Flaming Lips Considered Covering Black Sabbath's First Album

For more than two decades, acoustic guitars and soft soundscapes have been a regular part of the Flaming Lips sound. But don't expect frontman Wayne Coyne to make an entirely-acoustic album.

"Me, by myself -- and I know this goes against what I think a lot of musicians would think of the way that I am about music or we work with music -- on my own I don't think I would ever make an acoustic record," Coyne tells Spinner. "I'm not a very good guitar player, keyboard player or any of that stuff, so I do a lot of demos that are just me singing and playing and working out my ideas, but I am so at the mercy and want to be the mercy of this dynamic group I'm a part of. Even though I'm the leader of it, I don't have any desire to make just acoustic records."

The subject of acoustic records came up during a recent Oklahoma City snowstorm, which left Coyne snowed-in for five days. With the Lips having recently released their cover album of Pink Floyd's classic 'Dark Side of the Moon,' we joked with Coyne that five days was plenty of time to cover another album. He confessed that during the 'Dark Side' recording, the Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs, the band that joined them for 'Dark Side,' did discuss other possible records to tackle.

"As we were doing 'Dark Side of the Moon' we thought, just as your mind tends to do, 'What other records could we do?'" Coyne says. "We had considered, as the grouping, that we might cover Black Sabbath's first record."

Given the aggression that the two bands -- along with guests Henry Rollins and Peaches -- brought to 'Dark Side of the Moon,' the Sabbath thing could work. But still, it might surprise some fans, so why pick that one? "We like enough of the Black Sabbath songs, it's short and probably enough people know a few of the songs that it would be interesting," he says. "Sometimes when groups do cover version of obscure songs it kind of takes the fun out of it because you're like, 'Well, I don't know the song to begin with, so I don't really understand where your take on it is.'"

Though Coyne has a lot of fun with covers, he takes the art seriously and he brought that attitude to 'Dark Side.' "I don't think it would've been an interesting feat to replay Pink Floyd's stuff," he says. "For us, it was when we stumbled upon the arrangement of 'Breathe,' the very first song on there, and of course the strange, sort of hip-hop, minimalist thing that we did with the song 'Money.' Those made all the difference because if you can't do something to them, especially for this group of musicians, it just simply would've been drudgery to go through this whole record and play it note for note. We found those ways of redoing it and it sort of sparked us to think, 'We could do this.'"