Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne on Twitter Over-Sharing: 'I Show Them Everything'

If you follow the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne on your Twitter feed, you may have noticed that he's become embroiled in an epic Twitter war with his former "heady fwend" Erykah Badu over the NSFW music video for their collaborative cover of "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face."

A few days before all hell broke loose in 140 characters or less, Coyne spoke to Spinner about the joys of Twitter. He's a near-constant tweeter and even used it to touch base with some of the all-star collaborators, including Ke$ha and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, on their new album The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends. Coyne does mention Badu but, once again, this interview happened after the video was shot, but before it went online.

"A lot of people use [Twitter] as a back and forth to gossip about meaningless things. I don't do that," Coyne told Spinner. "I'm doing it specifically for Flaming Lips fans who I feel like give me this great, great life where I simply wake up in the morning and I get to do my thing. I get to make videos with Erykah Badu being naked all day."

"I get to make music with Flaming Lips, Ke$ha and Bon Iver -- or whoever we were with that day -- and I want them to see this is what I'm doing. Sometimes when I'm not doing music I say 'look at the life I get to live' -- and it's an extraordinary, luxurious great life that they gave me. So that's the reason I'm doing it because I know that a lot of people in the Flaming Lips audience are artists and musicians and they are wondering "how do you do these things?"

Indeed, Coyne does tend to chronicle his every move on Twitter, including tweeting naked photos of Badu's sister Nayrock, which caused a stir before the current stir (to which the below pic is a response). But Coyne just sees this all as being completely open about his art.


"I show them 'here, I'm making a video,' I show them what I think it's going to be, I show them while I'm making it, I show them while I'm editing it, and then they can see how the process works," he says. "And I show them that when I'm making music, I show them everything that I'm doing that I'm allowed to show. I mean a lot of things I can't; some days are so full I don't even show you everything because it would just be too much. So many cool things."

So as much as Twitter has embroiled Coyne in controversy over the past few days, he says ultimately it's an avenue to connect more closely to an audience that has kept him employed for the past quarter century.

"Flaming Lips fans, in their own time and space, can see what I'm doing, see what they're a part of, the thing they believe in -- me and the Flaming Lips," he says. "We're not wasting our time. We're not wasting your encouragement. We're not wasting you believing in us. We are doing everything all the time. Sometimes people can see that there are three, four, five days in a row where I really haven't slept because if you see the tweets you're like 'you did not rest in the morning, and then at six you were doing that. What the fuck?'

"I know man, I have the greatest fucking life ever and I hope it goes on forever."

Flaming Lips play Spinner AOL's free concert at Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto at 9:30 p.m. on June. 16.

View The Flaming Lips & Fwends NXNE 2012 Gallery