Interview and videos: The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne talks new live album, working with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, 'The Soft Bulletin' legacy and more

An abbreviated version of this story appears in Friday's Weekend Life section of The Oklahoman.

Live Lips: OKC-based art-rockers The Flaming Lips release their first live album, revisiting 'The Soft Bulletin' with the Colorado Symphony

Any Flaming Lips fans surprised that the Oklahoma City-based experimental rockers are just releasing their first official live album, take heart: Wayne Coyne finds it hard to believe, too.

"We have things out there but never an absolute live album; it's always been accompanied with stuff," the band's frontman said in a phone interview last week from his OKC home. "The other things that we released were like DVDs, so it would be a concert where it's really about the video. And of course, obviously, there's sound and stuff with it. But it was never like a live album where you're just listening to the music."

Out Friday, "The Soft Bulletin Recorded Live at Red Rocks with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra" not only marks the Grammy-winning band's first live album but also commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Lips' seminal 1999 breakthrough release.

The art-rockers performed the widely acclaimed "The Soft Bulletin" in its entirety and in sequence May 26, 2016, with the Colorado Symphony at the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado. The Lips - Coyne, Steven Drozd, Michael Ivins, Derek Brown, Jake Ingalls, Matt Kirksey and Nicholas Ley - were accompanied by an almost 70-piece orchestra and nearly 60-member chorus at the concert, under the baton of celebrated conductor Andre de Ridder.

It was an undertaking so huge, Coyne said he sometimes still can't fathom it actually worked.

"It's a venue where people really from all over the world travel to Red Rocks and don't really even care who's playing. It's such a phenomenal place to be that though they do good great concerts and though the Beatles have played there and Jimi Hendrix has played there and I think even Igor Stravinsky even conducted a symphony there, it's such an insane venue that people just like to be there anyway. So, it's a tall order just to do a performance there, without an orchestra. And then it's a particularly tall order to go to Denver, rehearse with an orchestra doing this kind of complicated music. ... And then to think you're gonna do all this, do a performance, do it with an orchestra and you're gonna record it is like, 'Oh my gosh.' I can't believe we actually pulled it off,'" he said.

Grand Canyon experience

Although the Lips had previously worked with orchestras, including in OKC, Coyne said the band had never collaborated with a symphony to the extent of the live project. Fortunately, the band had rehearsals to acclimate to the experience of hearing their music performed by a vast group of musicians in new orchestral arrangements.

"The people that were involved in the Denver symphony, these people know our music, probably better than we do. They're the ones that brought us there. The very first couple of times you go through songs, luckily, you're not having to perform and all that. You're kind of like 'oh, my gosh, this is pretty great,' 'cause it's just a sound that's hard to describe because you're in the middle of it, and it's different ... when you're standing right there," Coyne said.

"That presence is kind of like standing in the Grand Canyon: I can take a picture of it and showing it to you, or I can tell you about it, but it's not like being there."

For the singer, songwriter and musician, incorporating so many performers meant more anxiety, too.

"On the day that we did the performance, 20 more people were added to the choir - and the choir is singing from the very back of this giant stage. And it was already an impossible task to mike them ... and then it grew even more that day. I just think there was a lot of enthusiasm for being part of this concert," he recalled.

"My nervousness about it and my worry about it, I really think turned into the greatest thing about it, because you could really hear this insane choir blaring. It's like this triumphant, religious experience almost 'cause they're so powerful on the thing. And we didn't realize that until we got the recordings back and started to kind of listen ... so we were very relieved that we captured the audience being insane and we captured the choir being insane. That part of it makes it so special 'cause when we were there, I think that surprised everybody how cool that was and how it just sent chills up your spine to hear that element of it. It's not that present on the album 'Soft Bulletin' that we made; there was little bits of choir. But this being live and being kind of obnoxiously angelic or something is amazing."

Gift from the gods

From leading the orchestral musicians, the choir and the eager audience making insectile noises on the rarely played "Bugging" to the soaring renditions of the hits singles “Race for the Prize” and “Waitin’ for a Superman," the live album gave the band a chance to celebrate the 20th anniversary of "The Soft Bulletin." The concert was produced by the Lips, their manager Scott Booker and their collaborator Dave Fridmann, who all worked on the original album, and the live recording is being released on the band's longtime label, Warner Bros.

Although now regarded as an essential rock album of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Coyne said the band didn't look at it that way when they were making "The Soft Bulletin."

"That's probably the reason why we were able to make it. We really just made it for ourselves. There was no other music at that time that we were listening to saying, 'Oh, people are gonna love this. This is cool' or whatever. And we were very lucky that we had been left alone for a long time. Even after we signed to Warner Bros., (we had) people believing in us, saying, 'Just go make your records,'" he recalled.

"As time went on, I do understand its effect on people and I do understand what it says to people. I say it to people all the time, it's as if the gods of music said, 'This is album needs to be made, this album that speaks about this optimism despite realizing how brutal the world is.' ... And I think the gods of music said, 'It's gotta be made by some weirdos that don't know what they're doing, otherwise they'll (expletive) it up.' And they said, 'There's this band in Oklahoma' ... and then the gods of music let us make it. We really never would have been able to make it if we thought, 'Oh, we're making something important.'"

-BAM

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