When The Flaming Lips devoted most of 2011 and 2012 to a series of unconventional recording projects, many fans wondered if they’d ever return to the traditional album format again. As it turns out, psychedelic rock’s most uplifting ambassadors almost didn’t make it back from their creative ledge: burnt out from writing an a six-hour song and especially a 24-hour song, The Flaming Lips’ creative team were worried that they “had no ideas left” when they finished last year’s Heady Fwends record. Escaping for a few minutes in producer Dave Fridmann’s “b-studio,” Lips multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd started work on a series, of dark, twisted and, at times, terrifying recordings. Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne took notice and the resulting album, The Terror, is both the band’s darkest and most experimental album to date. As The Flaming Lips continue to tweak their exuberant live show, Drozd explained why The Terror is what happens after the “wild, acid LSD freak-out party that goes through the night.”
Your new album, The Terror feels like a cool evolution for The Flaming Lips but at the same time feels right in the canon. So the first thing I want to talk about is a little bit about when you guys started working on this. I know last year was kind of devoted to a lot of different types of studio projects and then you came back to create an album which feels very much like an album. What were the original conversations that led to The Terror?
I guess the earliest stuff was [when] we were up at Dave Fridmann’s mixing Heady Fwends, which is just a big hodgepodge of all these different projects and recordings with different people. Dave’s got another studio set up so if you’ve got some free time or you’re bored with the proceedings in the main room, you can go off and just do your own thing. So I was off in another room just kind of recording sounds. I didn’t really have an agenda, I wasn’t thinking of a new record, I wasn’t thinking of any specific project. In fact, it was the opposite. It was like, for me personally, I was just fucking burnt out. We’d done the 24-hour song, we’d done the 6-hour song, we’d been touring like crazy, we’d done all these re-releases throughout 2011 and mixing Heady Fwends, and I just didn’t really have any musical ideas even. I was just kind of working in this void of just recording sounds that I thought sounded cool. But I guess there was something there because I kept going back to this one song called “You Are Alone” on the new record, and then Wayne [Coyne] heard I was working on it and he just really responded. If he likes something I’m doing, he’ll respond and want to work on it, but this was like a whole other thing. He kept asking me about what it was. He was just like, “What is this you’re doing? It just sounds so sad and terrifying,” or whatever, you know?
But he was really curious about it and he wanted to work on it with me, so then we started working on that and just kept listening to it just for enjoyment not thinking it was for any project or anything. It was almost just so much fun to do this just for… I mean, we get to make records we want to make anyway but a lot of times you have deadlines and there’s things you have to do at a certain time, and you need material for this or that, and not having any of those things to worry about, this song was just kind of floating there in its own little world.
Then we just talked about trying to do a few more songs kind of like that in the same realm where there wouldn’t be any rock guitars, there wouldn’t be necessarily a pop song or anything, it could just be some sounds and harboring that realm. So we did a few songs like that and after three or four, that’s when we started talking about it being a record. Like, what if we made a whole record that was of this ilk, of this kind of trip that stay focused or stayed in the same kind of sound, the same kind of whatever feeling or emotions this music is evoking? And after four or five songs it seemed like it was going to work, and I have to say it’s one of the easiest Lips records I’ve ever made. It’s funny this far down the line and the record sounds so bleak and stuff, but for me it was one of our easiest records we’ve ever made. So that’s kind of how it happened.
For the last year and a half before The Terror, you guys were working on all sorts of different songs and the collaborative “And Friends” album, as well as a variety of other little projects here and there. Was there a conscious decision not to work on a studio album? If so, do you feel that having a year where you can experiment and create these songs that aren’t conventional rock songs gives you guys the creative freedom to make The Terror, which as you said, is a very different album in that it’s not a straight-up rock record or straight-up pop record like some of your other stuff has been?
