Flaming Lips

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so what are your thoughts on AWWTM? i'm looking for a second opinion

It's not Yoshimi. It's not the Soft Bulletin. But it's obviously not supposed to be, it's definitely different from anything I've hear them do before, which is commendable that they're still experimenting. Sadly, I wished their return to the electric guitar would've been something more.Still, I find it endlessly listenable even if it isn't as innovative as their previous two outings. "A Vein of Stars" is a beautiful song. "It Overtakes Me" makes want to wake and bake, and dance.

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Flaming Lips: 20 Years of Weird

this album has a song on it called "Enthusiasm for Life Defeats Existential Fear". This song contains the lyrics "Last night, i had a horrible dream..."
I have never heard this song in its entirety but i remember while watching The Fearless Freaks doc those lyrics pop up accompanying some beautiful arrangements. The sad thing is, Pitchfork has a link on their review of the album that says "Download from eMusic" that doesn't work. I want this song soooo bad! But i don't know what to do.

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Last week the record store around the corner from the video store i work at closed off the street and had a concert. Apparently one of the best shows this town's seen in a while (featuring a great band called Kunek that everyone should check out). I only caught the last portion of the evening as I was working at the video store until midnight. What sucks about this is that while I'm working everyone from the show keeps coming in and telling us how much we're missing and that wayne coyne from the lips is there and he's just hanging out with everyone. I thought I had missed an opportunity to meet one of my favorite musicians and the best musician to come from my home state since woody guthrie.
Fast forward two days later to a show featuring some local bands w/ Danielson headlining. Not only was Danielson amazing (daniel smith's performance has pushed his album Ships into my So Far this Year list) but as i'm rocking out to the music mr. coyne is standing right next to me. Between song breaks I asked him about the show from a few days earlier he said he enjoyed himself, it was too bad i didn't get to see his nephew's band open the show and if he would've know about my store he would've checked it out. And that was that, he walked away after "Did I Step on Your Trumpet" and i got to come home and tell everyone that not only did i see wayne but i had a casual conversation with him. Judging from the fact that I'm nearly the only one who ever posts in this thread, I hope you guys can understand my giddiness.

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If anyone cares....this av is a pic from the flaming lips show at the oklahoma city zoo last friday. it was great, thats wayne with a dove in his hand a spaceship in the background...if anyone cares to see anymore pics i've got a shitload, you can see the spaceship descend upon the zoo somewhere on youtube if one were so inclined

[MacGuffin]

For you, my dear:



Flaming Lips: They don't think small
Balloons. Dancing fans. A UFO. The band will go all out for a joint concert with Gnarls Barkley and Cat Power.
Source: Los Angeles Times

Singer Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips is apologetic. "We'll see if people will forgive us, and try again," he says.

Unlike other high-profile apologies (see Michael Richards, Mel Gibson, etc.), Coyne has done nothing to offend — his psychedelic pop band, after all, makes songs about coming together, finding the right direction in life, moral quandaries and even robot battles. But he's apologizing, now, for last New Year's, when the Lips' planned festivities at Giant Village in downtown Los Angeles were scotched after promoters, citing safety concerns caused by rain, canceled the event only hours before the gates were to open.

"When they take control away from you like that, it's just crushing," says Coyne, adding that the band learned its lesson: "[On New Year's], we should always play inside."

And so it will be Sunday, when the Lips, joined by Gnarls Barkley and Cat Power, give a concert that rings in 2007 at the USC Galen Center.

Few bands anywhere better embody what most concert-goers are looking for on New Year's Eve than the Flaming Lips. On what passes as a normal night for them, they're surrounded by audience members, each illuminated, dressed as aliens, Santa Clauses, giant stuffed animals, blow-up suns, enormous salamanders or some combination thereof. Then there are the balloons — thousands of them, bouncing merrily everywhere — as well as the blizzard of confetti blown on the audience throughout the show.

"For the past six or seven years, we've become a New Year's Eve band," Coyne says. "Each time we've done a New Year's show, the spectacle has stayed with us for the next show. The first time we did the balloons was at a New Year's show. We thought, 'We'll go all out.' "

Now, of course, all-out for the Lips' is far bigger than that. For most of this year, they've been talking about their plans to introduce a giant UFO to their stage set-up — a plan that was intended to be hatched at the Hollywood Bowl this summer but was foiled by (of all things) transportation issues. Instead, they debuted the UFO at a hometown show in Oklahoma City. It will get one more test run Saturday night in San Francisco.

