Remember “Christmas On Mars“? No? That film, a very low-budget sci-fi tale, took about seven years to complete with The Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne calling in favors to a plethora of people including Steve Burns, Modest Mouse leader Isaac Brock, Adam Goldberg, Fred Armisen and Elijah Wood. And when it did finally come out, no one really saw it (and it wasn’t that great). But you gotta hand it to Coyne, the man doesn’t do anything half-assed (if you’ve seen their live shows, you know exactly what we mean) and he’s got another project in the works.
Speaking with Rolling Stone, Coyne reveals that another movie is on the way and will follow a year in which The Flaming Lips will release a new song about every month or so. “We’ll start in late January, though I’m not sure if we’ll get together exactly by then,” Coyne says. “With this new thing, we’re going to spend a lot of time recording at our houses or wherever we are at. We’ll try to release a song a month and document the song in the making, whether it takes us three or five days or a week. It’s gonna be, ‘We’re working on a song and it’s gonna be up by Friday.’ We just want to [release material] some other way.”
“The dilemma is whether we’re going to release it on vinyl, cereal boxes or some of it on toys that we make,” Coyne adds. “Sometimes, the music is the simplest part of any of these things. We’ll be making these little videos that connect in the end to a bigger movie we’ll be making next year as well. It sounds like a bunch of fuckin’ work, but it’s different way of thinking about songs than just holing up.”
Now details at this point on what the movie will actually be are scarce, and no word yet if its related to the film project Coyne was chatting up last spring. At the time, Coyne said the movie would a decidedly more straightforward affair than “Christmas On Mars” and would be set “in someone’s house and in a back yard and in a slaughterhouse.” He was also dreaming of casting Justin Timberlake in the film. And if you think that’s just some pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, Timberlake actually jammed with the band on “Top Of The Pops” a few years ago.
Anyway, it promises to be a very interesting 2011 from everyone’s favorite psych-rockers and we’re certainly intrigued as to what they’re up to next.