I guess all those things played a part. I think if we hadn’t made Embryonic and then done all these other projects like we did, we definitely wouldn’t have ended up with The Terror that we started working on. I was doing “You Are Alone” in January of 2012, I guess? I mean, there’s a couple, like the “Butterfly” song, that go back to the summer before that, but we ended up changing it enough and doing some things to it so it would sit with these other Terror songs. But everything else was pretty much recorded from January through April of 2012. It just couldn’t have happened if we hadn’t done those other things first. For me personally, when we got done with the 24-hour song specifically, I just had no more musical ideas. I always have stuff that I record at home that I’ll bring in and we’ll work on together, [but] by the end of the 24-hour song, I just had nothing. There was nothing I wanted to do, there were no songs I had that I wished we would have done.
So when I started “You Are Alone,” it was really almost just starting from a blank canvas. And then when Wayne jumped in there with me and we started working together, it’s almost as if we were discovering music together for the first time or something. [Laughs.] We didn’t have to write songs for a record, and we had these old synthesizers that we would just record a sound on and start a song from instead of him bringing in a song or me bringing in a song.
So all these things kind of had to play a part in what The Terror became and, like I said before, we weren’t really talking about a new record even. We just did these few songs because we just really enjoyed them. We thought it was just a cool trip that we were doing, you know? As we started to think about it being our new record, we really loved the idea of this being our statement like, “Well, here’s where we are now.” After all the stuff that’s happened, we had the early 2000’s with Yoshimi and that got us to a next level of pop commercial success or whatever, and then Mystics seemed like the extreme end of pop commercial production and songwriting and all that, and then Embryonic felt almost like a left turn fuck you to that, like we wanted to just try some other trip, whatever you want to call that music.
Even though a lot got recorded between Embryonic and The Terror, The Terror to me is a perfect record after Embryonic. It’s like Embryonic is the wild, acid LSD freak-out party that goes through the night, and then The Terror is the next morning when the sun’s coming up and you’re thinking, “Oh my God, what am I going to do?” That to me is the sound of The Terror, which is a perfect sort of parallel to our career too. We had this big freak-out and now we’re coming down from the freak-out and what are we going to do? But back to your question, I don’t know what would have happened after Embryonic if we hadn’t had two years of just exhaustive recording and writing and stuff.
I think you described it very well that this is like the morning after the end of the world party where it’s like, “Well, what happens next?” I think that there’s something beautiful in that. Do you feel that that’s also a statement in terms of other things going on in the world or is it more just, as you said, focused on your actual career arc over the last dozen years from the explosion after Yoshimi and The Soft Bulletin?
Well, I think it’s partly our band career and I wouldn’t deny that it’s probably personal too. At least when I was working on those beginnings, I was kind of in a little crisis of my own right at that time and again, it says a lot to me about whatever was going on in Wayne’s life. He certainly reacted very strongly to what I was doing. I’ll always know if he’s interested in something I’m doing [because] he’ll say, “That’s cool! What is that? Let’s work on that.” And then sometimes he won’t be interested and I’ll know I’ll just throw that in the pile for some other project I’m working on or I’ll play it for him two years later and see if he likes it.
But that “You Are Alone” song, more than anything ever, I think, he was just like, “What is that?” He wanted to know what it was and what it was all about and why did I make that combination of sounds and why was it that way, and he just felt so strongly about wanting to do something with it that that told me that he must be on some similar wavelength about how he feels in his own personal life or something. I think maybe another reason why it was so easy for us to make the record is that we were kind of on the same page. I mean, usually we agree musically on things, but definitely the beginning of The Terror was just an effortless thing. So I think it says something about the band’s career path, our timeline, [and] I think it also says something about us personally that we wanted to make that kind of music. I think some people don’t hear it as being as depressing as I think it sounds. But when I say depressing, I mean it in a really good way. To me it just expresses something that I wanted to hear and I like when I hear other bands do that.
I think that it’s depressing but it’s confident in a sense. It’s not like moaning, but I think you described it great before, it’s the party after the end of the world party.
