The Flaming Lips’s Wayne Coyne on the Beatles, Drugs, and Loving Miley Cyrus
For the last 30 years, the Flaming Lips have been one of the predominant torch-carriers to the psychedelic music movement of the ’60s. So it’s fitting that they’d try to tackle the Beatles psychedelic classic “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in its entirety. The band recorded over the last year with a host of different artists like Miley Cyrus, My Morning Jacket, Tegan & Sara, Tool‘s Maynard James Keenan and many more. They’re calling the resulting effort “With a Little Help From My Fwends,” a track-by-track recreation of the 1967 record, with a Flaming Lips twist at just about every turn. The band has done this before. In 2009, they released a cover version of Pink Floyd‘s“Dark Side of the Moon” and this time last year, a recreation of Brit-pop band theStone Roses self-titled 1989 debut. This of course isn’t their only means of making music these days; in 2013, the band released their 13th studio album of original material called “The Terror.” Earlier this week, Speakeasy talked with the Flaming Lips’s frontman, Wayne Coyne, while he was cruising around his hometown of Oklahoma City,
OK. in his Toyota Prius. Here, he explains his philosophies on drugs and music, the Beatles, the appeal of Miley, and more. “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is one of the most famous drug albums of all time. Were drugs involved in making this? [Laughs.] Well, no. I think when the Beatles were doing it, they talked a lot about smoking pot and LSD and all that. I try to remind people, that when people are willing to do drugs, especially for creative people, it’s just another way of saying “F–k man I don’t have any limits. I’ll try things and see what happens.” I think when people do drugs, that aren’t creative, it falls in another category: “I like being f–ked up.”
Source: The Wall Street Journal
