They released their debut album together, also titled Deap Lips, in March via Cooking Vinyl. The Flaming Lips also teamed up with Los Angeles garage rock duo Deap Vally to form the collaborative band appropriately named Deap Lips. As its title suggests, the album featured a live concert of them recording their acclaimed 1999 album in its entirety with The Colorado Symphony Orchestra (and conductor André de Ridder) at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, near Denver, Colorado. In November 2019 The Flaming Lips released a new live album, The Soft Bulletin Recorded Live at Red Rocks with The Colorado Symphony Orchestra, via Warner Records. I think all of these songs are about this little switch.” “Something switches and others (your brothers and sisters and mother and father…your pets) start to become more important to you…in the beginning there is only you… and your desires are all that you can care about…but… something switches. Mother’s sacrifice, Father’s intensity, Brother’s insanity, Sister’s rebellion…I can’t quite put it into words. We were, while creating it, trying to NOT hear it as sounds… but to feel it. A feeling that, I think, can only be expressed through music and songs. “The music and songs that make up the American Head album are based in a feeling. We started to think of classic American bands like The Grateful Dead and Parliament-Funkadelic and how maybe we could embrace this new vibe. We had become a 7-piece ensemble and were beginning to feel more and more of a kinship with groups that have a lot of members in them. So for the first time in our musical life we began to think of ourselves as ‘AN AMERICAN BAND’… telling ourselves that it would be our identity for our next creative adventure.
not really caring WHERE we were actually from. “So… for most of our musical life (as The Flaming Lips starting in 1983) we’ve kind of thought of ourselves as coming from ‘Earth’. it wasn’t till I was about 10 or 11 that my older brothers would know a few of the local musician dudes. We mostly listened to the Beatles and my mother loved Tom Jones (this is in the ’60s). I know growing up (when I was like 6 or 7 years old) in Oklahoma I was never influenced by, or was very aware of any musicians from Oklahoma. We never thought of ourselves as an AMERICAN band. A special limited edition double LP colored vinyl (one pink, one blue) will be released on October 2.įrontman Wayne Coyne had this to say about the album in a press release (it’s an excerpt from a longer essay entitled “We’re An American Band”):
September 11 will see the album released digitally, on CD, and on black vinyl. And to make it even more timely, they did “Race for the Prize,” a classic from 1999’s The Soft Bulletin about two scientists racing to find a cure. In June, The Flaming Lips performed for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, with the entire band in separate plastic bubbles and also their audience, including some kids, in bubbles. Then they shared a fourth song from the album, “You n Me Sellin’ Weed,” also via a video for the track. Then they shared another song from the album, “Dinosaurs on the Mountain,” also via a video for the track.
When the album was announced in June, the band shared its second single, “My Religion Is You,” via a video for the song. Musgraves also features on another American Head song, “God and the Policeman.” The song featured Kacey Musgraves on additional vocals and was #1 on our Songs of the Week list. The album includes “Flowers of Neptune 6,” a new song the band shared in May via a video for the track. Longtime collaborator Dave Fridmann co-produced American Head with the band. Frontman Wayne Coyne co-directed the video with regular collaborator George Salisbury. Now they have shared another song from the album, “Will You Return / When You Come Down,” via a video for the track that features the band performing the song in the studio in a socially distant manner. The Flaming Lips are releasing a new album, American Head, on September 11 via Warner Records.