The Flaming Lips

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Op donderdag 9 februari 2006 21:01 schreef spacemangraig het volgende:

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Jezus, 27 april Flaming Lips, 8 mei Belle and Sebastian.

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Op zaterdag 11 februari 2006 02:50 schreef thijsdetweede het volgende:
Ja die. Geef toe, niet hetzelfde niveau als de eerste drie, hoef er ook geen cd's verder van, maar een concertje van die club staat toch nog wel hoog op mn lijstje. Overigens kan ik dan niet, maar dat terzijde.

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Op zondag 12 februari 2006 23:21 schreef thijsdetweede het volgende:
Ehm ja......
Eerste indruk na de eerste paar nummers is dat het toch wel een grote stap is voor de Lips. Ergens heen.

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Op zondag 12 februari 2006 23:52 schreef Wepeel2 het volgende:

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Ik snap wat je bedoelt. Ik weet het ook nog niet echt. Er zitten wat liedjes tussen die ik meteen erg goed/leuk vind (Free Radicals, The W.A.N.D., Vein Of Stars, Haven't Got A Clue), maar er staan ook wat nummers op die ik niet direct begrijp.
Zal het album de komende dagen gewoon veel draaien en dan merk ik wel in hoeverre er een kwartje valt.

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Op maandag 13 februari 2006 11:21 schreef thijsdetweede het volgende:
Daarom geef ik het ding ook nog wel een paar kansen. Probleem is wel dat een van de belangrijkste punten van kritiek op dit moment 'vlak' is, en daar heb ik de lipjes nog nooit van kunnen betichten.

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THE YEAH YEAH YEAH SONG (WITH ALL YOUR POWER)

Steven had been recording in a separate vocal booth on his computer and I walked by and heard the
crazy grouped vocals doing the "yeah yeah yeah" part and I was immediately hooked. This is one of
those songs that points the finger at the pettiness of those in power but also points the finger
back at ourselves - what would YOU do? Power in the hands of the inexperienced (which is what we
would be) is very dangerous...

FREE RADICALS (A HALLUCINATION OF THE CHRISTMAS SKELETON PLEADING WITH A SUICIDE BOMBER)

I had a dream in which Devendra Banhart (the weird singer/songwriter) is pleading with a suicide
bomber (who is about to go blow up something or somebody) to change his mind. And once he changes
the deranged zealot's point of view, he (Devendra) immediately sympathizes with the frustration
(mostly aimed at George W. Bush) that could make someone long for such exaggerated revenge...(Keep
in mind that this is just a funny dream - these suicide bombers are clearly brainwashed religious
fanaticals that are insane with their own agenda...they are beyond any pleads of reason and are not
worthy of any sympathy.)

THE SOUND OF FAILURE

We have some friends whose father was dying of cancer - I say "was" because it (the cancer and his
death) dragged on agonizingly for over a year - and they (our friends) were becoming,
understandably, weary of being forced to be upbeat...

And I remember hearing a comment once about how annoying it was, to them, to have to hear this
gratingly jubilant fake enthusiasm (usually hokey hyped-up pop groups like Black Eyed Peas,
Destiny's Child, Ashlee Simpson, Hillary Duff, etc.) blasting out of the "Muzak" systems virtually
everywhere they went. To them this cheerleader-type assault was really only effective if you didn't
actually have any real psychic stress...And they felt that it was, surprisingly, helpful to them to
try to understand their fears and their sadness - as opposed to pretending that it's "all good."

And, you see, this is true insight... finally we know it's okay to have a troubled mind, it's okay
to fail...

And so this song (which was written in the car on the way up to New York from Oklahoma while I
drove and Steven played battery powered keyboard and computer) is about a young girl whose best
friend has died, and everywhere she goes (like the friends I mentioned earlier) she must endure the
empty optimism of the inexperienced. She wants to know, since it has arrived, what is despair, what
is hope, what is failure...And what is in the darkness??

