn’t a lot of Japanese names, but it was about twenty or so. He was wonderful. We know each other and we’re friends and we’ve played shows earlier in the year, and you’re always looking for opportunities for something with people that are crazy like you. I figured he would go for it and it sounds wonderful. At the end, there’s this 7 or 8-minute section that ends the whole six-hour thing, and it’s Sean Lennon saying, “We will always love, we will always love you.” It’s haunting but it’s powerful.

MR: Beautiful. While we’re talking about The Flaming Lips, are you on tour?

WC: We’re kind of always playing. We never think of it of necessarily being on tour because it sends the impression that you’re out there traveling the world for two years; it’s not like that. We’re always playing shows, we’re always recording, we’re always doing things. Playing shows is a part of our normal week, and recording is a part of our normal week, not recording and doing other things is a part of our week. So, I will say, “Yes,” but I don’t want people to get the wrong impression. We don’t play 250 shows a year, we probably play 70 shows and a lot of those shows are strange unique places we’ve never been before. We’ve been around for almost 30 years, and we want to play places we’ve never seen, people we never met there. There are a lot of our own reasons to go to these places.

MR: As far as this 24 hour recording, when is it starting?

WC: We’re starting to record it even as we speak, but it’s going to be released at midnight on Halloween. It should be fascinating.

MR: As you’re recording, you’re not going to let sequenced parts ramble on for an hour, right? I mean, there will actually be a person in the studio always making music?

WC: To me, it’s all possible. If for some reason…there are millions of little devices that can play without the aid of any humans there. To me, it doesn’t matter, there are bits of things that we do in live performance that are machines making a great noise and we stand in front of it, adding to it. We’re not really thinking that it’s going to be repetitive material like that–it’s not meant to be hypnotic, it’s meant to be a moving composition. I would never rule out in any way if something happens and goes on for 20 minutes and happens to be generated by a computer and we all think it’s great, I say let it happen. To me, it’s all about listening. As much as it’s about creating and playing music, it’s about listening. It would be like a chef in the kitchen endlessly making food; in the end, he would want everybody tasting it and worth making it. I’m always listening, and I don’t always know if it was a machine doing it or a musician.

MR: Trash all boarder lines.

WC: Of course, not out of disrespect–this is what you do when you’re creative, you accept anything and not worry about it. I would say that it’s art and music; we’re not trying to create laws, we’re not trying to get medicine for children. This is the realm where anything is possible. A lot of the world is restricted. I think that’s why people find so much freedom and joy in music, because it’s not restrictive. I would never want to tell anybody that you can’t make music in that way. You can’t do that, I say do anything you want if you can get away with it. (laughs)

MR: (laughs) Thank you for allowing me to be devil’s advocate with that question.

WC: I love when people do that better…it reminds me of these things to say.

MR: Like, I don’t know, what advice do you have for new artists?

WC: The music business is changing a lot, so depending on musicians you admire and which ones you feel like you want to be like, I would say for the world of music and people who are allowed to make it and live in that world, I think it’s working for the better. It’s becoming a place that’s not about fame, it’s becoming a place that’s not about money. It’s about a place where people who really love music and if you’re like me–obsessed with music and ideas and creating–if you’re lucky, you can get to do that for a living. A lot of people are driven by other things. My advice is if you don’t live, breath, and love music, do something else. I don’t think it would satisfy you if you wanted to get into fame and all of these other things that were connected to it before. That’s just me. To me, the idea of being creative and doing that for your life, as opposed to doing some traditional job…to me, that’s the miracle of my life.

MR: I guess people should ready now for Halloween and this 24-hour event.

WC: Exactly, and you’ll find some space in your life somewhere along the way to listen to it–if not all of it, some if it–and get this other experience. That’s really what it is, it’s not just about music; it’s about this experience, and this sound that accompanies it.

MR: Wayne, all the best, it’s always a lot of fun talking with you. I guess we will be talking again in the next week or so.

WC: Excellent! Well, thank you sir, I will see you then.

Transcribed by Theo Shier