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29:19 · 5,043 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The reach argument comes first: MGMT's Oracular Spectacular and Tame Impala's Innerspeaker share a producer with the Flaming Lips, which is how a band most people know for two albums ended up shaping a generation of psych rock.
▶ 00:00:18
- She Don't Use Jelly is still their highest charting single, and the video's comparison is exact, it did for them what Creep did for Radiohead. Wayne Coyne describes hostile crowds who hated the band and liked that one song anyway.
▶ 00:02:05
- After the guitarist left, they deliberately made the next record as hard to listen to as possible, growing out of Coyne's parking-lot experiments where 40 cars played his music at once.
▶ 00:03:29
- Zaireeka is four CDs meant to play simultaneously on four stereos, and Coyne originally wanted 100 discs before being talked down through 20, then 10, then four. The sleeve carries a warning that it may disorient the listener.
▶ 00:04:12
- The Soft Bulletin was the commercial rescue, called the Pet Sounds of the nineties. They detuned keyboards from each other so the fake orchestra would sound less plastic, and it was their first record made in a digital audio workstation.
▶ 00:05:52
- Yoshimi's premise came from an offhand studio remark. Dave Fridman said a recording of Yoshimi P-We screaming sounded like she was being killed by a giant robot, Coyne answered that it would be a pink robot, and the album followed.
▶ 00:08:47
- Dave Fridman's first production credit was a Flaming Lips album in 1990, and he has been near enough a member since, which is why Tame Impala and MGMT went to him when they wanted walls of sound built around odd ideas.
▶ 00:12:35
- The 2011 run is the case for the gimmick-factory complaint: a track split into 12 simultaneous YouTube pieces, an EP in a seven-pound gummy skull, a six-hour track, and a 24-hour track sold on a hard drive inside a human skull in an edition of 13.
▶ 00:17:40
- The Terror is the band's bleakest record because Coyne handed the creative direction to Steven Drozd during a period of relapse and isolation, which is where the album's mood comes from.
▶ 00:19:44
- Coyne's own answer to why they never repeat themselves: they could not write another Do You Realize even if they tried, and they do not try, because making more of what already exists would not satisfy them.
▶ 00:21:07