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Jesse Malin

Photo by Joseph Quever

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Watch Jesse Malin's "Crawling Back To You" Video jesse-malin-celebrates-tom-petty-la-landmarks-his-cinematic-crawling-back-you-video

Jesse Malin Celebrates Tom Petty & L.A. Landmarks In His Cinematic "Crawling Back To You" Video

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The New York rocker also sits down with the Recording Academy to discuss his love of Petty, how he's passing the time in quarantine, working with Lucinda Williams and much more
Pamela Chelin
GRAMMYs
May 20, 2020 - 7:11 am

While watching Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at the Hollywood Bowl in the fall of 2017—which tragically turned out to be their final concert due to Petty's untimely death a week later—New York singer/songwriter Jesse Malin was struck by the lyrics "most things I worry about never happen anyway" as Petty sang "Crawling Back To You" (from his '94 classic Wildflowers). "I loved Wildflowers but I’d never focused on the words and the sentiment and the whole spirit of that song until I was at the Hollywood Bowl seeing them play," says Malin over the phone from his New York apartment where he’s been self-isolating for the last two months. "When he sang that line in the beautiful California night with all the stars out, I don’t know why but it just hit me and I got a little chill. Sometimes, with music, when people sing or say something that connects, it really lets you know you’re not alone and that you’re going to be all right."

It was the best Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers performance Malin had ever seen. "They’d always been an insanely great band, but there was some kind of magic there," he says. "Ironically, it turned out horribly that, sadly, that was his last gig ever. When Tom died a week later, it was just such a shocker." With "Crawling Back To You" embedded in Malin’s spirit, it resurfaced when he played it at Petty Fest—an annual tribute concert to Tom Petty whose proceeds go to charity. From there, he added the song to his live sets before recording a slower, stripped-down and heartrending version earlier this year. Below, the Recording Academy has the exclusive premiere of the Malin's "Crawling Back To You" music video: 

Malin’s plaintive and beautiful "Crawling Back To You," comprised of vocals, guitar and keys, illuminates the song's yearning for connection, making the ideal B-side complement to Malin's recently released upbeat rocker "Backstabbers," the first single for his forthcoming record (working title, Lust For Love) on Little Steven's Wicked Cool Records. "I like to put B-sides and extra songs on the singles that are things that I’m really inspired by." 

"When I cover something, I always try to find a way to put some of myself into it or change it up a bit," says Malin. "I enjoy finding a way to break down a song. I like to take fast songs and slow them down. I tend to go for the sadder things. If there's a beautiful sad blue in a song, it just connects with me and I focus on that, and it came out naturally when I started strumming 'Crawling Back To You,'" he says. "When I started to play it at my shows, it kind of fell into that place and brought out a sadder thing. As much as I’m a positive mental attitude PMA guy, I always seem to connect with the underside and melancholy side of life but part of that is how you get to the bright side by embracing and facing the sadness. The song is a beaten down and been through all of this—but it’s going to be OK, and that's the kind of message that I definitely need right now."

Like everyone else, Malin says he’s had his share of ups and downs in self-isolation, but he says today is a good day. "The sun is shining and I'm getting a lot done. I woke up embracing this current situation instead of being in denial and resisting." Still, he misses New York's usual bustle. "These times have been trying because it’s great to reflect and you need the time to refuel and reflect, and part of the loneliness is great for output as a writer. But I like to be on the move. I’m a walker. I like energy. I like being around people and I walk to get inspired. I’ve been taking little walks but it’s not like connecting with people and the adrenaline of everything of life. I like walking down a crowded street with all kinds of cultures and people and all kinds of things happening. There are a few little things open and then by 8 p.m., it’s really like a dead man's society. The pulse is like just some kind of weird futuristic deadsville. It’s terrible. But there is an optimism in the air between the restlessness, the spring coming and with the numbers going down a bit and the closing up of some of the wards at the hospitals that were just packed."

"I played the last night in London like it was the last night of my life. I was like, 'I’m leaving blood on the stage.'"