Yeah, it’s like you’re coming down from that party and what happens now? But yeah, of all the things we could have done, we’ve tried many different kinds of music, but this music on The Terror really feels like Flaming Lips music to me. It doesn’t feel to me like we’re trying different styles. Like if you get the Okie Noodling soundtrack, it’s The Flaming Lips but we’re doing this sort of country trip, you know? Or you could pick some other things, Christmas On Mars is very sci-fi, symphonic, orchestral movie music. The Terror, even though you could stylistically say there’s a lot of synthesizers and a lot of droning things, to me it just sounds like Flaming Lips music in 2013, which I’m really happy to say. It doesn’t feel like we’re struggling to come up with a new identity, this is just what we did. So I’m pretty happy about it.
Speaking of which, The Terror feels very much like an album in the classic sense of the word. I know you guys debuted it in its entirety at SXSW and performed it as this unified artistic work. Was there a point in the recording where it seemed more like an album than a collection of songs? And at what point did you decide that you’re going to put this out live as one full performance piece instead of sprinkling new songs throughout your whole show on tour this year?
We feel like we’ve had a couple of great experiences at SXSW. One of our very first parking lot experiments was there in 1997, I think the second ever South Bulletin Tour show was at SXSW in ’99. It just felt like, we have this new record, we’re really excited about it, we hope people perceive this as us doing something different or whatever. It just felt like a cool thing to just play the record all the way through. I mean, I don’t know if it was a success, but for us, I can say that I haven’t seen us that excited after a show in some time. Now, we may have lost some of the audience at that show [Laughs], but for us, maybe it’s just too self-indulgent, but it was just a wild, fun time. And not because people hadn’t heard it, that seems like a bad reason to do it, but the good reason to do it was it was just something different to do. I know Wayne was like, “Nah, I really don’t want to get out the space bubble and do that,” and we don’t want people dancing on the side of the stage, we want to just try something different.
So, now we’re about to go on the road [and] we’re working some of the kinks out of all that stuff, because it’s not just new music, it’s a new stage show and everything. There’s new video stuff, there’s new lights, there’s new technology, all kinds of stuff happening and it all goes hand in hand with this new music. It’s almost like a little rebirth. I hate to use that word, but it’s kind of like that. I think as the summer goes on we won’t be playing the record all the way through, but half our show will be new stuff. We’re going to try to make it work where we can play this new stuff and then drag some of the old along with it but not make it seem like such a contrast. We don’t want to make it seem like, “Oh, they’re doing The Terror stuff, now they’re doing stuff from Yoshimi.” We’d like to be able to have it where that can all be in the same live show and all be the same kind of live trip. That’s what we’re struggling with now, a way to make all this new stuff work with the old stuff and not have it be such a black and white change within the show. But at that time at SXSW, in our minds, especially since no one had heard the record, it felt like we might as well just fucking go all the way and just say we’re going to play this whole record all the way through and people will either be turned off or be really thrilled about it.
In the past your stage show has been very uplifting, whether it’s people dancing or costumes or the bubble or just kind of the party atmosphere. Do you think that the stage show will reflect more of this somber, morning-after feeling or will remnants from the party still kind of be trickling through?
Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out right now. We’re trying to figure out how much of that old, big celebratory Lips show we want to try to keep in there, because we don’t want to completely turn everybody off that’s been coming to see us for however many years but we also want to change the show. I could imagine where it would be a darker show overall, not literally with lights, I just mean with the vibe of the show but still have it be a badass rock show. We don’t want to completely go off the deep end. We’re trying to work out what the exact dynamic is going to be. Because we will play “Do You Realize??” but it’ll probably be like as an encore or something, I don’t know. But we’d like to be able to play this new music and have it be as intense live as playing “Silver Trembling Hands” off Embryonic or something is. But I think the people that want to see just the straight-up “She Don’t Use Jelly” yeah, yeah, yeah show, I don’t think we’re going to be doing that much of it. But we’ll have to see, I can’t really tell you right now.
Shifting from your music to music in general, it’s interesting that as your music has gotten, for lack of a better term, darker, in the last ten years, a lot of psychedelic music that you guys were always some of the first as a rock band to embrace has gotten more popular, and a lot of bands who play large places or even get some radio play are also rooted in this whole psychedelic world. Do you see a bigger conceptual change towards that music or do you feel that it’s just that people’s palettes are more advanced and with the internet they have no problem with listening to psychedelic music on the radio or in a big room?
