The Flaming Lips – The W.A.N.D.

Stream “The W.A.N.D.” (mov, asx), the first track from The Flaming Lips’ new album At War With The Mystics, or buy it from iTunes.

SONG NOTES FROM THE SORCERER’S ORPHAN

Understanding At War With The Mystics

THE YEAH YEAH YEAH SONG (WITH ALL YOUR POWER)

Steven had been recording in a separate vocal booth on his computer

and I walked by and heard the crazy grouped vocals doing the “yeah yeah

yeah” part and I was immediately hooked. This is one of those songs that

points the finger at the pettiness of those in power but also points

the finger back at ourselves – what would YOU do? Power in the hands of

the inexperienced (which is what we would be) is very dangerous…

FREE RADICALS (A HALLUCINATION OF THE CHRISTMAS SKELETON PLEADING WITH

A SUICIDE BOMBER)

I had a dream in which Devendra Banhart (the weird singer/songwriter)

is pleading with a suicide bomber (who is about to go blow up something

or somebody) to change his mind. And once he changes the deranged

zealot’s point of view, he (Devendra) immediately sympathizes with the

frustration (mostly aimed at George W. Bush) that could make someone long

for such exaggerated revenge…(Keep in mind that this is just a funny

dream – these suicide bombers are clearly brainwashed religious

fanaticals that are insane with their own agenda…they are beyond any pleads of

reason and are not worthy of any sympathy.)

THE SOUND OF FAILURE

We have some friends whose father was dying of cancer – I say “was”

because it (the cancer and his death) dragged on agonizingly for over a

year – and they (our friends) were becoming, understandably, weary of

being forced to be upbeat…

And I remember hearing a comment once about how annoying it was, to

them, to have to hear this gratingly jubilant fake enthusiasm (usually

hokey hyped-up pop groups like Black Eyed Peas, Destiny’s Child, Ashlee

Simpson, Hillary Duff, etc.) blasting out of the “Muzak” systems

virtually everywhere they went. To them this cheerleader-type assault was

really only effective if you didn’t actually have any real psychic

stress…And they felt that it was, surprisingly, helpful to them to try to

understand their fears and their sadness – as opposed to pretending that

it’s “all good.”

And, you see, this is true insight… finally we know it’s okay to

have a troubled mind, it’s okay to fail…

And so this song (which was written in the car on the way up to New

York from Oklahoma while I drove and Steven played battery powered

keyboard and computer) is about a young girl whose best friend has died, and

everywhere she goes (like the friends I mentioned earlier) she must

endure the empty optimism of the inexperienced. She wants to know, since

it has arrived, what is despair, what is hope, what is failure…And

what is in

the darkness??

The line in the song, “so go tell Britney and go tell Gwen” is

obviously a reference back to my friends and their Muzak incident…meaning,

“Yeah, go tell Britney Spears and Gwen

Stefani that their energy and their Prom Queen smiles only go to prove

that they don’t empathize with my sadness.” I believe, in the song,

that Britney and Gwen could be thought of as this grieving girl’s less

mature friends…and that she’s not trying to go against them, she just

doesn’t want to pretend that she understands what she doesn’t really

understand – what death is…what despair is…what existential fear is…

She doesn’t know, but she’s starting to find out…

IT’S DARK… IS IT ALWAYS THIS DARK?

A strange sort of afterword to the previous song. The voice and the

strange blippy trail is actually my voice run through a computer plug-in

effect called “Squirrel Parade”…Pretty cool… Anyway, it sounds like

I’m saying “It’s Dark”, but I didn’t say “It’s Dark”. I don’t remember

what it was exactly – just me talking before a song, but it gives the

illusion of a young girl finding her way through a mystery…yes?

MY COSMIC AUTUMN REBELLION (THE INNER LIFE AS BLAZING SHIELD OF

DEFIANCE AND OPTIMISM AS CELESTIAL SPEAR OF ACTION)

We had been using the musical elements of this song (it wasn’t a song

then) as an intro for our live shows, as I rolled around on top of the

crowd in the now famous “Space Bubble.” The power of the chord

structure and arrangement kept inspiring me and I eventually pieced together

this manifesto of defiance and optimism. It is my response to the

naysaying know-it-alls who see life leading only to death and see nature as a

cruel prankster designed to defeat the human spirit. And the truth

(which I get to proclaim as if standing on the top of a holy mountain

shooting lazer beams out of my hands – thanks to Steven’s epic

orchestration) is that no circumstance can ever defeat us unless we let it…

Resilience in the face of failure is a manifestation of the mind…

VEIN OF STARS

I picked up a guitar that Steven had tuned to an odd open chord (F

6/9) and, without thinking, strummed it a couple of times and immediately

sang (off the top of my head) the first line into the tape recorder,

“Who knows, maybe there isn’t a vein of stars calling out my name.” My

intention was to sing something cosmic about how humans have (as science

reveals more and more about the nature of time and space) been

abandoned by the stars…But I believe, once we finished it (the song and its

production), it seemed to convey just the opposite…That almost despite

science we are connected to the stars…Because we love to look at

them, we hope maybe they love to look at us…

THE WIZARD TURNS ON…THE GIANT SILVER FLASHLIGHT AND PUTS ON HIS

WEREWOLF MOCCASINS

A kind of space jam where the initial performance had Michael playing

the CD player (in it was a CD with a recording of the drums), Steven

playing the Rhodes and me playing electric bass. Mr. Fridmann ran the

whole thing through a series of space echoes. flangers, filters and

distortion boxes… The entire mix lays in the bed of a program called

Metaphysical Function…Neat, huh?

