They're far enough away now that we can sing about them. It's kind of mythologising them. "In that way it got us more comfortable with telling each others' stories, combining our pasts, our stories and our pain. "Steven and I have been doing podcasts for a couple of years now. We'll pick a song and dissect it on the podcast, and it'll make us tell stories: 'What did you mean by this, and what did you mean by this?' It sort of goes all over the place. Wayne says much of the new album came from a string of "intense conversations" between him and the band's guitarist and keyboardist Steven Drozd. "These are the types of songs that I think anyone could hear and think, 'What is that? These guys sound like they've been through something', and then once you examine what the lyrics are saying, it just becomes a bigger more enjoyable couple of minutes." It gave us a palette of sounds to work from, and even the way the songs could be structured. "In this album we used Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as kind of a model. "We're really just some weirdoes who like to record and write songs, it's not like we have a set thing that we think we are. The Flaming Lips are known for their fantastical live shows, which have variously included confetti cannons, laser pointers, dozens of large balloons, dancers dressed as aliens, yetis, fake blood, and even Wayne appearing from a giant alien mothership. So we wouldn't like to put out an album like this every time, because the other types of albums we make we learn so much from, we do a lot of experimenting and it's fun and it's crazy, and it's not under so much scrutiny - mostly from ourselves." Sometimes we put out one or two albums a year. "If we were a group that made an album every five or six years, most of the albums we'd make would probably be like American Head, but we make a lot of music. But they're hard, hard, hard to make, and it's stressful, and you do work very intensely to make the whole thing one good rolling vibe. "We make a lot of records and do a lot of weird stuff," Wayne says, "And we love this type of Flaming Lips album because it's easy to sing these songs, and you really really feel the songs. RELATED: The Sampler - The Flaming Lips American Head It's also been described as 'accessible'. The Flaming Lips are prolific, and their albums diverse, but their new record American Head has been compared to some of their most popular releases: Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. This audio is not downloadable due to copyright restrictions.
Add to playlist Playlist Listen to the full interview here