![]() American Head feels like it was born from this moment of innocence lost. In the 2005 band documentary The Fearless Freaks, we see old home-movie footage of Coyne and his brothers enjoying a typical ’70s all-American adolescence, playing pick-up football with the local longhairs, before a darker narrative emerges-specifically of the drug habit that would land his brother Tommy in and out of prison. Instead of tunes about killer robots and unicorns with purple eyes, we get songs about people working in slaughterhouses and slinging coke on the side to get by, fond teenage memories of taking quaaludes and frightening recollections of trying LSD, and dramatizations of actual traumatic incidents from Coyne’s early years. Likewise, Coyne approaches his favorite topics-love, drugs, and death-from a less existential, more personal vantage, grounding his narratives in more naturalistic settings. American Head retains some of the symphonic sweep of the Soft Bulletin era and the freaky futurism of their post- Embryonic state, but, at its core, we find the band rekindling their past romance with Neil Young’s piano ballads, the Beatles’ psychedelic guitar tones, and Bowie’s stargazing anthems. From that anecdote, Coyne and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd envisioned American Head as a work of speculative fiction, reimagining the Lips as the sort of drugged-out local Oklahoman rock band that might’ve hung out and jammed with a pre-fame Petty while he was passing through town.Īs it turns out, that mythical ‘70s scenario is really just a roundabout way of getting the Lips back to where they were in the ‘90s. After revisiting the Tom Petty documentary Runnin’ Down A Dream following the rock legend’s 2017 death, Lips ringleader Wayne Coyne became fixated with the story of Petty’s pre-Heartbreakers band, Mudcrutch, with whom Petty spent time in Tulsa in the early-’70s en route to L.A. The track "Sleeping on the Roof" is a live recording from the Flaming Lips' "Parking Lot Experiments" in 1996, where the band got some of their fans to play pre-recorded tapes (of music by the band) in their car stereos simultaneously.In sharp contrast to the Lips’ recent adventures in fairytale fantasias, American Head finds its inspiration in an arcane piece of Oklahoma musical lore. There is also a cover of Led Zeppelin's " Whole Lotta Love" (sung with the lyrics "Whole Lotta Satan"), which is played before "Cant Stop the Spring". Some notable tracks contained on this compilation are "Shine on Sweet Jesus", a track recorded live with a short lived line-up which included Jonathan Donahue (of Mercury Rev), and current Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann, also of Mercury Rev. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() These are: the introduction by Wayne Coyne, "Free Radicals" from the current album At War with the Mystics and "Enthusiasm for Life Defeats Existential Fear", a previously unavailable track. It is a predominantly live compilation, recorded throughout the career of the Flaming Lips (between 19), though the first three tracks are recorded in the studio. 20 Years of Weird: Flaming Lips 1986-2006Ģ0 Years of Weird: Flaming Lips 1986–2006 is an updated version of the free compilation CD given away at the SXSW Film premier of The Flaming Lips documentary " The Fearless Freaks", a film by Bradley Beesley. ![]()
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