The line in the song, "so go tell Britney and go tell Gwen" is obviously a reference back to my
friends and their Muzak incident...meaning, "Yeah, go tell Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani that
their energy and their Prom Queen smiles only go to prove that they don't empathize with my
sadness." I believe, in the song, that Britney and Gwen could be thought of as this grieving girl's
less mature friends...and that she's not trying to go against them, she just doesn't want to pretend
that she understands what she doesn't really understand - what death is...what despair is...what
existential fear is... She doesn't know, but she's starting to find out...

IT'S DARK... IS IT ALWAYS THIS DARK?

A strange sort of afterword to the previous song. The voice and the strange blippy trail is
actually my voice run through a computer plug-in effect called "Squirrel Parade"...Pretty cool...
Anyway, it sounds like I'm saying "It's Dark", but I didn't say "It's Dark". I don't remember what
it was exactly - just me talking before a song, but it gives the illusion of a young girl finding
her way through a mystery...yes?

MY COSMIC AUTUMN REBELLION (THE INNER LIFE AS BLAZING SHIELD OF DEFIANCE AND OPTIMISM AS CELESTIAL
SPEAR OF ACTION)

We had been using the musical elements of this song (it wasn't a song then) as an intro for our
live shows, as I rolled around on top of the crowd in the now famous "Space Bubble." The power of
the chord structure and arrangement kept inspiring me and I eventually pieced together this
manifesto of defiance and optimism. It is my response to the naysaying know-it-alls who see life
leading only to death and see nature as a cruel prankster designed to defeat the human spirit. And
the truth (which I get to proclaim as if standing on the top of a holy mountain shooting lazer
beams out of my hands - thanks to Steven's epic orchestration) is that no circumstance can ever
defeat us unless we let it...

Resilience in the face of failure is a manifestation of the mind...

VEIN OF STARS

I picked up a guitar that Steven had tuned to an odd open chord (F 6/9) and, without thinking,
strummed it a couple of times and immediately sang (off the top of my head) the first line into the
tape recorder, "Who knows, maybe there isn't a vein of stars calling out my name." My intention was
to sing something cosmic about how humans have (as science reveals more and more about the nature
of time and space) been abandoned by the stars...But I believe, once we finished it (the song and
its production), it seemed to convey just the opposite...That almost despite science we are
connected to the stars...Because we love to look at them, we hope maybe they love to look at us...

THE WIZARD TURNS ON...THE GIANT SILVER FLASHLIGHT AND PUTS ON HIS WEREWOLF MOCCASINS

A kind of space jam where the initial performance had Michael playing the CD player (in it was a CD
with a recording of the drums), Steven playing the Rhodes and me playing electric bass. Mr. Fridmann
ran the whole thing through a series of space echoes. flangers, filters and distortion boxes... The
entire mix lays in the bed of a program called Metaphysical Function...Neat, huh?

IT OVERTAKES ME

I sometimes will do a silly songwriter's trick - I'll act like I'm writing a song for someone else
and on this track I was imagining Gwen Stefani... I pictured her singing it and imagined what kind
of production would happen. Initially I called the song, when it was intended for Ms. Stefani, "I
Like To Masturbate and Think Of Outer Space"...and I still think that if she was doing the song
it's a great title....But to think of me, a 45 year old man with a graying beard, umm,
masturbating....is... well...(I'm uncomfortable even typing this)...unpleasant...so anyway...The
song ends up being more about my occasional bouts of panic when accidentally contemplating the
"Cosmic Reality", that is....that we (the Earth) are floating perilously adrift in a vast and
endless sea of black infinity (outer space) and it is, when analyzed, a mindfuck...and yes I feel
horribly insignificant....So anyway, what we ended up with, I believe, still sounds like a mashing
of "Hollaback Girl" and "1969" by The Stooges...take some drugs and turn it up real loud...

THE STARS ARE SO BIG AND I AM SO SMALL...DO I STAND A CHANCE?

This section of the song captures, I think, the vulnerability and awe of this same scenario (the
Cosmic Reality) within a cathedralesque womb-cloud of angelic voices... but instead of panic it is
solemn and comforting...

MR. AMBULANCE DRIVER

The entire song, its key and chord structure, is built around the ambulance siren sample. When we
first did it there was an eerie death coloring (probably due to the siren and the lyric about the
girl being dead) that was very satisfying... But we found, with repeated listening, that the siren,
somehow, subliminally disappeared and, to our surprise, it revealed a kind of Eddie Rabbitt (70's
pop-country singer-songwriter) at the roller rink, easy listening teenager car crash ballad.

