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The Flaming Lips perform during the Bourbon and Beyond festival. And I think we felt like with this one, it’s such a weird story that if you’re not a little more specific, you wouldn’t really know what the hell is going on. It’s just another version of how you can not be so abstract - you can really nail at what the story is about. Seuss cartoons - How the Grinch Stole Christmas! There’s a Harry Nilsson album called The Point! That has some narration on it. We hadn’t done a record that had narration on it. And we thought, “Well, let’s tie all that stuff in.” So if you went to the installation, you’d know the album, you’d see the painting, you’d hear that narration and it would all just sort of tie in. Some of them we just made up - we didn’t have paintings for all of them. So the paintings would have titles like, “When the king was born, his mother died.” The things that he said there. So whether it was Mick or someone else, we were pretty set on having some narration.Īnd the narration would be the titles of these paintings that I did. In terms of driving the narrative, which is what he does, how crucial is Mick’s role on this album in particular?Ĭoyne: Steven and I, there’s a couple of albums that we really like that have narration. And I think that really kind of pushed it to be better and more simple and more emotional and all of that. We’ve got this fantastic voice doing this story now. And about a month and a half later, all of this stuff came back and it was actually Mick Jones having done it. We weren’t really that far along on the making of the album anyway. So I had put together all the things for him to read. And he said, “You know, Mick doesn’t do anything… But I’ll get him to do it for you, Wayne.” And I was like, “Sure. He’s come to Flaming Lips shows and we’ve talked and all of that.Īnd one day, we were talking about Mick Jones and I just sort of said, “Hey, do you think you could get Mick to do some narration on the new album we’re putting together?” And we were both sort of halfway joking, talking about this.
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So Don is friends with Mick Jones who used to be in The Clash. And Don Letts was in the band Big Audio Dynamite. How did you wind up getting Mick Jones involved in his role as narrator?Ĭoyne: A friend of ours, a British singer named Georgia, lives next door to Don Letts. in Louisville, Kentucky Photo by Barry Brecheisen Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips during the Bourbon and Beyond festival. Some songs would be more stories, some would be sort of abstract instrumentals and stuff. So that sort of started us conceptualizing. But with more urging we thought, “Well, maybe it would be better? Maybe it suits having an album that goes with it.” In the beginning we didn’t intend to make an album.
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“Well, there’s already music and a story. And the more that it went along, people that would experience the installation and then see these sort of drawings that laid out this story, I think they would assume that we were just making an album. I drew some collages, sort of painting and collage things, and those turned out really well. And the curator at the very first place that we did it at, he sort of urged me to come up with a little bit of like, “What’s the story of this thing?” And I sort of took it as an excuse to come up with just a fantastical story - just a fantasy story of what it’s all about. It was just this thing that you went into. Which, in the beginning of 2014 or 2015 or whenever it started to really be something out in the world, it didn’t really have a story. Wayne Coyne: It is connected to this installation. It certainly lies at the heart of King’s Mouth, as a companion piece to the art installation, in a way it kind of never has on a Flaming Lips album. And that idea has been at the heart of great Flaming Lips songs and albums. A lightly edited transcript of that conversation follows below.
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I spoke with Wayne Coyne backstage at the Bourbon and Beyond festival in Louisville, Kentucky about the collaboration with Jones, the optimism often found in the group’s music and what makes Daniel Johnston’s songs so great. And I think that really kind of pushed it to be better and more simple and more emotional and all of that.” And the narration would be the titles of these paintings that I did,” explained Coyne of the new album and its ties to the art exhibit. “We hadn’t done a record that had narration on it.