I think it’s all that. You know, there was a time that if you had a keyboard in your band that was weird or completely unacceptable. If there was a band playing in Austin that had a keyboard player, that was just considered wild and not very cool. And then when we started doing Soft Bulletin stuff, we started moving towards keyboards, and to us, and the world we existed in, that seemed like a radical change from what was going on before us and around us at the time. And now, none of those things seem like any big deal. It’s just everything is so much more wide open and that’s the good news, it’s just that evolution and then mutation of music.
I remember I made a compilation tape in 1992 that had Sonic Youth and it had the band Yes on it and I had a couple of friends [who thought] that was completely unacceptable. You couldn’t listen to Sonic Youth and Yes that just was not cool. [Laughs.] And now an 18-year-old is like, “Well, yeah, Sonic Youth, Yes, fucking Donna Summer, Tammy Wynette.” It’s just people are a lot more accepting of different styles of music so, to answer your question, I think that’s just the way it is everywhere. On the other hand, I feel like commercial radio is getting more and more down to a smaller, thin tunnel of what’s popular music on like Top 40 radio. But I don’t really think about that too much and I don’t have to think about it for some time, my kids are still pretty young and hopefully they won’t be listening to it anytime soon. [Laughs.]
By then it’ll be people won’t even listen to radio, it’ll be satellite radio and Spotify and some other invention that we haven’t thought of yet.
That’ll be it, yeah. I mean, Top 40 radio, nobody I know actually even listens to it. But to go back to your thing, just things keep moving forward, moving on. I mean, to think that – I’m just trying to give a good example of a band in 1995 – like Stereolab to me in 1995 were a radical band for their time. They had keyboards, they were heavily influenced by Krautrock and stuff like that, and that’s oversimplifying, I know, but that was a radical thing. I still have those records, but now you can hear 50 bands doing their kind of trip. They had that kind of influence. And I think there’s a lot of bands that probably love the era of Flaming Lips and that’s sort of their jumping off point. And it just keeps changing, you know? So that’s a good thing, right? I mean, I think it’s all a great thing so it just keeps moving on. And then for us, that’s another reason we feel like, why would we want to make Yoshimi again now that there’s like ten bands that are doing something like that but just more advanced, you know?
Given all these changes in music and the way people perceive and put out music, have you ever thought that the classic album is no longer something that you guys would focus your energy on and that it would be more interesting or not more interesting to put out various other experiments like you guys were doing the last few years? Or do you still have faith in the idea of the album as the album?
I think it’s going back the other way and I only thought about this a few days ago because I really love the idea of The Terror as a whole record. I think it’s one of our best records as a whole LP that you put on and listen to front to back. But I think with all these crazy releases of the last few years it seemed like we were going through this phase where “fuck the long player album,” fuck all that. It’s just crazy like, “Here’s three songs, here’s one song, here’s three songs and it’s in a gummy skull.” Now I think we’ve gone the other way where we were really excited about having a record in a traditional way.
In fact, we actually talked about releasing it only as, if you were going to download it, you had to download the whole thing as one piece of music. We talked about that early on. So instead of individual tracks you would have to purchase – or not even purchase, whatever it was – just download the whole thing. But then we realized that we would look like old assholes that thought we were like Lou Reed or somebody if we did that so we decided not to do it. But to me that told me that we’ve all thought it was a valid enough listening experience to call it a whole record. I mean, you can listen to individual songs but what we recommend and what we’d like you to do is listen to the whole thing.
And then I think for like 25-year-olds, young people – I say “young people” like I’m an old dude, but I grew up when there wasn’t internet. But for young people I think it’s going the other way too. I think ten years ago everyone was so jazzed about iPods and downloading individual songs and that kind of thing, that that was the trend for a while. But I actually think there’s a new trend coming up where young people – [Laughs] I keep saying young people – younger folk, the kids these days, are actually going to start listening to whole records as a normal thing to do. Right now it’s kind of an oddity for a young kid to listen to a whole record, except for hipsters, but I think that’s going to change where people will start listening to whole records again, I really do. And I think the art form will change again when bands figure that out. Instead of putting out records that are all about individual downloads or songs it’ll become like, “Yeah, let’s try to make a whole long player record again.” That’s what I really think, maybe I’m wrong, but that’s what it feels like to me.
