If you know anything about Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd- colorful front-man and talented multi-instrumentalist/musical director for The Flaming Lips – you know that there’s no musical suit they won’t fit on. Whether it’s covering Pink Floyd, King Crimson albums in their entirety, recording four separate albums meant to be played simultaneously or playing eight shows in eight cities in 24 hours; The Flaming Lips have created an unparalleled resume of musical experiments.
So it was no surprise when we got word a couple months ago that Coyne and Drozd have formed a prog-rock side projected called Electric Würms. Featuring Drozd on vocals, guitars, and keyboards and front man Wayne Coyne settling rear on bass and backed by Nashville psychedelic rock band Linear Downfall, Electric Würms have just released their debut Musik, Die Shwer Zu Twerk on August 19th. The first single from the 29 minute Musik, Die Shwer Zu Twerk, is a cover of YES’ “Heart of The Sunrise,” while the other tracks continue to bend the dark prog element of 2013’s The Terror into a slightly sunnier terrain that expands with the krautrock foray of “Living” (fans of Wilco’s “Spiders (KidSmoke) will enjoy) and “I Can See Clouds” which comes off like Flaming Lips composing an original YES song. We recently had the pleasure of talking to Drozd about this new prog endeavor and get answers to many previously unanswered Flaming Lips questions….
Hey Steven how has your summer been so far? I understand you’ve been traveling from one end to another?
We just got back from Portland and this next month we’re doing some one off things. I think this next weekend we are going to Quebec City, and then we come home and then the next weekend we go to London.
You guys don’t play city to city on a highway route like most tour bands do – you jump around geographically from festival to festival. Do you enjoy that process and bringing gear long distances in between shows?
We don’t always do that it, so it kind of goes back and forth. Like the run up to Bonnaroo was all four shows that kind of made sense if you were looking at a map: St. Louis to Detroit over to Bonnaroo. And sometimes we’ll do these things in which we’ll fly out to a city, and the truck has to drive out there and leave early. We have four different sets of backline for these kinds of things; we have one over in England so they are just in different places. That allows us to fly if we need to on short notice, so we’ll just fly with our guitars and we’ll meet the equipment there. It goes both ways, I think if it was all one offs all the time I’d get really sick of it, but there’s enough of it like I said where we do a bus tour for a week or week and a half and then you come home and then the next time you come home it’s just fun for one show. It goes back and forth a lot.
I wanted to talk about the new Electric Würms album. It’s always easy to spot the progressive rock influences in the work you, Wayne and Michael do and I know your influenced by a lot of progressive rock bands. I read Wayne helped kick start this initial project but did you always want to do an Electric Würms type progressive rock leaning off shoot as well?
I have but I mean the twist was Wayne and I would do it together. We always had these conversations, especially with Wayne that are pretty funny like –“what if some band did this thing, what if some band put a record or CD out of Christmas songs and it was kind of a different take on Christmas music?” So it was like “hey I’ve been wanting to do that.. we should do it.”
So it was one of those conversations of wouldn’t it be cool if a band put together these influences and it’s something we talked about but then who wants to do it? I’ve always got pieces of music that I feel would be great for this other prog rock band that doesn’t exist and it’s not necessarily the Flaming Lips.
And that’s just kind of how it happened you know? We were talking about wouldn’t it be cool if there was a band that was a little bit krautrock and all these influences we love and just how things do with Wayne or the Flaming Lips, you go to talking about it to it’s going to happen. You just don’t talk about it you’re going to do something.
Where do you guys find the time these days? It used to be every few years you put out a new album but just recently it seems like there is a new Flaming Lips project or collaboration going on all the time. Did you think back in the day you’d have such creative energy at this stage in your musical career?
If you were going to ask me twenty years ago I wouldn’t have thought so. Back then it was a more traditional setup where you get together, record an album that takes you two or three months, and then you rehearse to go on tour for that record and that takes you forever how long and then you take a two or three month break and then you start the whole process again. We did that for many years like all bands do, so if you were to ask me back then if there was another way to do it which is with the internet and technology being that much faster, I would think so.
I do think that if we were living in an age where everything was done at the pace it was done in the mid 90’s we wouldn’t do it. It’s only because we have all this technology where I can record some beat at my house, send it across the country to Michael (Ivins) in an email and he can run it to Wayne who has a studio at his place now, and I have a little studio at my place now. The times change and you just change with the times. I wish we would take some time off here and there but I just can’t see it happening any time soon. I think another way of looking at it is that doing things creates more ideas and if you think about stuff that’s one thing, but if you actually start to do things; the doing of the thing creates twenty other things. That’s what happened with the Electric Würms because we started one thing like “let’s just see what this is like” and it really spilled over into more ideas. The six song EP is coming out but we have a lot more material we can go through use as a jumping off point for the next thing which I think this will be a continued thing from now on.
