Video: Flaming Lips & Ed Sharpe Perform at a Cemetery

Director Christopher Pomerenke has rounded up an impressive — though somewhat random — group of artists for his forthcoming documentary The Heart Is A Drum Machine, including the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, actor/A&R man Elijah Wood, actor/Coconut Records mastermind Jason Schwartzman, Spoon’s Britt Daniel, Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, ex-RHCP guitarist John Frusciante, Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT, and more. As the Playlist reports, the film features interviews with the above artists answering a not-so-simple question: “What is music?”

Okay, we’ll add that to TwentyFourBit’s official Netflix queue (trailer below), but here’s the part that caught my eye: “The film features an original score by The Flaming Lips’ Steven Drozd and a cover of Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’ by Drozd and Keenan.” As Larry David would say, “What a combo!”

Trent Reznor married his fiancée of five months, Mariqueen Maandig, this past weekend. NIN collaborator Danny Lohner first broke the news on Twitter by posting a blurry picture of the couple dancing after tweeting earlier: “goths the world over will mourn this day- off to a wedding…” The scoop, however, goes to Pink is the New Blog’s Trent Vargas, who attended the wedding (invitations were inscribed with pseudo NIN lyrics, “Nothing can stop us now…”). The latter Trent even has the wedding photo.

When a famous rock band gets a chance to share the stage with the Flaming Lips, they best alert their crew and all group members to be on their top behavior ‘cause Wayne Coyne can, and will, call you out, take it back, and then call you out again. After all, as one of our readers once pointed out, Okies don’t lie. In an interview posted on Coldplay.com, Coyne discussed his long-running friendship with Coldplay and whereas he previously asserted that Arcade Fire and the “dudes running their stages” treated people “like shit,” he has nothing but praise for the good vibes in the Coldplay camp.

“Of all the giant groups out there in the world, they probably are the coolest as far as people and the way they treat their audience and their crew,” Coyne said on his reasons for joining Coldplay’s European stadium tour. “So we kind of knew going into it that we’d have a good time, even if the audience didn’t understand us.”

Not only have the Lips shared the stage with Coldplay many times, been covered by Chris Martin, and shared a love for balloon drops, Coyne also catches his BFFs whenever they play his home state. “The previous time I went down there in my truck and Chris and Jonny [Buckland] jumped in the back and I gave them a tour around Oklahoma and some of the significant places that are important to Flaming Lips folklore, like the first place we played and where we filmed Christmas On Mars.”

Aww. It’s so nice to see rock stars getting along for a change. For more of Coyne’s gushing over their musical bromance go thataway.

On one fateful day in March, we awoke to find an awesomely blunt quote from the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne that was sure to get fans riled up and people talking. Coyne—somewhat randomly—bashed the Arcade Fire, saying they “treated their crew like shit, they treated the audience like shit,” and “they’re pricks, so fuck ‘em.”

Arcade Fire’s Win Butler was all over it, posting a blog later on the same day the news broke, which confirmed to the music blogosphere that a clash of indie titans was about to begin. Butler’s response, in short, was that Coyne doesn’t really know the members of Aracde Fire, or as he put it: “I hope I was less of a ‘prick’ then telling Rollingstone that a bunch of people I don’t know at all are really assholes.”

Eventually, Coyne sort of apologized on the whole thing, saying he wished it had “never happened” and that he “meant it about the guys that were running their stages at a couple of festivals.” Pretty much everybody knew this was crap (he mentioned “their crew” in the original rant) and now Coyne is standing by the initial comments:

“For Arcade Fire to even think that what I would say would have any impact on their egos… it’s all silly” Coyne told Independent.ie. “Who cares?”

I don’t care. I know what I said was absolutely the truth. I run into people virtually everywhere we play and they’re like, ‘Wayne, you’re the only one that says anything’. I would say in their defence that perhaps they have changed. But I don’t care. A lot of silly gossip gets built up into epic proportions. I can understand people who loved their music thinking I was out of line for saying it.

Adam Goldberg has joined the ranks of actors Jason Schwartzman, Zooey Deschanel and Ryan Gosling by unveiling his own set of actually good music. On his brand new project LANDy, Goldberg didn’t take any chances in making sure his album would be better than some actor’s vanity project by enlisting Flaming Lips’ Steven Drozd, Earlimart’s Aaron Espinoza and many more talented musicians from the LA scene for his album Eros and Omissions.

The Playlist reports the album drops on June 23 and based on the three songs streaming on his MySpace, it sounds great. He’s also offering a free download of the first single “BFF” here.

“[Goldberg] writes songs about a despair that he knows is coming,” Flaming Lips singer Wayne Coyne said. “Songs about the mystery of love… Adam writes songs for the only reason any song, by anybody, should ever be written… Because if he doesn’t he becomes a freaked-out, insecure weirdo on the verge of suicide. With songwriting like this who needs psychiatrists!!!”

Wayne Coyne sure doesn’t censor himself. The Flaming Lips frontman, and inflatable ball crowd surfer, has snubbed 4 of the UK’s top music acts. In an interview with the Daily Star (via AngryApe) Coyne said:

“I’ve never got Arctic Monkeys - they seem too much like a British thing to me. They’re like Oasis whereby Americans can’t really relate to them. Lots of British people like it but not for me, and I don’t like Razorlight or Duffy much either.”

Possibly realizing he came off as an anti-Britite, Coyne clarified his statement by saying some of his best friends are British: “I prefer Radiohead - they deserve to win a Grammy. And I’m still a fan of Amy Winehouse but hope she doesn’t become too much of a drug addict.”