Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne Recalls Michael Jackson's Death as Surreal

Flaming Lips' frontman Wayne Coyne may have never been a Michael Jackson fanatic, but for him, finding out about the singer's death was still surreal.

"I was in Switzerland, going to play a show after flying all night," Coyne tells Spinner. "So after sleeping all day, I turned on CNN, which had only started to say something like, 'We think Michael Jackson might be dead.'

"When you hear something like that, you never think it's going to actually turn out to be a story. You just fall back to sleep, but when it actually gets confirmed it takes about 12 hours to sink in."

No stranger to the idea that pop music can breed bizarre characters, Coyne found it difficult to separate Jackson's image from his music.

"The sad thing about Michael Jackson is that it's so hard not to pay attention to the general absurdness of that man's life," he says. "All you can think about is his face, the kids at his ranch...

"[Jackson's death] affected so many because of the power of listening to music -- it's there when you have all these experiences in your life. Music gets played when you fall in love, when you're having sex for the first time... it's literally the sound of your life, so it's just so easy to surrender."