Do you see these Electric Würms songs ever fitting into the Flaming Lips set lists in the future?
Oh no, it will definitely be still Electric Würms songs only as we have shows booked as the Electric Würms. We actually did have two shows booked in England but we decided to postpone them to let the EP be out a little longer so people can be a little more familiar with it before we asked people to come see us. But The Electric Würms will perform, we already spent a couple days rehearsing about a month ago.
How did the collaboration with Linear Downfall come together and how are they different from other bands like Stardeath and the White Dwarves that you previously collaborated with?
I think Wayne has known them for awhile, but the first time I met them was when we did this eight concerts in eight cities in 24 hours, which was a Guinness Book of World Records thing and when we played, I can’t remember what city it was, but they got up and did a song with us and that was the first time I ever met them. We did “”21st Century Schizoid Man” by King Crimson and I couldn’t believe how good they were and was like “these guys can play.”
And that definitely stayed with me and we were thinking of putting together a group for Electric Würms. I wasn’t sure what it was going to be. I didn’t know if we were just going to get a couple guys from around here or if we were looking to get Dan Snaith from Caribou. I didn’t know what were going to do, as we hadn’t recorded that much. And it was Wayne’s idea to get them and I see his line of thinking now as they are technically very advanced musicians for their age. And at the same time they are open to any experience musically or any direction we suggest to them. And they love our music so already there is a mutual respect thing that is happening for them.
First it was alright well get this young band to play with us and after spending three or four days playing with them I quickly came to respect and value whatever they had to say about anything, because they are just bad asses musically, it’s pretty crazy. And as far as collaborating with Star Death, we’ve collaborated with them but we don’t actually play a lot together, like Dennis (Coyne) and I have never really sat and jammed together, we’ve just never done that.
But with them after three or four days I’m like all this is great I get to stand and listen to them play music and I get to sing on top of it, that’s pretty fun. That’s a new experience for me, just standing there singing and I can see why people like to do that, because you don’t have to worry about the music you get to listen to the music and sing on top of it and that’s pretty fun.
You mentioned previously about the 24 hour show experience. How did that experience help you as musicians and did it help you work ethics even more. Did you deter anything specifically from those 24 hours?
I just realized I never want to do it again (laughs). It was just one of those things, maybe you’ll have to ask Wayne about that but I think I can speak for most of us, when I say we just wanted to survive the experience. You start out and the first couple shows are a fun, and I think each show was like 20 minutes you know, that was the minimum. There’s no way we could have done a full concert at every stop. I think for it to be considered a world record it had to be 20 minutes. But what we did do was a different performance at each one and we never played the same song twice. So that’s where there is a little more preparation and each stop we collaborated with someone else. Every stop of the way someone met us and did music with us. Jackson Browne was with us at one and Neon Indian was with us at Jackson (MS). But it was just one of those things where you prepare and that experience was so intense that going to back to playing a regular show after it was nothing – not nothing – but it seems a lot less daunting after doing eight performances in eight different cities.
Talking about live shows, The Flaming Lips have so much material now to work with and such a limited time to play it all- do you ever think of making your full shows completely different shows setp-list wise each night and make your performances even a more unique event than it already is?
I can see us maybe doing that more as time goes on, we’re still trying to figure out how much of the old to play verse how much of the new to play. That’s something were trying to figure out. Last year we went on the road for The Terror and we were playing a lot of that material and very little of our old stuff and I think that turned people off. I think the really really hardcore fans that go see 20 shows a year liked it, but I think that people that are on the peripheral of our fandom were just kind of confused by the whole thing. So we decided to back up a little on that and bring back some of the older stuff. That’s what we are figuring out now how much of the old stuff to play; how much of The Terror stuff do we play and should we throw in a cover?
But back to your question, if we are playing ten years from now and which I can’t see why we wouldn’t be, it could become where we aren’t even worried about playing new material; we’re just trying to deal with all the material that exists. There is just too much to choose from. A lot of people want to hear “Do you Realize??” and we should play that. And they probably want to hear “Race for the Prize” or “Yoshimi” and we should play those and beyond that maybe get a little weirder.
Right now we are opening up with the first song off of Clouds Taste Metallic (“Abandoned Hospital Ship”), which I think a lot of people don’t know but the hardcore fans whenever we kick into it every night they can’t believe we are playing that. And that’s fun and I think we’re going to do an all Transmissions from the Satellite Heart show next month in Minneapolis which is going is going to need some preparation because I would say three or four songs off that record we haven’t played since the mid 90’s, so that should be interesting. But I think at some point I think it will be one night it will be one thing and if you come three nights later it will be a completely different set list. But a lot of it for us is just the light show that gets worked out and the videos that need to get worked out, it’s not just us playing that needs to be figured out.
