Wayne Coyne Quotes (51 Quotes)


    People have given me the freedom and believe in me enough to say if I want to do these things that I will find a way to make it work. I don't know if they think I'm crazy, drug damaged or just an old weirdo.

    It's good that we have the potential in the marketplace to reach bigger audiences, ... We're three people who are interested in music as art, but most of it won't ever be marketed as popular stuff.

    When we went to cover it I thought we would change it to a song of loving and longing instead of the sex machine song Kylie turned it into. I've met Kylie and told her we were covering her song and she was pleased.

    We transferred it all down to computer land within the last couple of days,

    If SANTA CLAUS came down the chimney in a fking jogging suit, you wouldn't even know it was him.


    They'd say, 'The Flaming Lips And you won't believe it They're from Oklahoma City' as if we're from outer space, ... And we thought, 'That's a good thing.'

    We love playing music but we're too weird to play music.

    Even in the beginning, when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song, as one songwriter to another, I wasn't sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad.

    We love it when we make mistakes that are better than something you could think up.

    I can see that if this was an album done 10 or 15 years ago we could see we were moving on to some place else.

    With out art, without communicating, we wouldn't live beyond 30 because we'd be so sad and depressed.

    It was endlessly entertaining, watching people beat each other up. All the little kids in the neighborhood would come and watch... and then we'd beat them up as well.

    I stopped caring so much about what people might think if I sung about love and humanity.

    I don't want anyone to think that I really am trying to overthrow the government with our music, or stop the war with our music that's just for fools.

    I understand that that song is what will stick out, ... And the guy on the street only needs to know what has become popular -- that's what is so good and powerful about the music industry. It's about appealing to masses of people with popular music. And hey, it's good that people know who you are.

    I embrace the idea that I'm an entertainer.

    In this gap where your mind is stretching itself to keep the music going it hits you as a new music experience. We were excited about it.

    We really attempted it in a full-force Flaming Lips behemoth production style. We recorded 100 tracks of our beloved pedal steel guitar and 100 guitar overdubs for the music, and for the vocals we stacked all these crazy harmonies. We wanted to add different layers that people might expect from us, but we tried hard not to change the fundamental nature of the song.

    We remixed them in 5.1, which doesn't sound like much, but let me tell you it's really a crazy, complicated thing to take these things that you did almost 15 years ago and revisit 'em in this format that only became available a couple years ago. A lot of bands can't do that because they don't have their own recordings. But we've always recorded ourselves, so it's a matter of me just going to the back room and grabbing the tapes and sort of putting them back on the reel. It's a weird treat.

    There's something about whatever despair and whatever negativity there is in your life, once you expel it, well, it's like praying, saying whatever's troubling you through your mouth, and hearing it through your ears, participating in your own despair makes it better. So we're not making it for you like a birthday cake, we're making it for ourselves.

    The way that I work is not that much different from the way I would do a painting or even the way that we record our music a lot of the time. We go in and we have a lot of energy and enthusiasm for things that we want to happen and sort of try to shape them up. But if we're lucky, something emerges that's really better than what we intended and we'll go with that. If we're lucky, 'Christmas on Mars' will continue to do that. We'll have built the sets and have actors there, and of course there'll be things for them to say and all that, but something marvelous will happen and we'll be able to incorporate that into the idea of what we wanted to do and it will be better and more expressive and more communicative and more emotional - all those things that I think all artists intend to do.

    We hear so many records these days that are done with click tracks, as opposed to a drummer.

    People who listen to our music get it, and the ones that don't -- well, it's not for them anyway, ... Our audience is perfect for what we're doing. We don't feel under-appreciated at all.

    Anyway, Cat Stevens is never going to make much money out of us.

    I don't think you could be making any art in the atmosphere that we're in now with the war and the different ways people feel about the Bush administration and all that without having some things that sort of, not address that specifically, but address this whole idea of what you do with power. When is the time to have mercy And when is the time to be aggressive I think we have some things on the record that I hope will stand the test of time long after this war is over and all these young guys have come home.

    We could take the movie around as well, and not just be playing as the Flaming Lips as a rock band. I'm thinking of taking it to theaters and having it be an experience where we bring in giant sound systems, smoke machines, Christmas lights, s--- falls on you from the ceiling and you can smoke pot and do whatever you want. There's something about the communal experience while something intense and unexpected is happening. I'm sure it will come out on DVD and there'll be a soundtrack, but that isn't the real experience.

    If you have a song that you think sounds like another song you should contact the publishing company and say I have a song here, let's cut a deal that lets everyone walk away feeling good.

    Sometimes the song title comes with the songs, other times you just sorta make something up afterwards.

    I am not that thrilled about the way our records sound anyway. Don't get me wrong, I work hard on them and I want them to sound fantastic but I'm happy to have another interpretation of them anyway.

    We never thought it would be something everyone would listen to. We never thought people who listen to Britney Spears would run to listen to it. It was intended for people on the fanatical side of production and hi-fi.

    We made music that wouldn't be in synch.

    There is a lot of melody and things that sound familiar in hundreds of songs.

    It isn't all about some band promoting a single or a promoter trying to make money or something. (When they started), I think people just assumed it would be this disorganized thing.... The more these things work, the more they're successful, the better off these things will be.

    I want people to be ecstatic but to cry at the same time.

    Most artists I run into aren't that thrilled with what they do anyway. They are glad to have different versions out there to see which one the audience likes the best.

    When we started there was this element of these experiments we were doing where we weren't really sure how the music would play out because the music was all on different players.

    It really is no different in the way that we make records and shoot music videos. I don't think of the movie as being a great leap out of my current profession.

    But I also have to deal with death. You can't skirt round it. It's a struggle and you really don't know if you are going to come out the other side.

    Music is amazing. There's some metaphysical comfort where it allows you to be isolated and alone while telling you that you are not alone... truly, the only cure for sadness is to share it with someone else.

    To try to please people is an endless chasing of one's own tail. That's not very satisfying, so we do what we like and that satisfies us. When it does work out, its a bonus, really.

    I knew she was from Australia and I knew that is where she started but I didn't know if she was still popular there. I hope people understand we aren't making fun of Kylie.

    This album is bigger and more lush than our previous stuff, ... We had the musicality and the ambition and the time to be more lush this time, to make more normal music.

    In a way I hope we don't win because there are some fantastic records in the same category like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Radiohead and White Stripes.

    I was in England and I know Cat Stevens told some journalists that he loved our song and was honoured that people compared our song to his song.

    Yeah, people always get that wrong about me. I only took acid a few times, and never while I was in the band. I mean, most of the good rock things that I've done were actually done before I was in a rock band, like doing cocaine and having sex with people that you don't really know.

    Our publicist at Warner Brothers is a young guy who has worked so hard for seven years with us and when we saw him backstage he broke down and cried. He couldn't believe it happened. It was seeing him so overcome when we realised how much it really meant.

    We're aware that we have to be marketable, because at the end of the day, it's about making money, ... So we try to make our albums a good blend of art and commercialism.

    I remember playing CBGB and thinking that no one had cleaned the toilets in there for at least six or seven years. Now maybe the women's bathroom is different but in the men's bathroom, you literally wouldn't want to stand there, let alone sit there. I mean, it's horrible.

    Their opinion can truly shape what the rest of the audience thinks of you.

    Music - music that moves you - usually comes because something horrible has happened to you. It's cathartic. I think music does that better than almost any other art form, because most of our lives are about things that don't work out.


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