"There's an amphitheater that's part of the Oklahoma City Zoo," Coyne says. "We've been out there for the last month or so trying to figure out lighting configurations and weight configurations that will let us do this stuff. We were out there last night at 1:30 in the morning with smoke machines blowing into the hyena pits over there. It looks pretty crazy — even by my standards."

For this New Year's show, the onstage dancers will be picked from Lips fans who've uploaded videos of their dance steps onto YouTube, and Coyne says he's impressed with the results: "They can share their freakiness and not be overshadowed by the Flaming Lips."

The band is also planning onstage collaborations with its openers, Cat Power and Gnarls Barkley, first in Gnarls' set on their ubiquitous "Crazy" (which Coyne calls "the coolest song of the year") and later, post-midnight, for an all-band run-through of "What a Wonderful World."

Says Coyne, "That's the sort of thing an audience thinks should happen at something like this, and they often don't. I've been to plenty of New Year's shows that were standard issue. You go to a Flaming Lips show — that's what New Year's is all about."

In fact, he says, he wants people to think they were at the best event in the world.

"Sometimes you'll go to a New Year's party or New Year's show, and [the next day] you'll be watching some dumb CNN thing, and they'll show some party that's utterly out of control," the singer says. "You'll slump in your seat and say: 'I wish I was at that one. The one I was at, even though it was fun, wasn't out of control.'

"My thought is: You come to a Flaming Lips show, come home and watch CNN — you pity those fools.

"You were at the party that was the greatest party on the planet at that moment."

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Sorkin Will Script Flaming Lips Musical

March 20, 2007--The West Wing/Studio 60 creator will write the script of a musical based on the psych-rockers' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

The Great White Way will never be the same: In an exclusive interview, Wayne Coyne, lead singer of the Flaming Lips, told EW.com that the psych-rock band will team up with acclaimed TV writer and show creator Aaron Sorkin to turn the group's 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots into a Broadway musical.

Sorkin's reps confirmed on Tuesday (March 20) that the West Wing creator has officially signed on to write the musical's script. ''Maybe that means they'll need to build a stage with lots of hallways on it,'' joked Coyne of Sorkin's fondness for walking-and-talking characters. ''It will be a giant tube that's always moving!''

Sorkin is just one of many marquee collaborators attached to the project: Tony Award-winning director/producer Des McAnuff (Jersey Boys, The Who's Tommy) will be overseeing the show. In fact, the unexpected collaboration grew out of McAnuff's fondness for the Lips' acclaimed Yoshimi album. ''When Des heard the record, he heard a lot about death and loss and the triumph of your own optimism... he had an emotional attachment to it,'' Coyne says. The San Diego-based theater producer pursued the idea and convinced the band that the album would make a compelling musical - other songs from the Lips' catalog will likely be included as well - despite the abstract, trippy nature of the source material. ''I tell people all the time, it's not really a story. It's more like a mood,'' Coyne says. ''There's a Japanese girl; she fights some robots; that's five minutes. After that I don't know.''

Sorkin was brought in by McAnuff, who recently directed Sorkin's play The Farnsworth Invention at the La Jolla Playhouse. According to Coyne, the TV scribe listened to Yoshimi while driving from San Diego to Los Angeles; the next day he signed on to write the ''book'' of the musical. ''I didn't know if that was a big deal or not,'' Coyne explains. ''But then Des [McAnuff] called me and said, 'Believe me, that's a big deal!'''

The musical's debut is likely years off, and details of the plot aren't specific yet.

Coyne compares the proposed concept to Terry Gilliam's dystopian sci-fi movie Brazil. ''There's the real world and then there's this fantastical world,'' explains Coyne. ''This girl, the Yoshimi character, is dying of something. And these two guys are battling to come visit her in the hospital. And as one of the boyfriends envisions trying to save the girl, he enters this other dimension where Yoshimi is this Japanese warrior and the pink robots are an incarnation of her disease. It's almost like the disease has to win in order for her soul to survive. Or something like that.'' Sounds bizarre, but so does a musical about a ''deaf, dumb, and blind'' pinball virtuoso. That one turned out okay.

SOURCE CREDIT: Entertainment Weekly; By Michael Endelman


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This is fuckin' cool....