Song Exploder - The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize??

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

The Flaming Lips formed in Oklahoma City in 1983. Over the last four decades, they’ve put out 16 albums. In 1999, they put out their album The Soft Bulletin, and that brought them a new level of success. And then, in 2002, they followed it up with Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which was their biggest album to date. Pitchfork named it one of the top 5 albums of the year, Stereogum called it one of the best albums of the decade, and they won a Grammy. And the biggest song from the album was "Do You Realize??" So, for this episode, I talked to Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd about how that song was first imagined. You’ll hear the very first demo Wayne recorded for the song, and the demo he and Steven put together later, on their way to making the final version with producer Dave Fridmann. For more, visit songexploder.net/the-flaming-lips.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. The Flaming Lips formed in Oklahoma City in 1983. Over the last four decades, they've put out 16 albums. In 1999, they put out their album, The Soft Bulletin, and that brought them a new level of success. And then, in 2002, they followed it up with Yoshemi Battles the Pink Robots. Pitchfork named it one of the top five albums of the year. Sturrygum called it one of the best albums.

of the decade, and they won a Grammy. The biggest song from the album was Do You Realize? So for this episode, I talked to Wayne Coyne and Stephen Drozd about how that song was first imagined. You'll hear the very first demo Wayne recorded for the song, and the demo that he and Stephen put together later on their way to making the final version with producer Dave Friedman. My name is Wayne Coyne, and I'm the singer for The Flaming Lips. My name is Stephen Drozd, and I'm a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter.

for the flaming lips. We had put out this record, The Soft Bulletin in 1999, and the success of the Soft Bulletin, I think in our state of mind at the time, it bought us a couple more years of making freaky records. I think there was an active feeling that we didn't want to repeat the Soft Bulletin, so maybe let's use less acoustic instruments

and more electronic elements. So Yoshimi Bow's the Pink Robots is not us making a commercial record. It felt like another experience. Yeah. And there was already a couple of songs where we used this lyric, Realize, in the songs. This word, realize, it resonated with the way I communicate or something. Yeah, we had done a BBC session, a song called We Can't Predict the Future that had that

realized at the end of it. And that's really the first time that really took hold like that. Yeah. And Stephen and I both thought, we didn't. nail that one. Now, let's keep, let's see if we can find the song that that word is going to work with. So, spring of 2001, Wayne's living in Oklahoma City where he lives now. I was living down in Norman. And Wayne just showed up in my house one day and said, hey, I've got to play this thing for you to see what you think about it. At the time, I was using a four-track cassette recorder. Old school.

No effects or anything, just me, a microphone. And it's all plugged in ready to go. You know, If you sit down within five seconds, you can be recording. That's the way I'd like to do everything, because if you get an idea, you want to be able to just go right to it. But these demos, you know, they're excruciating to hear because it's just a guy fumbling in all areas. You know, I don't know what I'm going to sing. I don't even know what key it is.

And I don't really even know the chords. Take two. I think I'm improvising the lyrics. this beginning of romantic line. Romantic is such a dumb word, but it's true for songs, you know, where you have the most beautiful face, and I don't really even do songs like that, you know.

And I think in my embarrassment that I would start a song with that line, I quickly go and do you realize we're floating in space to kind of make up for it? That would be me. I'd say, no, I'm not cornball. I'm cosmic, you know, or whatever. I think that probably says. me free and then I could just hope to get like a rhyme. I think most people would hear that and say, you call that a demo?

I mean, it sounds like a guy just barely getting through it. I don't sing in time, I don't sing in tune, I don't play in time. All these things that good musicians do without thinking about it, I just can't really do it. Because if you have to know all these things, it just takes all the fun out of it. It already sounded like something to me for sure, something we could work on it could be great. And I know that when Steven hears it, he can help me with some of the tuning and the melody and where the chords could go. You know, Wayne had what he had, but we knew that we needed another part. So I'm just trying to come up with something that breaks away from

the main part of the song. Here's the new part. For a long time, I was kind of obsessed with key changes. I think it's interesting that in pop music especially that you do this thing called a key change and people just accept it. And like, we should do a key change just because it would be a fun thing to do, you know. So it's got this, I think, a little bit awkward key change, maybe. I do think it's interesting that on the demo, I go through the key change twice, you know, and on the record, it's just once. That was probably Dave Fridman, like, that's too long, chop that in half, let's go.

Dave Fridman, our producer, he's not going to give you any slack. I mean, back then it was like. Too long. This is too slow. This is boring. You know, we first become aware of Dave Friedman through our friend, Jonathan Donahue, who's in a band with Dave Friedman called Mercury Rev. Then we ended up back in Dave Friedman's studio, and he's going to record the Flaming Lips for his senior project.

And we're all living together, all doing this stuff day after day after day after day. And we loved each other. I mean, we all really loved creating music together and mixing together. And I think as soon as we would have got done with that, we would have been thinking, do this as much as we can. So I've known him since 1988, long, long time now, yeah. As far as the acoustic guitar track goes, I think we were trying to make it as intense as possible. We know we're going to compress it. We know it's going to be as bright as possible. It's going to be slightly distorted, but it's not really going to sound distorted.

