Flaming Lips, ‘Blues Clues’ collide on nearly decade-old collaboration
‘Easy for us’
But lighthearted songs about giraffes, insects, giant pink robots and unicorns litter The Flaming Lips’ discography. That’s what caught Burns’ attention in the first place.
In late 2001, Drozd was living inFredonia, New York, and met Burns shortly before leaving his show. Burns especially loved the Lips’ 1999 record “The Soft Bulletin” and wanted to collaborate. The duo met at Tarbox Road Studiosand started working on therecord“Songs for Dustmites.”
“He spent two weeks there,” Drozd said. “(Recording engineer) Dave Fridmann was recording another band downstairs while I produced the demos with Steve upstairs in a smaller studio. Michael Ivins helped us. Wayne Coyne was back in Oklahoma. We just hit it off, and we kind of made a note to get together and do more stuff sometime.”
The duo would reconvene in 2006. Over a bottle of red wine, the Steves wrotea Groundhog’s Day song in a couple of hours. STEVENSTEVENrecorded it in Bell Labs studio in Norman. Studio owner Trent Bell is a constant Lips fixture. Drozd praised his laid-back demeanor and noted the drum sound on “Foreverywhere” as some of the best he’s ever recorded. “It was easy for us because we like doing it so much,” Drozd said. “If you really love doing it, even if it’s hard work, it doesn’t feel like hard work because you love doing it, and that’s definitely where we were with all that stuff. I think if we had to make a whole other record, which we might do someday. I don’t know if we’ll have that same experience. We might have more moments of agonizing over what do we do now. We had basically none of those moments in all the sessions we had for ‘Foreverywhere.’”
By 2010, STEVENSTEVEN recorded a couple more sessions alongside Bell andknocked out 11 songs about space rocks,triumphant spiders and drumming giants. Barring a few music videos released over the years, “Foreverywhere” lived in purgatory until this month. Regardless of age, thealbum’s strengthlives in its sincerity. Burns retainsthe knack for speaking to ayounger crowd without sounding condescending. Drozd frees ideas that might not have made sense on a Lips record.
I can tell the duo take the project seriously.
“Nothing was flippantly gone over,” Drozd said. “Every lyric he wrote, like on‘Mimic Octopus,’ he’s really bummed out because he said linguistically speaking the phrase ‘You can’t eat what you can’t see’ is actually not correct because he wants the song to be educational. ... He wishes he could go back and rewrite it. That’s how much he cares about what he’s singing.”
The pairare doing everything in their power to give their attention to the project. STEVENSTEVEN is even working on a way where Burns can perform solo with backing videos of Drozd. “We’ve just been in each other’s lives since 2001. It’s been a long time coming,” Drozd said. “I just hope that people are excited by it.”