According to Rolling Stone magazine, the tireless Flaming Lips are recording a six-hour song called ‘I Found This Star on the Ground’.
Six hours? As usual they are crazy,… this is what Wayne Coyne declared to Rolling Stone:
‘It's a six-hour song. When you call it ‘a piece’ it sounds like more than it should be. This is one song that goes on for six hours, yeah. Now I’ve realized, it’s insane. When we started doing it, it didn’t seem like it was that big of a deal. So we were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll do a song that is six hours long – it will be fun.’ But then you get in to it and your like ‘Fuck, what the fuck were we thinking?’ We finished it last night, around two o’clock in the morning because we knew we were leaving today and we were gonna be gone for a little bit and we didn’t think we’d be able to get back to it. It’s taken us about three weeks. I think, in our usual overconfidence, I think we thought it would take a couple of days and it's taken a couple of weeks.’
Wayne explained the creative process behind the song, which was originally composed by Steven Drozd and was ‘only’ 25-minute long, but they decided to stretch it for a couple of hours. He also described the sound of the song as ‘the Velvet Underground meets Super Mario Brothers’:
‘And if you’ve ever played the Mario Brothers game or it you’ve had it on in the background, you could listen to a Mario Brothers type video game forever because its kind of just ‘do do do do do la ta da ta da.’ It's not real intense, and it's not going anywhere. Steven was already composing it to be kind of like a long John Coltrane thing.’
But, wait, Super Mario or John Coltrane? I’m lost,….
They are releasing the song with a ‘weird little strobe light toy’, that Wayne described like this:
‘you spin this little disc, and it has these little animations on it that kind of come to life when you put this strobe light on it. And you could play with it for hours. I mean, I don’t know if you could play with it for six hours, but it's kind of meant so that kids can like, take LSD and play with it. You know, that’s kind of our intention, so that people buy it at like a festival, and then go back to their parents' and take some acid and play with it all night. So it’s a song you can play while you're sitting at your computer, you plug it in and it plays all night.’ …. Is he encouraging his fans to take drugs now?
He admitted later that this song is not really intended to be listened to for 6 hours, it’ s not ‘for intense listening’, more like a at-small-dose-kind-of-thing, or a background music, ‘while you’re fucking your girlfriend’… errr so it’s not that interesting?
In the music, there is also Sean Lennon reading the list of all the people who have gone missing in the Bermuda Triangle over the phone, a weird thing ‘meant to sound eerily like the ghost of John Lennon or something’.
For a while, fans could even pay $100 (this offer has expired on September 12th) to have their names included into the lyrics of the song, the proceeds going to the Central Oklahoma Humane Society and the Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma.
He also admitted they are deliberately moving away from the album format, releasing stuff every month, ‘and sometimes it would be a record, and sometimes it will be a strange Flaming Lips object’,… like this edible gummy skull that contained a USB flash drive with the songs. They have more like this one in store, he mentioned a mega skull, a psychedelic frog with a powder to put on it, a watch whose volume turns up as you heat up your skin,… all mysterious crazy toys coming from an eccentric and unique mind,…. And you may expect the next Flaming Lips creative silliness for Halloween!