HAVEN'T GOT A CLUE

A friend of ours, Greg Kurstin (he played with us on the Beck tour and was nicknamed "Firefingers"
by Steven due to his sublime playing of the keyboard) is an accomplished musician and has a great
ear for pop sounds and structure...He's written songs with artists ranging from Enrique Iglesias to
Karen O and he, upon my insistence, sent this unfinished track for us to build on. It was great fun
and again (like the Gwen Stefani trick) it allowed us to create inside a different identity. The
song is about a type of person that everybody knows and endures (we won't mention names). They
blame everyone but themselves for all of their problems which they seem to have in endless supply.
If they suffer, you suffer more... You know what I'm talking about.

THE W.A.N.D. (THE WILL ALWAYS NEGATES DEFEAT)

I was playing electric guitar, Michael was on fuzzwah bass and Steven was on the drumkit and we
stumbled upon this druggy prog-rock riff and stuttery, funky beat. It was like Black Sabbath
getting mashed up with Sly and the Family Stone or Stevie Wonder, and it sent us off in a wonderful
new direction. The idea of a magic wand and magic powers occurred to me while watching a homeless
guy in Oklahoma City. He was, I believe, Vietnamese, and had a cool looking wizardly beard and
mustache and he carried a long stick, which he used as a kind of cane-weapon. And one day I saw him
fighting an "imagined" enemy and the long stick became (as best I could tell) a kind of magic wand
that made his invisible foe retreat. I mean... it seemed to give him a confidence that allowed him
to defeat his hallucinations...and at first I thought "how sad...he believes this old stick is
saving him"... but the more I thought about it, the more I envied him in a way...for the evil
manifestations of his mind he invented a sparkling sorcerer's baton to lead his psychic
revolution...yes!!...

And so we delved into a kind of radical protest rock mentality...We sing, "We got the power now,
motherfuckers, that's where it belongs", but I believe it's cosmically empowering - not actually
empowering. In the song, we rail against the greedy, corrupt evil beings who are in control and
trying to enslave us... But our rebellion is simply to fight back - we have no solutions.

POMPEII AM GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG

A galloping Godhead melody (reminiscent of the German National Anthem) telling a vague story of a
young couple planning their suicide. They live in a place where there are volcanoes erupting and
they are going to take the train up the mountain and jump into the flowing lava as a symbolic
sacrifice of their restricted love.The triumphant quality of the arrangement suggests that, just
before they obliterate themselves, they realize that to make such a decision, to destroy yourself,
is really just a point of internal motivation leading to outward action. And, if they could do
something as extreme as annihilating themselves, why couldn't they just try to change the
circumstances that have limited them?....Action is all we have....Worth mentioning is that this is
Steven's first lead vocal on a Flaming Lips track...

GOIN' ON

The core of the chorus melody has a melancholy resolution evoking, abstractly, sections of Mahler's
9th Symphony...We are, subconsciously I guess, drawn to "the answer"... maybe that is why people
have the urge to pray or sing or create...We long for this thing called "closure", but I believe
that "closure" is, maybe, an illusion. This song takes a long stare at coping and the secret
healing powers of slipping through time and space...How suffering, somehow, is relieved by
simple...acceptance...

Wayne

2006

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Op zondag 19 februari 2006 19:17 schreef spacemangraig het volgende:
Ik zit te twijfelen of ik een kaartje voor het concert zal kopen..

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Op zondag 19 februari 2006 20:08 schreef Wepeel2 het volgende:

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Waarom zou je het niet doen?
Live zijn ze erg tof hoor.

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Op dinsdag 14 februari 2006 18:38 schreef Wepeel2 het volgende:
Even wat meer info over het nieuwe album. Voor personen die deze tekst nog niet gelezen hebben. Een uitleg over de verschillende tracks op het album.
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Op woensdag 22 maart 2006 09:28 schreef Z het volgende:
Flaming Lips Cover "Bohemian Rhapsody"



Ziet er wel gezellig uit.