IT OVERTAKES ME

I sometimes will do a silly songwriter’s trick – I’ll act like I’m

writing a song for someone else and on this track I was imagining Gwen

Stefani… I pictured her singing it and imagined what kind of production

would happen. Initially I called the song, when it was intended for Ms.

Stefani, “I Like To Masturbate and Think Of Outer Space”…and I still

think that if she was doing the song it’s a great title….But to think

of me, a 45 year old man with a graying beard, umm,

masturbating….is… well…(I’m uncomfortable even typing this)…unpleasant…so

anyway…The song ends up being more about my occasional bouts of panic when

accidentally contemplating the “Cosmic Reality”, that is….that we

(the Earth) are floating perilously adrift in a vast and endless sea of

black infinity (outer space) and it is, when analyzed, a mindfuck…and

yes I feel horribly insignificant….So anyway, what we ended up with, I

believe, still sounds like a mashing of “Hollaback Girl” and “1969″ by

The Stooges…take some drugs and turn it up real loud…

THE STARS ARE SO BIG AND I AM SO SMALL…DO I STAND A CHANCE?

This section of the song captures, I think, the vulnerability and awe

of this same scenario (the Cosmic Reality) within a cathedralesque

womb-cloud of angelic voices… but instead of panic it is solemn and

comforting…

MR. AMBULANCE DRIVER

The entire song, its key and chord structure, is built around the

ambulance siren sample. When we first did it there was an eerie death

coloring (probably due to the siren and the lyric about the girl being dead)

that was very satisfying… But we found, with repeated listening, that

the siren, somehow, subliminally disappeared and, to our surprise, it

revealed a kind of Eddie Rabbitt (70′s pop-country singer-songwriter) at

the roller rink, easy listening teenager car crash ballad.

HAVEN’T GOT A CLUE

A friend of ours, Greg Kurstin (he played with us on the Beck tour

and was nicknamed “Firefingers” by Steven due to his sublime playing of

the keyboard) is an accomplished musician and has a great ear for pop

sounds and structure…He’s written songs with artists ranging from

Enrique Iglesias to Karen O and he, upon my insistence, sent this unfinished

track for us to build on. It was great fun and again (like the Gwen

Stefani trick) it allowed us to create inside a different identity. The

song is about a type of person that everybody knows and endures (we won’t

mention names). They blame everyone but themselves for all of their

problems which they seem to have in endless supply. If they suffer, you

suffer more… You know what I’m talking about.

THE W.A.N.D. (THE WILL ALWAYS NEGATES DEFEAT)

I was playing electric guitar, Michael was on fuzzwah bass and Steven

was on the drumkit and we stumbled upon this druggy prog-rock riff and

stuttery, funky beat. It was like Black Sabbath getting mashed up with

Sly and the Family Stone or Stevie Wonder, and it sent us off in a

wonderful new direction. The idea of a magic wand and magic powers occurred

to me while watching a homeless guy in Oklahoma City. He was, I

believe, Vietnamese, and had a cool looking wizardly beard and mustache and he

carried a long stick, which he used as a kind of cane-weapon. And one

day I saw him fighting an “imagined” enemy and the long stick became (as

best I could tell) a kind of magic wand that made his invisible foe

retreat. I mean… it seemed to give him a confidence that allowed him to

defeat his hallucinations…and at first I thought “how sad…he

believes this old stick is saving him”… but the more I thought about it,

the more I envied him in a way…for the evil manifestations of his mind

he invented a sparkling sorcerer’s baton to lead his psychic

revolution…yes!!…

And so we delved into a kind of radical protest rock mentality…We

sing, “We got the power now, motherfuckers, that’s where it belongs”, but

I believe it’s cosmically empowering – not actually empowering. In the

song, we rail against the greedy, corrupt evil beings who are in

control and trying to enslave us… But our rebellion is simply to fight back

- we have no solutions.

POMPEII AM GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG

A galloping Godhead melody (reminiscent of the German National

Anthem) telling a vague story of a young couple planning their suicide. They

live in a place where there are volcanoes erupting and they are going

to take the train up the mountain and jump into the flowing lava as a

symbolic sacrifice of their restricted love.The triumphant quality of the

arrangement suggests that, just before they obliterate themselves, they

realize that to make such a decision, to destroy yourself, is really

just a point of internal motivation leading to outward action. And, if

they could do something as extreme as annihilating themselves, why

couldn’t they just try to change the circumstances that have limited

them?….Action is all we have….Worth mentioning is that this is Steven’s

first lead vocal on a Flaming Lips track…

GOIN’ ON

The core of the chorus melody has a melancholy resolution evoking,

abstractly, sections of Mahler’s 9th Symphony…We are, subconsciously I

guess, drawn to “the answer”… maybe that is why people have the urge to

pray or sing or create…We long for this thing called “closure”, but I

believe that “closure” is, maybe, an illusion. This song takes a long

stare at coping and the secret healing powers of slipping through time

and space…How suffering, somehow, is relieved by

simple…acceptance…

Wayne

2006