At the top of their third decade, the Lips rekindle their past romance with Neil Young’s piano ballads, the Beatles’ psychedelic guitar tones, and Bowie’s stargazing anthems on a deeply personal album.
Thirty years ago this month, the Flaming Lips released their first game-changing album: 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance. After spending the ‘80s trying to figure out if they wanted to be a prog Replacements or a punk Floyd, the Lips outfitted Priest with an interstellar noise-pop sound that nonetheless retained a distinctly Oklahoman flavor, complete with fairground noises, field recordings of crickets, and strange songs about Jesus. In a Priest Driven Ambulance was also the first installment in what would become a Lips tradition: releasing pace-setting albums at each turn of the decade. Nine years later, their orchestral opus The Soft Bulletin ushered in the band’s imperial phase, while 2009’s Embryonic portended an extended period of wild, anti-pop experimentation. The band’s first album of the 2020s likewise marks another significant change in course; in this case, however, it feels less like the start of a new journey than a homecoming.
In sharp contrast to the Lips’ recent adventures in fairytale fantasias, American Head finds its inspiration in an arcane piece of Oklahoma musical lore. After revisiting the Tom Petty documentary Runnin’ Down A Dream following the rock legend’s 2017 death, Lips ringleader Wayne Coyne became fixated with the story of Petty’s pre-Heartbreakers band, Mudcrutch, with whom Petty spent time in Tulsa in the early-’70s en route to L.A. From that anecdote, Coyne and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd envisioned American Head as a work of speculative fiction, reimagining the Lips as the sort of drugged-out local Oklahoman rock band that might’ve hung out and jammed with a pre-fame Petty while he was passing through town.
As it turns out, that mythical ‘70s scenario is really just a roundabout way of getting the Lips back to where they were in the ‘90s. American Head retains some of the symphonic sweep of the Soft Bulletin era and the freaky futurism of their post-Embryonic state, but, at its core, we find the band rekindling their past romance with Neil Young’s piano ballads, the Beatles’ psychedelic guitar tones, and Bowie’s stargazing anthems. Likewise, Coyne approaches his favorite topics—love, drugs, and death—from a less existential, more personal vantage, grounding his narratives in more naturalistic settings. Instead of tunes about killer robots and unicorns with purple eyes, we get songs about people working in slaughterhouses and slinging coke on the side to get by, fond teenage memories of taking quaaludes and frightening recollections of trying LSD, and dramatizations of actual traumatic incidents from Coyne’s early years.
In the 2005 band documentary The Fearless Freaks, we see old home-movie footage of Coyne and his brothers enjoying a typical ’70s all-American adolescence, playing pick-up football with the local longhairs, before a darker narrative emerges—specifically of the drug habit that would land his brother Tommy in and out of prison. American Head feels like it was born from this moment of innocence lost. Though not a narrative concept album per se, each song feels like a vignette from some tragic sequel to Dazed and Confused, where carefree teenage kicks have given way to the unforgiving realities of young adulthood. (And while it’s not an explicitly autobiographical work, tellingly, one of its doomed characters is also named Tommy.)
“What went wrong?/Now all your friends are gone,” Coyne sings on the album’s majestically melancholy opener, “Will You Return/When You Come Down,” and as American Head plays out, that absence takes many forms. On the equally crestfallen “Flowers of Neptune 6,” his old acid-eating pals are getting shipped off to war or thrown in jail; on the moving orchestral centerpiece “Mother I’ve Taken LSD,” his youthful naivete turns to sorrow as he sings of an addict friend taken off to a psych ward and another on life support after a motorcycle crash. But as the album’s title suggests, these sorts of crises are endemic to the American psyche and perpetuate themselves for generations. While these songs may be loosely based on incidents in Coyne’s past, they speak soundly to the country’s current condition, where working-class teens are still often forced to choose between the army, addiction, prison, or death. “Now, I see the sadness in the world,” Coyne sings on the latter track as the strings come in, “I’m sorry I didn’t see it before.” It’s a line that hits especially hard in 2020, when much of the world is both pining to go back to the way things were pre-COVID while having their eyes pried open to the social ills and inequalities that have been festering all along.
But American Head handles this heavy subject matter with a light touch, framing its stories in a magic-realist sunset atmosphere that lends even its gravest songs an earthbound charm. The barnyard sound effects and countrified breakdown of “You n Me Sellin’ Weed”—a folksy ode to young dealers in love—nod to the group’s more playful mid-’90s catalog, as do the dixie-glam guitar slides throughout the record that summon the spirit of the group’s former string-bender Ronald Jones. And for added authentic southern flavor, three tracks feature vocals from Kacey Musgraves, the latest pop star to get roped into the Lips’ supersonic circus. However, in contrast to their previous match-ups with Kesha and Miley, Musgraves serves more as a textural enhancement to the album’s fading-summer milieu, lending her dreamy wordless sighs to the instrumental “Watching the Lightbugs Glow” like someone familiar with the sight, and floating in the background of its companion track “Flowers of Neptune 6” as if beaming in harmonies from the afterlife. Even on their proper duet “God and the Policeman,” she isn’t so much seizing the spotlight from Coyne as playing the angel on his shoulder in a moment of crisis.
American Head hits its emotional peak with the plaintive ballad “Mother Please Don’t Be Sad,” a fictionalized account of Coyne’s real-life experience getting robbed at gunpoint while working at a Long John Silver’s back in the ‘80s; here, he imagines himself getting fatally shot and bidding his mom adieu with “Bohemian Rhapsody”-worthy gravitas, before the song’s hypnotic psych-jazz sequel “When We Die When We’re High” thrusts him toward the white light. But American Head arrives at a calming full-circle conclusion with “My Religion Is You,” which provides a handy yardstick for just how much the Lips have changed in the past 30 years—and how much they haven’t.
On In a Priest Driven Ambulance, the Lips capped off a set of sacreligious psychedelia with a ramshackle yet earnest cover of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”—an early indication of Coyne’s future role as alt-rock’s leading motivational speaker. “My Religion Is You” is an infinitely more elegant performance, yet Coyne’s affinity for simple, optimistic sentiment remains. On the surface, it’s a song of devotion expressed in the language of heretics—”I don’t need no religion,” Coyne sings, “all I need is you.” But, coming at the end of a record that’s largely about grappling with loss and change, “My Religion Is You” is an open invitation for you to hold onto whatever it is—whether it’s Jesus, Buddha, or, in Coyne’s case, family—that can help make this scary world feel a little more wonderful.
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