I think that kind of leads perfectly into my next question, because thinking about the band’s unique approach, and how you march to your own drummer, and how you guys have grown so much, the idea of “legacy” is naturally going to come up. When it’s all kind of said and done, decades from now, what would you want people to say is the legacy of The Flaming Lips?

Well, I think we’ve been really lucky that we’ve been able to sort of…You know, we’re already like an old, old group. We’ve already been around for 35 years. We’ve already been around a long, long time, and I think in that time, for better or for worse, whether you are intending it to happen or not, your legacy is being written for you. And you’re either helping it to happen, or you’re against it.

I think for us, this song, “Do You Realize?” has probably changed us more and probably made us more who we are than it is the other way around. There’s hardly a day goes by where I don’t talk to someone who’s said, “That’s the song that we played at our wedding,” “That’s the song that we played when my mother died,” “That’s the song that we played when my brother was, you know, dying of cancer.” Something like that, some big emotional, important, really wonderful thing that music can do. Our song being able to be used and part of people’s lives in that way, I think that changed us, knowing that we weren’t trying to do that with the song, but the song started to do that, and it just happened to us and brought up to a whole ‘nother world of what our music could mean, and even what it could mean to us.

It’s very profound that “Do You Realize” really changed people’s lives. I also really like how you kicked off the Greatest Hits with that song, because I think maybe sometimes bands aren’t as forward. A lot of times some bands like resent their most popular song for some reason.

Especially I think when they’re younger, and then they’re saying, “No, this doesn’t define me,” you know” And I totally understand that, I can totally see why groups, especially younger groups, would not want to be the definers of what they are. You know, they may say, “We haven’t done our greatest songs just yet.” But we don’t feel like any of that that. We kind of feel like we know there’s a certain audience out there that would like nothing more—I would be part of that audience—that would love nothing more than to say, “Put all your kinda popular songs on one record so I can just get it. Instead of having to jump around why don’t you put them all on something, make it easy for me.” And so part of it is that, and that we don’t necessarily feel either defined by it or that being defined by it is a bad thing. And so I think it’s all those things, in time, you either, like you said, you embrace this ride that you’re on or you try to go against it, or, I think in our case, we’re glad for all the good things that happen and we try not to worry about the bad things that happen and that we’re always making music anyway. I mean, I was in the studio just two hours ago, you know, working on a record that’s gonna come out before too long as well. We’re always just kind of immersed in absolutely right now, and you know, stuff that we’ve been doing for almost 40 years, so it’s insane really. It’s insane how much time of my life I get to spend just doing my thing. It’s great.

I wanted to talk a little bit about the festival scene. You guys were one of the first indie bands to become a huge festival act and enter that jammier sphere. And, you know, as opposed to when you guys first broke that barrier, now it’s not unusual to have an indie band and hip-hop music and all these different genres on the festival scene. What do you make of the festival scene now as opposed to when you first started kind of dipping toes into them, you know, decades ago?

Well, I think you’re exactly right. In the beginning, I think people would sort of think a festival is a certain genre of music and if you don’t understand that sort of genre of music, you don’t wanna go to a festival. And then I think people would sometimes go to, I don’t know, I can think of like, a Bonnaroo or something early on where they would say, “You know, I didn’t really know any of the bands but I fucking had the greatest time ever.”

My analogy is always like this: All great parties start with like-minded people liking the same thing and kind of celebrating themselves and the thing that they like. But any great party eventually just draws people who like to party. They don’t really need to be like you or like the same things you like, they just like to party, and since you’re partying, they just wanna join your party. And I think that’s more what we see now. You can go to almost any festival now and see, on the same bill, what at one point we could have called a jamband, at one point we would have called an electronic band, at one point we would have called it a DJ, at one point would have called it a hip-hop act, and a pop act, and that can all be on the same stage, on the same day.

We just wanna be together and party, and we don’t necessarily love every band and we don’t necessarily hate every band, we’re just here and we have the ability to sort of embrace the stuff we like about it and go get something to drink at the stuff we’re not interested in. And I think that’s probably the way it should be, ‘cause it’s all-inclusive.

I think there’s just a great desire in America now, there didn’t used to be, but I think Europe has been like this for a long, long time, there’s a great desire to spend your summer traveling around, going to festivals, seeing new music music that you may not have ever experienced before. I say that’s a fucking amazing, amazing thing to be happening in America.

I heard you saw Phish for the first time not too long ago, what’d you make of that experience?

Even when I went to see them, I didn’t really get to see them, because everybody dragged me backstage and everybody got caught up in talking and exchanging stories and meeting people afterwards. So I feel like I’ve kinda experienced them without necessarily having to be, you know, in the audience knowing every song.

I think what I like about them is what they’re about. I don’t know if I would know too many of their songs but I like the idea that what they’re about being there at their shows and being around them and being around their audience and all that. I think that’s really what a lot of groups are aspiring to in a way. It’s not necessarily that you have to like our music, it’s the idea that you like being in this room with these people and doing this thing, is really what it is. I think I’ve learned a lot about that as well, you know, just going to festivals and not knowing what these groups were. I’ve been turned onto so many cool things I would have never known what they were about, but standing there in it, having the experience with it, does sort of change you about that.

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