The Flaming Lips’ first album in six years starts with a fear many parents recognize: the thought of losing a child. For Wayne Coyne, that fear surfaced in a Trader Joe’s parking lot as he watched his 3-year-old son, Rex, sleeping in the back seat. A sign for the Children’s Health Foundation briefly looked, to Coyne, like it read “Children’s Death Foundation.” The misreading sent his mind to families grieving a child and to the thought of losing his own son.
“It occurred to me there will never be anything in my life as important as my two little boys,” Coyne writes in a detailed account of making The Teardrop Throbs. That moment supplied an emotional thread for the Oklahoma band’s new record, due Jan. 22 through Jack White’s Third Man Records. Longtime collaborator Dave Fridmann produced the album, which arrives with the single “God Will Control the Werewolves.”
The announcement also brings a run of two-night engagements in Nashville, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and London. Each stop is set up as a distinct program: the first night pairs the new album with songs from the 20th century, including material from 1986 to 1999 that the band has never played live. The second combines The Teardrop Throbs songs performed “in a new way” with selections from 2002 to 2020.
How the songs took shape
The title track, “Throb,” began with Coyne’s interest in The Night of the Hunter. He was drawn to “Pretty Fly,” the song children sing as they flee an evil preacher, and asked new slide guitarist Adam Judd Slaughter to reproduce it note for note. Slaughter’s longer intro and outro pushed the idea in a different direction. Guitars and drum machines entered the mix, and the piece grew into a song about a bleak hospital. Coyne rewrote the lyrics; only a fragment of the original idea remained.
“God Will Control the Werewolves” started with a question from Coyne’s sons, Bloom and Rex. During a full-moon game of hide-and-seek, they asked whether werewolves might come after them. Coyne’s attempt to reassure them became the song’s central idea. He pictured its sound as “kind of Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon BUT Syd Barrett is still in the band.”
Other tracks draw on difficult subjects. Coyne says “You’ve Got Brain Damage” grew from thoughts about the damage drugs and alcohol can cause. “Instructions on How to Draw an Eyeball or How to Deal With a Loved One Who Is Addicted to Drugs” takes its cue from a stubbornly hopeful line: “I don’t know why but I just keep on trying again and again.” “Every Teardrop Cried,” meanwhile, began as a line Coyne wrote during the same parking-lot episode that set the album’s opening track in motion.
Leaving room for listeners
Coyne resists pinning each song to a single interpretation. “I don’t really believe any song has a fixed meaning,” he writes, “and I don’t WANT my songs to have a fixed meaning.” His aim is for the music to shape listeners’ moods and feelings without prescribing what they should hear in it. That openness gives the album’s personal origins room to become something different for each listener.
The Teardrop Throbs follows a 20th-anniversary reissue of the band’s At War With the Mystics, due Nov. 13 from Rhino/Warner. The anniversary release and the new album frame the upcoming shows across several eras of the group’s catalogue.
Flaming Lips tour dates
Jan. 22-23: Nashville (Brooklyn Bowl)
Jan. 26-27: New York (Irving Plaza)
Feb. 23-24: Los Angeles (Bellwether)
Feb. 27-28: Chicago (Metro)
April 2-3: London (O2 Shepherds Bush)
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See the 20th-anniversary reissue details and the upcoming live shows.
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