It’s admirable how you have gone in more experiment directions with Embryonic and The Terror rather than doing another Yoshimi. In many ways The Flaming Lips could have been one of the biggest bands in the world with another few of those types of records. What are your thoughts on that?
Well I don’t know if that would have worked out for us anyways, it didn’t feel like that way for me. I mean we tried to do that with War of the Mystics and that was like our most straight pop record, more so than Yoshimi I think. And even though I like half that record, half of it felt like we were trying too hard to be a big pop group you know? So I don’t know if that would have worked out for us anyway.
I know by the time we started working on Embryonic it was nice to not write a pop song per say and just make some wild noise. And so it wasn’t a struggle or anything. it just felt like this is what we should do now. We have lost a few fans and a few people that liked our music at the Starbucks might not have liked Embryonic but I don’t really mind. I don’t mind losing a few fans here and there. I think people would rather have us do what we want to do and if they like it, it’s even better for them and if they don’t they can go back to the Yoshimi stuff. But I’m just glad we did what we wanted to do verse what we should do. I can say for me, and I’m not a calculating kind of careerist person but I don’t know what would be the right thing to sell out anyways. (laughs)
Seems like everyone wants to collaborate with you, whether its Miley Cyrus, Moby, Nick Cave you name it. How do you decide who you want to work with?
Well Wayne will reach out to anyone he’s interested in and nine out of ten times they’ll respond back. Like on the Sgt Peppers tribute album that’s going to come out, I don’t know how many he got…. I was responsible for a couple. I mean every day he was on the phone with someone else and on one track alone he has three different artists besides The Flaming Lips. It’s just fun and it’s easy to correspond with people so why not? I would say we usually we usually don’t say no to people and usually people don’t say no to us. I would say 95 percent of the time it works out.
I mean even with Miley Cyrus we got these people that are like “Oh my God how can you do this, how can you work with Miley Cyrus.” I mean the band is going to go for 30 years and if you are offended by us doing something like that, 30 years into the career of the Flaming Lips, I guess you just don’t understand the basic gist of the band in the first place. I mean we were on Beverly Hills 90210 in 1995, so you couldn’t get any more sell out than that.
Since she’s a pop artist, Was there anything on that collaboration with Miley that surprised you when she entered the Flaming Lips world? Does she really get where you guys are coming from composition wise?
Well it’s not even that, she’s just singing you know. If we gave her some crazy instrumentation and she sang on top it, you can say “that doesn’t sound like a pop song.” I don’t think she would necessarily change the way she sings for any one particular thing. In fact we’ve written two or three songs now with that we’re hoping to record with her, and maybe even make a whole record. I mean she wants to make a whole record like in Oklahoma and we’ll see if we can make it happen. That will be something you know? Here’s this band that’s been around for- the band is ten years older than her- and here we are in the studio together working on some new… I think she just wants to do whatever she wants to do. And she wants us to be part of that, so we’re like ‘ok we’ll be part of that.’ And her live show is just insane and even if you don’t like her music, it’s just a bombardment of psychedelic insanity on stage.
Yeah it’s interesting how everyone from My Morning Jacket, Maynard James Keenan, Kesha and Miley get an equal opportunity to work with you all. I think it says a lot about Wayne.
He’s just like the more the merrier and lets all collaborate because if we try this thing something might happen that might not otherwise happen.
Coming full circle The Flaming Lips were the backing band for Beck on his Sea Change tour in 2002. He recently did the Song Reader project where he released new music as sheet music only- leading to the reader to interpret. In some ways it flows with the experimental grain of the Flaming Lips- what were your thoughts on that endeavor?
Well I have mixed feeling about it you know? One on hand it sounds like a pretty cool gimmick but on the other hand it seems like a pain in the ass if you just want to hear his new music.. But for me, I haven’t heard what the music is, and that’s the ultimate judgment. We know how the music was released and the presentation. but if the actual music itself is not good I wouldn’t care about it. I’m willing to give it a shot as Sea Change is my favorite Beck record but his newest stuff sheet music or not I haven’t heard what that newest stuff sounds like. I would say yeah cool good for him if you can have any idea that makes it seem like you are still trying new ideas.
And just on a final note, have you seen or heard anyone this summer at the festivals you’ve played that you are digging?
We actually got to play with a band called Morgan Delt and let’s put it this way they can wear headbands and get away with it. We did like three or four shows with him and his band and after a couple shows I was like this is great because I just had randomly heard them a month before and was really curious about it and then hey here we are out on the road with them. How great for me I don’t have to go anywhere to see them, they are right on the stage with me.
Who else? I got to see Lorde in Japan for a couple songs and I was pretty surprised I must say. The music sounded great and it was just a stripped down sparse production and she wasn’t playing the mega stage at Fuji Rock, but man she’s a great singer.
Live photos by Billy Briggs
One Response
Nice job Shane!!