Often times you’ll end up with two or three different versions of the song – different inflections, different melodies, different little bits – and I sort of welcome all that.įor me, I get pretty easily satisfied if anything works at all, and then I’m like, “oh great, look, it works”. We do quite a few songs that way, where the song we think we’re working on, we’ll quickly abandon that for the new song that seems to be appearing beneath the song we thought we were making – we’ll just abandon it and write the other song. It can go a lot of ways, but a lot of times you’re working on a track and, because of what you’ve built from it, you hear another song in that. WC: Well sometimes it works the other way, where it’s already kind of a track: it’s already got bass and drums and things that’re playing the chords and whatever. WHF: So do you end up with a base track, effectively, you can then add bits to, make it a song that’ll go on a Flaming Lips record? I think I’m just really lucky that I gravitate towards people who already have something, then I’m just adding to it. Then a lot of times Steven will have a really great chord progression, melody, mood already, and I think he knows simply by playing it for me I’ll start going, “oh, I could do this, I could do that”. Then once he gets involved I get to jump on it again. I mean, I write a lot of songs myself, but they’re slightly vehicles to get Steven involved. So that’s definitely one way of doing it, where you’re just taking the feeling of whatever the music is doing, and if you’re lucky that sends you down a melodic road and a lyrical road – then you’ve got to pick and choose, you’ll repeat words or something won’t make any sense, and you’ll try to finish it up as best you can. And he’ll play his little bit, then simply by him playing it’ll do that thing where it provokes me to go, “oh, I could say this, I could say that”. Occasionally I’ll come up with a chord progression and a melody and lyrics, then I’ll get stuck and I’ll say, “well where else can this go?” And having a virtual master musician like Steven, he can say, “well it could go here, it could go there”. It reminded me a bit of working with the Chemical Brothers, where they sent us a track and I’d do whatever came to my mind by having the music kind of give me a marker, and think: “Okay, well I’ll sing about this, and I’ll just be Wayne inside this song.” Sometimes that’s really easy and it works great, and sometimes that’s really easy and doesn’t work at all, but you kind of have to go with whatever the vibe, the feeling it has evoked in you.Īnd Steven and I work a lot off each other in that same way. Wayne Coyne: Well just as you called we were working on a track: I forget the name of the band but someone had sent me a track and we were putting some singing to it.

The flaming lips albums