The Flaming Lips are coming to Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena May 3 with special guests The Black Keys. Later that weekend they will join the Keys, along with Smashing Pumpkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Roots, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Bassnectar and others in Memphis for the 2013 Beale Street Music Festival.
Steven Drozd, Flaming Lips songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, speaks to the Murfreesboro Pulse about the upcoming show, writing songs with bandmate Wayne Coyne and the Lips’ fifteenth studio record, The Terror, which was released last month.
Steven Drozd
What response have you gotten from fans so far regarding The Terror?
Well, there are the fans, and there are the hardcore fans, you know? I don’t know if the hardcore fans are bummed out by it, but maybe they’re reading too much into it, like, taking it personal. “Wayne and Steven must be really going through some dark times to make this record.” Generally, people seem to be excited about it. It seems like something different. It seems like we tried to make a different record that wasn’t another Embryonic or Soft Bulletin or Yoshimi or something. I think, overall, the response has been really good.
The two records are so different, but you’ve said you see The Terror as a follow-up to Embryonic. In what way?
I don’t think we could have made this record if we hadn’t made Embryonic first. We got done with At War With the Mystics, and in hindsight, it seems like that was us trying to go as far into pop songwriting as we could. Pop songs, big production, and Embryonic seemed like a big “fuck you” to The Mystics, like, let’s just jam for an hour and turn 10 minutes of recording into a song. To me, The Terror is like the hangover from Embryonic. If you spend all night jamming from Embryonic, when the sun came up in the morning, and you were coming down from LSD or whatever it was you were on [laughs], that would be the sound of The Terror. I say that jokingly, but, musically, I think it was almost like when we started, I wasn’t thinking we were starting a record. I just thought we were making some music, but Wayne seemed to really respond to it, and we started working on it together. Next thing you know, we had three or four songs. It was a few songs in before we realized we were making a record. I was just doing it for my own personal enjoyment. I just don’t think it could have happened that way if we hadn’t made Embryonic first and had two years of making all this extra music for all these different releases and Heady Fwends and the 24-hour song and the 6-hour song.
The Terror is thematically dark. Why did you decide to focus on those concepts in this record?
A lot of times, if I’m working on some music, Wayne will either respond to it, or he won’t, and if he doesn’t respond to it, I just throw it into a pile to use for something else, or maybe I’ll play it for him later. If he does respond to it, we work on it together. When he responded to something called “You Are Alone” in such a way that told me he must be on the same kind of wavelength that I am… like, he was having doubts about whatever life is, or new doubts about life, or what you do when you’ve been in the band for… I’ve been in the band 21 years, the band has been going for 30 years. We were just on a similar wavelength of how we felt about stuff, and I think us being on the same wavelength created the energy that made the record. It just seemed like a good time to do a record that said there’s not just the, “Do You Realize??” Flaming Lips, and not just this band that has people in costumes dancing onstage and Wayne in a bubble floating over the crowd or whatever. There’s another side to the band that’s, for lack of a better term, bleaker or more depressing. Those are all kind of clichés, but we wanted to express there’s this other side to the band that I think people forget about all the time, because we’re always out there doing this other stuff that seems like a lot of gimmicks or whatever… our live show is this big party. When we got done with this record, I was the happiest with this record that I’ve been with any of our records in years. Maybe since the The Soft Bulletin, you know. It was the record that we should have done at that time.
Do you approach a record as one idea, or several smaller ideas on the same record?
It varies from record to record. I feel like At War With the Mystics was almost to a fault just a collection of songs, not that every record needs to be a concept record. But that one just felt like all these different pop productions thrown onto one record. Early on, when we started talking about this record, we wanted it to be a uniform or, what’s the word people use, cohesive statement. I would say with this record, as much as with The Soft Bulletin or any of our “concept records,” we wanted it to be one statement. We talked about releasing it as one whole download instead of individual songs. But then we backtracked and thought it might be really pompous, pretentious and presumptuous [laughs], so we decided not to do it. They’re individual songs, but they serve the purpose of one continuous idea. Embryonic, even though it’s a double record, is like little blasts of different ideas, peaks and valleys. To me, The Terror is, probably more than any of our records, a continuous, similar hum of despair.
Would you make “traditional” records if not for the fans and keeping the audience engaged?
