By Graciela Razo
Photos by Ingrid Laubach
Interviewed on March 13, 2010
Graciela Razo: Is this your first time in Denton?
Wayne Coyne: I’ve been through it. I don’t know if there’s been any other reason to come to Denton. I know there’s a really great Thai restaurant here that the guys have been to. I have tried to see a couple of groups play here, but I didn’t make it. Me and Michelle were in Dallas maybe a year ago or something, and we were staying in South Dallas, so it was quite a drive into Dallas. I think we were thinking we’d leave at nine o’ clock and see the show then we realized it was an hour and a half away from where we were, so we kind of misjudged the distance between Denton and Dallas and Dallas traffic on a Saturday night. So this is my first time to be in Denton.
Graciela: How do you like it so far?
Wayne: Well it’s kind of a lot like Oklahoma City. I’m from Oklahoma City, so it’s kind of non-descript, kind of Midwest, kind of south, kind of forgotten little town. It doesn’t seem desperate or overly exciting. But I think it really is your experience and the people there that make the difference. I’ve never thought that the tress and the dirt and the buildings really mattered. But this here seems phenomenal. This would not happen in Norman or Oklahoma City where we’re from. It’s cool. Let’s hope it works.
Graciela: You all are known for your live shows. So how did you all decide what you were actually going to do during the show?
Wayne: We work out all these things or else they probably wouldn’t work at all. You kind of need to know what you’re going to do. We do this entrance where the guys come out of a big screen up there. On each song we’ve worked out little cues with our lighting guys and sound guys, but all groups do this. You get together and rehearse what’s going to happen when you’re in front of people. For me, doing something like coming out in the space bubble I just simply think if I was in the audience, I would think ‘Man, it would be cool if Wayne came out in a space bubble.’ So I just think I’ll just come out in a space bubble and walk on people’s heads. But you really don’t know how you’re going to do it but until you think you’re going to do it, you just start to work it out. If you do it a hundred times, you start to figure out what works and what doesn’t. But it’s mostly just that. I just think it would probably look cool. F*** it, let’s do it. But it’s not easy as it looks. For a lot of these things you really have to have a good crew and a bunch of gadgets.
Graciela: Do you try to evolve your live show so that people who see you more than once get to see a different show each time?
Wayne: I don’t always worry about that so much. I think there’s an element of knowing what to expect, which people like that. They know you’re going to do these things. They know you’re going to sing these songs. Then I just leave it up to our own whims to be like ‘What do we want to do?’ We never feel restricted by these things anyway. We never feel like ‘Jeeze, why do we have to go up there and why does Wayne have to have giant rubber hands? Why cant we just play songs?’ We never feel like that. Most of the things that are going on are things I’m doing. The group really has a quite a task just playing this music. A lot of this is complicated, and it’s hard music to play. I mean they’re great musicians, but it’s a difficult task anyway. But I don’t know. I think we want to have the audience involved. We want everybody to have a picture on their phone at the end of the night saying ‘Look, Wayne walked on my head.’ We throw balloons out and confetti. We want everyone to be involved. That’s the reason you do these sort of big things. If we played to like a 100 people a night in a small club, it would be easy to reach the people there with really doing hardly anything. You simply talk and play, and it’s pretty effective. Sometimes we play where there’s 100,000 people there. They’re not going to see you playing some little guitar part. I’m not saying that’s not significant, but there’s reasons why Radiohead has a giant light show because it’s cool. You want to look at some cool sh**.
Graciela: You did work with Sparklehorse on Dark Night of the Soul and with the recent suicide of Mark Linkous this past weekend, is there any truth to the rumor that the album will officially be released?
Wayne: Well in a way its already been released. So many people download things immediately anyway. There were just some legal dilemmas with Danger Mouse and Mark’s record labels. But I think in the spirit of a lot of the things that Danger Mouse does, he just fucking does it and is like ‘F*** it. We’ll work it out.’ I think he’s exactly right. So we worked with Mark quite a few times. We like him. We’ve done shows with him. We played a tour that was three weeks or something that was maybe in 2003. We know him good enough. As sad as it is, I would never say it was ever out of the realm. If someone calls you up and says ‘Mark Linkous committed suicide,’ at first you would despair for a moment, but you would think ‘Yeah, he did live with a lot of pain all the time when we were around him and he did suffer from depression.’ I know that for sure. It’s definitely a struggle.
Graciela: How was it working on that album?
Wayne: Well you know I wish I could say we all got together, and we had fights, and we got drunk, but you don’t really do that these days. A lot of the things we did over the computer over e-mail. He could e-mail us a song at 10 o’clock in the morning, and we could throw it on the computer, and by 11 o’clock we can have a song finished. You don’t have to arrange flight schedules or anything because everyone has a studio right there on their computers these days. The song we did for him… but it wasn’t even a song. He just sent us a series of chords, which he’d do a lot. Sometimes he’d send us stuff when he was alive. Sometimes we’d write the whole song, and he would have one little part. He’s funny that way. But with this one I had a song in mind that would be Sparklehorse or Mark Linkous-esque, and we just got lucky it worked out. He liked it. It moved along. We never really worried about it that much. When you do collaborations with people, you don’t always have a say. You don’t always know it’ll be the greatest thing ever. You just say ‘F*** it. It’s cool. He’s fun.’ It doesn’t have to stand as an epic piece of art, though I think that one can. I think if you put too much into, it you don’t always have a lot of control.
Graciela: How is it to be playing with Midlake again?
Wayne: We’re kind of in contact with them all the time. They come to Oklahoma City several times just for occasions for parties and things like that. It’s great. Their hair is longer. They’ve put on a little weight (laughs). When they played with us they were a slim, trim, fighting indie rock band. No, I’m kidding. They’re wonderful. We wouldn’t play with them if we didn’t like them.
Graciela: How’s the tour been promoting Embryonic?
Wayne: I don’t really look at it as promoting. I know we play shows for people who like the Flaming Lips and then we have new songs to play. But it’s great. I don’t know if we realized just how fun it is to play new music. We just sort of decided with “Embryonic” that we would play a lot of it and see how it went. We don’t do that a lot. Sometimes we put out a record and just play one or two songs from it because we have so many records, and people want to hear so much stuff. But I think with this one we were like ‘F*** it. Let’s play these weird new songs.’ But the people really seem to like it. It’s been very intense. That’s a good word because they’re weird songs. They’re not songs just about the power of the human spirit sort of things, which I love. Don’t get me wrong. But there’s an element of these songs are just intense, just sort of primitive, freaky things, which is fun to sing about. I don’t know why, but it is fun to sing about.
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