Atlantic City Weekly

So you just suggested it without any prior thought?
Well, I didn’t really think they would go for it! I just thought it was going to be a way of saying, ‘Well, I don’t really know about that, but what about this?’ And then about a week later they called back and they said, ‘Were you serious about that? Because we looked into the publishing and all the legal stuff and you could do that if you wanted to.’ Of course, that’s not the end of the story; we had to get Pink Floyd’s approval and all of that. It was mostly that, and then once I said it, it occurred to me, ‘Oh, this is a good choice because it’s really not that many songs and some of them are very similar and they’re just great. There’s a lot of great stuff on there. I don’t think there’s one [bad] thing on the record that we would not want to do. I think the only song we considered which would be painful was gonna be the song “Money.”

It came out great though, I thought.
It did. That was one of the first ones that we set ourselves up for. If we could do that one then some of the others ones would be a pure joy. ... I think [we] took the bluesiness and the sarcasm and the cynicalness out of it. I think The Dark Side of the Moon gets tagged as being this slap-in-the-face, this cynical kind of take on the world, but you know I never considered that and I have to say once we started to do it and really delved into what the lyrics mean — sometimes you can sing along with some lyrics and never really consider what they mean — and once we did, I didn’t really feel that way at all. I felt like it was very [much about exploring yourself]. To me it felt like it was a lot of empathy. This idea that “all that you touch and all that you see is all that your life will ever be,” it’s a warning, not just to other people, but to yourself. It’s that your life is going by and you’re not — the horizon that you keep walking towards isn’t when it begins ... [and] your life is already going by, you’re already becoming who you think you’re going to be, you’re not waiting in line to get your turn, you know? And I think some of that is a great energized, ‘Hey, wake up!’ kind of message and I don’t know if it comes across as cynical. Definitely some of the [lyrics] in “Money” are cynical, [but] when you think about the sort of way Pink Floyd became after Dark Side of the Moon, it really wasn’t very cynical at all, it was very realistic in a way. They became such a mega-fucking huge band and all of those things probably did play into their lives of having limousines and football teams and whatever they sing about.

And the album’s one of the biggest selling of all time or has been the longest on the charts or something, right?
Yeah, it’s definitely one of the top [albums]. I don’t know if it outsold Michael Jackson’s Thriller, but yeah. And I mean I think that too plays into why everyone thinks, ‘oh, it’s so popular it must not be very good.’ That’s always a major reaction people have and I point that out all the time. I mean some of the most popular records of all time are some of the best records of all time [because they’re just] a motherfucker. People who love music love that stuff, and people that don’t love music love it because it’s popular. You know, popularity sometimes can put a dent in something that otherwise is just phenomenal. People will point to obscure things and think, ‘oh those things must be great because the public doesn’t understand it.’ No, no, that’s not right!

What do you think about Lady Gaga? She seems to be the most popular music artist right now.
Well, um, I’m glad, you know, at least it seems like she’s a freak and I applaud anybody who’s willing to go out there and be interesting and be controversial — go for it. [But] I don’t know if I would listen to her music that much. I do love “Poker Face,” but I don’t find all of it like “ohh,” but I would say the same would be true about Madonna. If someone is lusting enough for new and interesting ways of being, when I say being I mean not just songs to sing, things to wear and life to sing about, um, I say go for it. I mean with a name like Lady Gaga I was already in before she got popular.

During the past three decades the Flaming Lips have certainly done some off-the-wall stuff, and Embryonic, I think, is definitely up there. It’s pretty out there I’d say, wouldn’t you agree?
Well, yeah. I don’t think we thought, ‘Oh let’s do something that’s out there.’ I do think there are times when you’re just moving along and suddenly you start making music and you’re like, ‘Hey! What is that? I like this.’ I think we knew about halfway through it, you know, we started to compile this stuff that seemed — it did not seem like any other record we had done. Even though when you’re in the group you can see your influences a little bit easier, but there were moments of it where it was, ‘Wow, that does not sound like something we were getting ready to do,’ which really shocked us and sort of made us go, ‘What do we do now?’ Because we would talk about what we would want to do, we would want to be making a record and we know what we’re doing because we’ve made 14 of them, blah, blah, blah, whatever, and then all of a sudden this music appears and that’s what happened with all of our records really. The best parts of all of our records are these little surprises that happen when you think you’re doing something else [and] this other thing happened and you get these moments and you think, ‘Well, did we just not care about this and move on from what we thought we were gonna do? Or is this the music that we’re making now?’ And I think about halfway through [recording Embryonic] we had stumbled upon a few of these weird things and we started to think, ‘Oh, I want to try and make a record like this.’

It must be a good feeling when these little surprises happen.
Yeah, it’s fabulous; it’s the best thing that can happen to you. You get immersed or lost or hypnotized by this thing that is kind of crawling out of you, but then at some point just before the record was getting ready to come out, you start to do what I’m doing here with you, you start to talk about it, and you really don’t know if people will like it, understand it, or anything, and you start to panic. We got lost in this thing, but now we’re really going to have to answer for it, and you just don’t know — I mean, everything about it is filled with insecurity — but, you know, I would rather people not like it and know that we followed this [creative] desire. And to sit there and try to second-guess: ‘Well, you know, let’s make this kind of music because it’ll make us look cool.’ I mean, any time you do that you feel like a complete idiot.