Oklahoma-based band The Flaming Lips got their start in the early eighties with core member Wayne Coyne, the later addition of multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, and a number of other revolving bandmates over their tenure offering up an eclectic mix of songwriting, swaying from acoustic ballads to quite heavy hits with a focus on their own vision of psychedelic rock.
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After signing to major label Warner Bros. in 1991, The Flaming Lips began to see commercial success, helped in part by touring slots with the likes of '90s faves the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Candlebox, as well as a number of high-profile television features thanks to their 1993 Transmissions from the Satellite Heart single, "She Don't Use Jelly." In 1997 however, the group turned all of that momentum into a wild experiment, the Zaireeka project, which arrived on four CDs to be played simultaneously on four separate players.
With that out of their systems, followed by a number of unfortunate health related events within the group and their families, the band returned to their senses releasing The Soft Bulletin in 1999 featuring the hits "Waitin' For a Superman," and "Race For The Prize," which solidified an entirely new sonic direction.
So determined... 2002 was the year that officially broke The Flaming Lips into households worldwide following the release of the group's tenth studio album, the production-heavy Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, featuring the band's biggest single to date, the emotionally driven "Do You Realize??" and their Best Rock Instrumental Performance GRAMMY-winning track “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)."
In a new chat with Yahoo! Entertainment marking the 20th anniversary of the record, frontman Wayne Coyne admits their musical experimentation simply continued into the realm of Pop when they set out to make Yoshimi. “We would listen to things like Nelly Furtado and Madonna, and we would say, ‘Why don't we try to do that to our music? Like, wouldn't it be funny?’ — not thinking that we're making commercial-sounding music,” he says. “And we really thought when we put it out that people would not accept it at all, that they would think, ‘This is just a silly pop experiment.’ I think for us it was just a big surprise: ‘Oh, people think it's pop, and people think it's normal! Yay!’ The way that we were making it was challenging for us, like no record that we had ever made. It was experimental in its own way, for us. It just doesn't sound that way.”
What surprised them mostly was how fans new and old gravitated toward the lead single. “That line of like, ‘Everyone you know someday will die,’ in this type of poppy, slightly uplifting, slightly sad, slightly happy, slightly moving-along type of song -- we thought, ‘No one is going embrace this.’ Because it really is a weird way to look at living and dying, you know? But we were wrong,” says Coyne. "There would've been no way that we could've known that it was going to have this other power, where people use it at the deaths of their grandmothers and the births of their sons and daughters — for it to have such, such powerful meaning to people.”
"People would send us videos and say they'd use that song in there -- you know, big, powerful, mainstream family occasions. And we would be like, ‘What are we doing there?’ But in time," Coyne says, "we started to see that this is the power of music. They're not playing it because it's the Flaming Lips. They're playing it because of what the song means -- which, for a songwriter, that's as great as it gets. That really is the peak of having communicated with people at such a powerful, emotional time in their life. So yeah, I could easily say we were stupid for that, and we were wrong for thinking that. And in time, we were allowed to come to it in our own way and be like, ‘What were we thinking? This is amazing!’ So yes, I'd say we were completely stupid about it."
Watch the full chat below.
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