It depends on what a traditional record is. We have years of great traditional music. Rock and roll in the ’70s – to me, how can you top what Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, the Stones, Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath did? You’ve got Sex Pistols and The Clash and what happened after that… Sonic Youth and all those bands. There’s just years and years of traditional records, and I feel like we’ve got plenty of those, so I don’t know. To me, The Terror isn’t that weird. It’s not like it’s Zaireeka where you have to have four different CD players to play it. It’s just our trip right now. Who knows, our next record could be 10 perfectly produced pop songs. I doubt it, but we could. It just depends what we’re thinking at the time. What would you consider traditional at this point? It’s 2013. Some 18-year-old kid somewhere with GarageBand can make a record that might blow our minds, so it seems like all bets are off at this point.
Can you describe your songwriting role with Wayne on this record and the process?
Over the years, it got to the point where, luckily, we’ve always been really comfortable with each other and making music with each other. When I first joined the band, I played drums. Pretty quickly, we’d work on music together, and I’d have a song idea, and he would write the lyrics for it, or he would have a song where he wanted a couple chords different, and I’d help him with that. By the time we were doing The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi, we were writing songs together, and it was very comfortable. On this newest record, instead of him coming to the studio with a song or me coming to the studio with a song and helping each other, we would just get together with literally no idea. We’d go to the studio, turn the synthesizer on and record the first sound we thought was really cool and evoked some mood, and we would record that and put sounds on top of it and start riffing with melody ideas, and he’d start writing lyrics, or I’d sing one line, and he’d start writing words. I felt more connected with him when we were working on this record than probably any other record. We were both sitting there and both reacting to what we were hearing for the first time. That was pretty cool. It happened very fast that way, and we didn’t think too much about it, and I think it helped us. We just did it. Hopefully, you’ll hear that in the record. It was like we were discovering music again in a real positive way.
You do a lot of covers and collaborations. What compels you to do that?
I feel like we love music, and most people who play music, love music. We like to show how much we love other kinds of music and show how much we appreciate it, and that’s one of the reasons we do these covers and stuff. The collaborations show we’re interested in what other people are doing, and we value what anyone thinks about what we do, and we want to tap into whatever it is they do, and that seems like a good way to do it. If you can get together with Kevin Parker from Tame Impala, who are one of my favorite bands from the past three or four years, and he’s interested in doing something with you, that’s really exciting. It’s like a mutual appreciation thing that you wouldn’t get to have otherwise. Covers, we just want to show we are really excited about all kinds of music we’re interested in and want to see what’s going on with it.
As a band with such an emphasis on video, why do Flaming Lips do few “traditional” videos?
I guess I don’t know what a traditional music video is. I guess the videos for Embryonic suited the music pretty well. Last time we did a “traditional video” was “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” in 2006. We did that with this team called Traktor. They’re high-tech, cutting edge, and I hate to use that term, video guys, and it was a really fun experience, and the video is pretty funny and suits the songs really well. Wayne is the de facto video director of our group, and I’d say nine times out of 10, the video he comes up with suits the music. With Christmas on Mars, I thought the music and video went hand-in-hand pretty well. Maybe we’ll make a traditional video this year, I don’t know.
What can people expect from the Nashville show? Will it be like your SXSW show?
I think, let’s see, that’s with The Black Keys, right? At SXSW, we played the new record from top to bottom. That was kind of an experiment in front of 20,000 people. By the time we play Nashville, I think we’ll work out some of the rough edges of that. I don’t think we’ll play it top to bottom, but we’ll play three or four songs from the record. By then, we’ll have worked out some video stuff more and lighting stuff. We don’t want to completely turn off the people that like the big Flaming Lips show, but we definitely want to change the show, so we’re not just doing the dances on stage and the bubble. You’ll see something between what the Austin show was and our big festival show. Darker and heavier and not so joyous, but it won’t be whatever Austin was, which was a sustained, “Oh my God, what are these guys doing?” show. Somewhere in between, I hope.
What inspires the theatricral aspect of your live performance and stage setting?
That’s a good question for Wayne. I think early in his life, he must have seen some rock show. He saw Alice Cooper when he was really young. That did some brain damage, like, to him; [a show] could only be really intense if there was a visual element to it [laughs]. Maybe that’s exaggerating the situation. Even before I joined the band, when I saw the Flaming Lips, you couldn’t see the band. It was smoke machines and strobe lights. I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen, that level of smoke and strobe lights in a club for 200 people, and they were playing, like, 130 decibels. It was just crazy, and I think its always been a part of the Lips trip. We’re going to play music, but you’re not just going to be assaulted with music, you’re going to be visually fucked with. I’m glad that aside from the music hitting you, you’re getting pummeled with an image on the giant video screen. That’s all it is, making a rock and roll concert more extreme, more memorable. I’ve seen a million bands that play really well. They’re really intense, and that’s enough for me sometimes, but sometimes you see a band, and they have all that, but also a crazy light show, and you walk away never forgetting that.
