We are so bad at being mean that it’s funny. … When I hear that stuff now, I hear just how innocent and happy and dorky we are through music that’s trying to be angry and cool and whatever. If I really thought, “I’m a great singer and songwriter, and I want to sing about loving my mother,” I could never do it! But singing these ridiculous things that I don’t really know the meaning of – a lot of times, it’s a collision of all these exaggerated ideas about religion and drugs and the way you’re putting your life in-between these.
I think I’m being smart and cool, but the more I think I’m doing both of those things, the less I’m actually doing that – but through trying to be cool, I’m exposing some innocence, some dorky part of me, that’s better, that I never could have done that on my own. That’s probably one of the great accidental things that the Flaming Lips do. When I hear it now, I know I’m being too obvious in one way and too innocent in another way. In a way, they’re sort of classic, existential Wayne Coyne, but they’re also darker and angrier than your trademark style: “Well, I never really understood religions/Except it seems a good reason to kill.” The opening lyrics to “Jesus Shootin’ Heroin” are fascinating. Let’s go back to the beginning with your first album, Hear It Is. For better or worse, it all sounds really fantastic. And we’re putting it in a certain order and giving it a certain vibe and remastering it. You can just have them.” In a sense, it’s curated by us – we’re the ones saying these songs are important. You don’t have to search around for what album they’re on. We were just thinking, “Why don’t we make that easy? Here’s this collection. “Here’s the song everybody wants to hear first,” and then it goes from there. Spotify is a great example: They’re putting out kind of a greatest hits already. We’ve been trying to put out a Greatest Hits for a long time, but we just haven’t been able to get all the pieces to come together. The Flaming Lips have been around for decades. But for most Flaming Lips fans, it’s not like, “They put out an album 10 years ago that I like.” It’s “I’m interested in them – what are they doing?” We always know we’re gaining a little bit of our audience but also losing a little bit of the audience all the time. A lot of people are only going to be interested in music or buy music or have it be connected to their life for just a short amount of time – maybe from the time they’re 18 to 25. The Flaming Lips fans are people who say, “Oh, I like this music,” and then they discover more of our music, and it becomes a bigger and bigger thing, instead of it being just attached to a certain part of their life. Was part of the reasoning of creating this Greatest Hits to remind fans that, “Hey, there’s this entire other Flaming Lips universe you may not have heard of”? It’s easy to break down the Flaming Lips catalog into these clearly defined eras: 1999’s The Soft Bulletin is an obvious marking point, as is 1992’s Hit to Death in the Future Head, your Warner Bros.
To mark this rare repose of looking backward, Coyne spoke to Rolling Stone about their creative evolution, the crucial impact of his bandmates (both temporary and long-term) and the idea of becoming a “character” – both on album and in real life. From like Transmissions From the Satellite Heart to Zaireeka, it all starts to blend together.”
You’d hear a song and would say, ‘I’ve gotta hear that record.’ When you hear a lot of our music, it just starts to blend into being the Flaming Lips – it just doesn’t stand out as being from this time or that time. Of course, back then, it wasn’t that easy to get those other records. And as we were growing up, those records really did turn us onto these bands because we didn’t really know about their other albums. “He’s always like, ‘Let’s do a greatest hits!’ He points to Echo & the Bunnymen and the Cure having a greatest hits. “Our manager is like the biggest Flaming Lips fan that could ever be,” he adds.