‘We’ll start in late January, though I’m not sure if we’ll get together exactly by then,” Coyne says, adding that the band will convene in Oklahoma with longtime producer Dave Fridmann. “With this new thing, we’re going to spend a lot of time recording at our houses or wherever we are at. We’ll try to release a song a month and document the song in the making, whether it takes us three or five days or a week. It’s gonna be, ‘We’re working on a song and it’s gonna be up by Friday.’ We just want to [release material] some other way.’
A song a month? But does this mean there will be no more album? Not really!
‘Not that I think the old way was boring, but to spend another two years with the same 13 songs, it’s just like fuck, I think we’re going to just start to do things and put it out. Once we get 11 or 12 songs together, maybe we’ll do something else with it. We want to try to live through our music as we create it instead of it being a collection of the last couple years of our lives.’
But Coyne has always a funny way to come up with things, and he said he did not know whether they ‘were going to release it on vinyl, cereal boxes or some of it on toys that we make’.
Toys? I was already thinking about Flaming Lips action figures but he added:
‘Sometimes, the music is the simplest part of any of these things. We’ll be making these little videos that connect in the end to a bigger movie we’ll be making next year as well. It sounds like a bunch of fuckin’ work, but it’s different way of thinking about songs than just holing up.’
But he was also thinking about real toys as Wayne has been dealing with a guy who flies to China and Korea six times a year and who is making ‘these new fantastic looking toys.’
The Lips concerts are full of giant toys anyway, what will it be? Giant hands? Pink robots? Or an inflatable bubble with a zipper?