Wayne Coyne, singer
We started the Flaming Lips in 1983 and had already been a band for a long time when we came to record Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots in 2000. We’d seen a lot of things come and go and were probably suspicious of the success we’d had with its predecessor, The Soft Bulletin, even though that felt wonderful and amazing. We didn’t presume we were going to be successful again or be rock stars for ever.
We were blown away by some of the pop and electronic music we were hearing at the time, like Missy Elliott, Gorillaz, the Chemical Brothers and Björk, and thought “why don’t we record stuff like that?” But we weren’t thinking of the Flaming Lips making accessible pop music. It seemed to us and [producer] Dave Fridmann as another fun sonic experiment, rather than a way to have people accept us. We wanted to try out having those types of sounds with our ridiculous songs.
We stumbled upon the concept of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. I wouldn’t even know why that sounded like a Flaming Lips song or album title but straight away it did. The robot theme was fun, entertaining and gave it colour and a sense of futurism. That freed us to write songs with this other drama or life and death struggle and a suggestion that something important is being revealed.
It wasn’t too far into making the album that Do You Realize?? emerged. Steven Drozd, our guitarist, liked the line: “Everyone you know someday will die.” You don’t really know where the song is going until that point. There’s storytelling and it has wisdom, romance and heartache. It’s gentle but not mellow and has elements of propulsion and triumph even though it’s lazy and sad at the same time. It also benefits from not knowing it’s going to be an important song. That’s the best thing about it. The “1, 2, 3, 4” at the beginning is like the laughter at the end of Within You Without You on the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Anything we could do to lift the song and deliver a great but not heavy message.
From the beginning, we would meet people who told us about playing Do You Realize?? when their mother was dying in the hospital or their brother had been in a car accident. We didn’t know what to say. In time, we were able to have some distance and let down our guard. We wrote the song, but what we made is not what it’s become. We’re so grateful, lucky and blown away to have one of those songs that people play at heavy, heavy times, the heaviest you can endure. But at lighter occasions too, when babies are born or at a cousin’s wedding. We always thought that ruined music but we were wrong. It doesn’t. It’s the greatest thing music can do.
Steven Drozd, guitarist
I was at the end of a terrible year-long problem with heroin and opiates when we were making Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots at Dave’s Tarbox Studios in upstate New York. I was sick a lot of the time. Dave and Wayne would get me to record something before I disappeared to lie in bed for a day. They were very patient with my bullshit. Making the record and having to stay alive and be creative kept me tethered to the Earth. If it hadn’t been for that, I might have disappeared into a void.
“Everyone you know someday will die” immediately seemed like a classic Wayne line. He’s always written lyrics that felt true and obvious but also fucked up and jarring at the same time. He’s always made references to space in his songwriting too. There’s a joke within the group that there are four things that make up Wayne’s psyche, which all happened when he was around 10 years old: the moon landings, the Beatles splitting up, his parents listening to Tom Jones and the Manson family murders. That’s Wayne.
Do You Realize?? was voted the official rock song of our home state Oklahoma in 2009, which caused controversy. There were people who thought we shouldn’t be considered for something so serious just because we were the Flaming Lips. We also had pushback from people who had Googled us and said: “They’re into drugs. They’re satanic. They should not be representing Oklahoma.” Then a photo appeared of our bass player Michael Ivins wearing a T-shirt with the hammer and sickle communist symbol at the Capitol.
The Oklahoma governor, Democrat Brad Henry, signed an executive order to make it happen but his Republican successor, Mary Fallin, decided not to renew it in 2011. If there was another vote now, there wouldn’t be any pushback. It’s not that we’ve sold a bunch more records since then but more people are aware of us in the landscape of pop culture and Wayne has become a big local celebrity and an ambassador to the state.
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots: 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition is out now. The Flaming Lips play Troxy in London on 25 April, then tour
