The Flaming Lips – Interview

Steven Drozd of The Flaming Lips calls in!

I noticed you lived near Buffalo.

I’m living west of Buffalo. Do you know where Fredonia is?

Yeah I grew up outside of Buffalo.

I moved here last year to get out of Oklahoma City. I really like it. The winters here are brutal. There were travel bans the day after Christmas.

Did you move there for recording?

We’ve been recording there since ’97. Our producer Dave Fridmann lives there and has a studio there. His wife and kids are there and I love those people and to be really honest I was trying to get out of a really bad drug thing for about six years. So I needed to get out of Oklahoma City. I thought I’d go and see what it was like living with Dave and see if I could get off the stuff, I don’t want to get into it anymore than that. So I stayed there and tried to clean up and it’s been about a year now, it’s been great. We started recording Zaireeka there.

How long did you spend in the studio on Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots?

The summer of 2000 to February 2002, but we will record for a few weeks and then go and play shows. Its very off and on. We record a few songs and then hang out with it and listen to it for six months. But we do spend a lot more time recording than most bands.

Do you have a lot of tracks or do you put a lot of time on tracks over and over?

We don’t have like fifty songs, it’s usually a struggle for us to get twelve songs for the record, but we will work on the same songs over and over. We’ll remix it ten or twenty times to make it great. It’s really time consuming.

Do you work on the tracks separately?

We can do that. Sometimes I’ll have chords, but no lyrics and Wayne will give it a name and lyrics. Wayne is really good at that, but sometimes he has the majority of the song done and he’ll play a song for me on an acoustic guitar and we go from there.

Does Wayne still blow you away when he brings back your instrumental and has great lyrics done for it?

All the time.

I loved “The Spiderbite Song” and I read it was because a Brown Recluse Spider bit you. Ever since I moved to the Mid-west I’ve been so paranoid about those things.

The thing with those spiders is they are very small. Spiders give me the creeps. When I was a kid my step-mother got bit by one and they had to take out a big chunk of her leg. They just leave a massive absess. I got bit by one and they almost had to amputate my hand.

Every time I see a spider now I freak out that it might be some Recluse Spider.

You are touring soon with Beck…

…Right now I’m listening to him do a radio interview while I’m talking to you. Once I’m done talking to you and he is done with his radio show we are going to meet in the valley to practice. We’ve been practicing until midnight every day this week. I like the new record Sea Change. When I first heard it I thought, ‘ah, big deal’, but after a few listens I think it is his best one.

What do you think about being in a lot of critics top ten albums of the year all of the time?

Well, hmmm, what do you say to that? I would admit that it would be hard to continue if the critics hated our records and we didn’t sell much. It would be really hard because it would wear you down if no one cared. After a while you’d get to a point where you’d be like ‘wow, what are we doing here?’ We don’t sell millions of records so at the end of the day what people say about us matters. Of course it’s our art and we do it for that too, but you want people to listen to it. When people gave us this overwhelming response to The Soft Bulletin we were blown away. We thought it was good, but we didn’t know how others would respond. I was really happy people liked it. Even with the new record people still seem overjoyed with it.

What kept you guys doing your own thing rather than attaching yourselves to what might make you a lot of money for radio or whatever?

I don’t think we know how to do the popular thing. We are always trying to sell out but we don’t know how to do it right. (We both laugh) We love so many different kinds of music and there is a lot we want to try. So we are interested in what is current. We listen to Madonna as much as we do weird stuff. We like top forty radio. But we are lucky that we can make the kind of music we want to. We got lucky with our label. We have one of the worlds largest conglomerate backing us. They never make demands, they just make suggestions on singles and stuff, but nothing major. I can’t really take credit for taking so many chances. I have to give credit to Wayne and Michael, those fuckers have been together for twenty years now. I joined in 1991, that was a long time ago and I’m still the new guy. They have always been independent minded people. They’ve always wanted to do it their way and hope the world would come along. That is the thing I loved about the Flaming Lips when I joined them.

Earlier you said you do a lot of remixing. Is there ever too much?

We do that too much. Sometimes we keep working on something and we just forget we should stop. Like with “Do You Realize?”, we were rapping up a session and had finished a few songs and we didn’t finish mixing it. Then we turned it in and Warner Bros. heard it and didn’t want us to change it, but we didn’t think it was done. That was cool and a tell-tale sign that we can take it to far. We do forget sometimes to let it go and we will spend two weeks remixing a chorus on one song.

You guys have some serious fans, do some get to the point of weird?

It gets weird sometimes. They come to ten shows and at the third show you are like, ‘okay, that’s cool’, but by the tenth show you think they are really good fans. Then you realize they are really freaky, needy people and they want you to hang out with them. That is weird. I guess fan is just short for fanatic. We get the fanatical types, we don’t get the groupie types. I never got to tap into that much. (We both laugh). Maybe I should check into that. (We both laugh) Actually that is mean, I don’t really mean that. But seriously we usually get the total nerd people who know every sound of every song of every record. They always want to talk about music.

It could be worse, they could find your house.

Speaking of that, Wayne had a couple just show up at his door one night. They were from Tennessee and showed up at his house without him knowing and then didn’t leave for like two days. Wayne almost had a nervous breakdown. He’s really nice, too nice to say ‘get the fuck out’. But they didn’t come there to do anything, they just sat there and sort of stared at him for a couple of days.

+ charlie craine