It's just going to sound like it's very much in your face. I know I strummed it like all downstrokes. So instead of ding-jig-jit, it's all da-da-da-da-da-da. and it's got a lot of high notes. You know, everything is up, up, up, up, up. That's driving the song. A lot of times we would just put down a bunch of tracks. What I did was recorded different parts individually.

So I recorded the kick drum. Then I put the tombs down, which is just two tombs by themselves. Then I put a shaker down. And then Wayne put down the electronic loop thing. And then we just put it all together and kind of make a one thing out of it. The drum fill is actually from a song called Slow Motion from 1999 by us. That's actually just taken from that session and thrown into Do You Realize? This was Wayne's idea to use that actual drum fill from that song. We didn't want to set up a drum kit session, which would

take really a long time back then. So it's like, let's just grab the thing that already exists. That we'd already spent 50 hours getting that sound. The thinking was, let's do this quickly and see if we like it. And for us, it was even cooler that it was out of one of our old songs. That part was played on the Fender Music Master Base. Wayne was thinking, can you play a bass line that propels along like Adam Clayton from you too? And that was the assignment. So that's what I did.

Part of our songs would be classic rock, you know, where they have a drummer and a bass player. And then other parts are like a couple things thrown together. and we don't really want you to hear a bass player. Yeah. Let's sound less like just a rock and roll band from Oklahoma City and sound more like just something you can't really put your finger on. You know, realize that life goes fast, it's hard to make the good things last. I mean, that's cheap, but it sings great.

And the sun doesn't go down. It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning around. That's something I would say anyway. It wouldn't occur to me that that's that lyrical. Yeah, those little squiggly blitzing, you know. I mean, we would just already have an agenda. It's like, all right, we need at least seven of those in the song. Seven squibs.

Yeah, and we try to find different ones. I don't even know if they're, are they in key or anything? Some are, some aren't. When you hear them out of the context of the song, it just sounds like, what is happening here? Kind of goofy, yeah. The flaming lips have never been afraid of chimes. That's just a color, a palette, just a sound we would go to. I mean, we like epic.

We like to be like, we're going all the way. Right, right. It's as bombastic as you can get away with. You know, we're on the way to it being the biggest production ever, every time. Right. The big string sections. What I liked about it is like it starts and it's already intense. It's up and it's full blast.

Yeah. You know, that uplift, that energy and those bells and all that together. just like, I'm in. That's me singing 12, 16 tracks of vocals, I guess, just all mixed together. I would just say, well, we need, like, the Wizard of Oz choir, and that means it's a big choir. It's men and women. Lots of voices. And then there's voices that are slowed down and sped up.

You know, we want it to seem like 20 people, and some of them are giants, some of them are two inches tall, and they're all singing together. It's like a Dr. Seuss choir or something. It would be like 12 voices, probably double-tenth. track also. And then tape manipulation for some, so they're lower, and tape manipulation for some, so there's higher. So you get a full, big full spectrum of sound there, you know. It's just a evocative sound, and it does sound a little bit like it's ridiculous, which is, that's what you want. Stephen and I will say this all the time. The worst thing that we can say to each other is, it just sounds like music. When the song came out, we probably didn't want to be known

for being the people that do the song, do you realize? We probably were like, no, we're not like that. I mean, I think there's a sense of it feeling like there's something heavy about it. You know, at the time to have people say, I played that at, you know, my mother's funeral, or we played that at our wedding. It was the first song we danced to. You know, our reference for those types of songs would have been like, I hate those kind of songs.

I don't want to be played at people's weddings. and it was weird that it would have so much meaning. The way that we made it is just sounds and stuff. Even though we always treated it like it's one of our great songs, we didn't really embrace it like this is who we are. But in time, little by little, we could see why it is cool to have these types of songs. But I mean, we've played it every night since 2002, you know. For the longest time, we played it, the very very good.

last song we would play. You know, just, do you see people crying, you see people hugging, you see people struggling, you know. I mean, I struggle, watching it, you know. And yeah, it's heavy, you know, but when we did it, it wasn't heavy. It was fun. Coming up, you'll hear how all of these ideas and elements came together in the final song. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations

about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April,

and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzucas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin, Clion, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now.

You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishi-kash.co, or just go to songexploader.net slash live. That's song-exploder.net slash live. Thanks. And now here's do you realize by the flaming lips in its entirety. visit SongExplotor.net. You'll find links to buy or stream Do You Realize, and you can watch the music video. This episode was produced by Craig Ely, Theo Balcom, Kathleen Smith, Mary Dolan, and myself. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo.

Special thanks to Miles Adams for recording Wayne and Stephen's side of the interview. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, you can sign up for my newsletter, which can find at SongExploder.net. You can also follow me and SongExploder on Instagram, and you can get a SongExploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt.

I'm Rishikesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.