The Flaming Lips
About The Flaming Lips
The Flaming Lips are an American rock band from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Formed in 1983 as a small-town noise rock foursome, The Flaming Lips have gone through numerous lineup changes and style reinventions, ultimately settling on a consistent core in the late 1990s with frontman Wayne Coyne, chief composer Steven Drozd, and bassist Michael Ivins putting out sublime pop-rock with grandiose synth-orchestral backing arrangements.
Notable former band members include Wayne’s brother Mark Coyne, who was the band’s first vocalist, Jonathan Donahue, who went on to become the frontman of Mercury Rev, guitarist Ronald Jones, and roadie turned tour drummer Kliph Scurlock.
Once Wayne took over as frontman in the late 1980s, the Lips were known for their loud, psychedelic guitar rock (an aesthetic best summed up in the name of an early works compilation “Finally, the Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid”) and wild stage antics.
In the early 1990s, they blustered their way into a major-label deal with Warner Brothers, then unexpectedly had a breakout hit with the single “She Don’t Use Jelly.” Warners allowed sufficient creative control when the band began abandoning its experimental grunge for an all-encompassing embrace of digital production techniques, blazing a trail toward what would become their signature sound at the turn of the century.
Their most critically and commercially successful albums, 1999’s The Soft Bulletin and 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, found the band in close collaboration with producer Dave Fridmann – employing layered drum kits, tape warps, MIDI strings, choirs of pitch-shifted vocals, and many other studio tricks to produce wistful, cosmic pop music. The band introduced ever more imaginative live theatrics in this era, most infamously with Coyne crowd-surfing inside a giant plastic hamster ball.
At this same time, Steven Drozd was battling drug addiction, which peaked in 2001 during the recording of Yoshimi. He has since gotten clean and has two children with his wife Becky.
Writer Jim DeRogatis published a biography of the band in 2006, Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma’s Fabulous Flaming Lips, covering its history until the release of At War with the Mystics. Filmmaker Bradley Beesley released a biographical documentary, The Fearless Freaks, one year prior. The film famously contains a scene of Drozd shooting up heroin.
In 2009, the band pivoted hard back to guitar-centric rock with the angsty, improvisational double record Embryonic. Their next LP, The Terror, was a bleak, mostly electronic affair inspired by Coyne’s split from his longtime common-law wife Michelle Martin-Coyne. In 2017, the band released Oczy Mlody (which translates: “Eyes of the Young”). Though some of the same Terror-esque coldness runs through that album, Coyne and co. revived the more optimistic sounds of their Soft Bulletin era, likely thanks to Coyne’s relationship with Katy Weaver, who he married in 2019 and is the mother of Bloom Coyne, his first child.
Weaver was friends with pop star Miley Cyrus, who collaborated with Coyne and the Lips for a cover of the Beatles' “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and ultimately a surprise, self-released record – Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz – which she announced the same night she hosted the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards.