I agree and I think that part of it also has to do with the fact that because the CD is moving on its way out, people are now either listening to MP3s or going back to vinyl and having that LP experience where they put the record on and listen to the whole thing.
That’s what I’m doing. I can’t think of the last time I bought a compact disc. For me, in my world, I’m just getting stuff off the internet and I put it on an iPod and I hook it up to these speakers that I have in the living room that are really high and badass speakers, that’s the one thing I do. The second thing I do is I have a shitload of old records, from like 1930’s big band crap to all the classic records of the ‘70s to like the new Ariel Pink on vinyl, and sometimes I listen to my old hi-fi stereo that’s in the living room. There’s no CDs, I can’t think of the last time I listened to a cassette, which I kind of miss, but it’s either MP3 downloads or it’s old vinyl. That’s my listening world. So I think it’s probably like that for a lot of people now. If I want to hear a whole record, like my daughter loves Dolly Parton’s greatest hits from the early ‘70s, we put that on, the whole record plays. My kids know that you can put on a record and play a record. Whereas they’ll have friends over that have never, literally never, seen a vinyl record before. That’s pretty crazy.
Yeah, but I think as you said, it’s kind of coming back in a collector’s way, in a sense.
That’s what I’m saying, I think it’s getting beyond that. I think it used to be a super specific crowd that was buying the vinyl but I think it’s kind of spreading out a little bit where people are getting older, like even someone like my brother-in-law who’s a little older than me, I think he’s actually getting to a point where, “Yeah man, I want to listen to Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl. That would be a cool thing.” And even though he’s not some hipster going to buy obscure Krautrock on vinyl, he’s just a normal dude who’s a doctor, he is still wanting to listen to old vinyl again. So I think it’s kind of spreading a little bit more now, which I think is pretty exciting.
Switching gears to festivals, The Flaming Lips have stopped at so many, do you have a favorite festival memory from recent experience that you’ve either been to as a fan or as a performer?
God, we’ve done so many the last several years. Well we played Bonnaroo 2010 and it was my birthday. And I just quit drinking and everything like two months before so it was one of my first sober shows ever [Laughs] and I was so full of dread all day long. I was walking around the festival, people are loaded at 3:00 in the afternoon, people are walking around with beers, spilling them, there’s pot smoke everywhere, there’s drug casualties laid out in the muddy field everywhere. I was just so full of dread.
But then about two hours before we played, I just got this really great feeling like I don’t know what happened, you know? I just got this feeling I was looking forward to playing to all these people. We got up and we did our show which was just a normal Lips show, and it could have been the most mundane, nothing show but it was one of the most fun shows I’ve ever played. So I kind of think of that from time to time if we’re playing some festival somewhere, because generally I don’t like playing festivals, but that’s such a great memory that I’ll draw upon from time to time to remind me like, “Hey, you still like playing music.”
It’s cool too that you mention Bonnaroo because I always felt that that festival more than any other U.S. festival really has kind of evolved with The Flaming Lips. The first time you guys played you were on the fringes of the whole jamband world, and then obviously performing Dark Side late at night, and watching the different psych bands come through or hipsters rediscover the band after a couple years, it all happened there.
Definitely. Bonnaroo’s a great festival to sort of connect us to because in 2003, like you just said, when we played that, that opened us up to a whole new world that before that we did not know about and they didn’t know about us so much. So that opened up a lot of doors and places to play and people to play to. Then the next time we played in 2007, we had a much bigger show and we had the UFO there and it was just a mega, mega, mega show. Then 2010 was the next time we played, and that’s the show I was talking about, we played our show and we played Dark Side of the Moon all the way through so I definitely see some cool parallels between Bonnaroo and The Flaming Lips for sure.