If he had his way, Malin would still be overseas in support of his most recent record, 2019's Sunset Kids, which won three Independent Music Awards last month. Due to the rapidly spreading coronavirus, however, he was forced to return to New York much earlier than planned. "To have it all pulled back was heartbreaking," he says. "I’m happy we got half of the cycle of touring done which is better than nothing, but we were in the peak and shows were selling out and we were moving to bigger rooms and we were going to play two days at Glastonbury. It was the best situation I’d been in in a while, where the record was really connecting and selling more," he says. "I played the last night in London like it was the last night of my life. I was like, 'I’m leaving blood on the stage.'"

At the best of times, coming down after a tour can be tough. But the abrupt finish made it even harder, compounded by the shocking homecoming. "It was devastating. We didn’t know what we were walking into," says Malin. "New York was like a Mad Max ghost town...a lot of fear, a lot of death, and uncertainty, and there still is." Pausing for a moment, he says, "I could play the violin but there are millions of people going through this and worse. It’s one of these things that shows we’re all in this together as a race on this planet."

Malin co-produced Sunset Kids with Lucinda Williams and her husband Tom Overby. Having initially been a fan of Williams, the pair eventually became friends. In fact, it was Williams who’d invited Malin to the Hollywood Bowl that transformative night where she played an hourlong set opening for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The following evening, when Malin met Williams and Overby for dinner, they decided to make a record together. Referring to Williams, who lends vocals to Sunset Kids, as his "North Star" who "made me want to be the best I can," Malin says, "She made me put my A-game on 10. She’s so good and she has such a strong gut instinct for the groove and soul of rock and roll but also the details and the lyrics. She’d go through my lyrics and ask things and having her brain on it was great. She has an eye for how things can be loving and beautiful but also fucked up and cool and real, and the dirty side of things, the grit that makes rock and roll or art that has an edge to it."

Read More: The Rebellious Brilliance Of Lucinda Williams

Born in Queens, Malin's a quintessential New Yorker with the accent to boot, but recording Sunset Kids on the West Coast wasn’t new for the rocker; he'd recorded in Los Angeles before (parts of Malin's Glitter in the Gutter and Love it to Life records were recorded in the City of Angels). "I do have a real feeling for L.A.," he admits. "I’ve grown to really love it, being around people who are so happy to get up early and get stuff done, and the beauty of it. I can see the romance of the California atmosphere. There's always that thing in every East Coast person. It may or may not work out, but that thing of ‘Go West, young man,’ that you can go out there and things can maybe be better and healing and the warm weather and all of that."

When he returned to Los Angeles to play shows last January, he shot the video for "Crawling Back To You" with filmmaker/video director/photographer Joseph Quever with whom Malin's previously collaborated. Quever says before the song was recorded, he was already compelled by Malin's live performances of "Crawling Back To You." It was after a performance in San Diego last October when Quever noticed he wasn’t the only one who was humming the song’s melody long after the show ended. "I could hear Jesse’s crew humming the song. I mean, imagine how many times they’d heard that song and yet they’re still humming it after a show as they're packing up the van," says Quever. "And there I was doing the same thing because the song was also embedded in my head, and I just thought, ‘Oh my god, there’s something special here with this version. It’s just spectacular."

Shot over the course of several days with footage of late-night drives on sparsely populated Los Angeles freeways and winding roads high above the city lights, and flecked with passing glimpses of The Hollywood Bowl and Sunset Boulevard (not to mention isolated shots of Malin in a hotel room), the intimate and minimalist video exudes acute longing, which resonates even more poignantly during the pandemic.

"This particular video is one of my personal favorites that we’ve ever done. I’m really happy with the song and this video which captures the spirit of what I was feeling which is my interpretation of the Tom Petty song," says Malin. "'Crawling Back To You' has a longing to get somewhere and to make that connection whether it’s love, drugs, creation, family, whatever...crawling back to whatever it is for you."

Until he can return to the recording studio to finish his next record, Malin, who is equally high energy onstage and off, has been hosting two-hour livestreams from his apartment on Saturday afternoons called "The Fine Art of Self Distancing" (a play on the title of his first solo record, The Fine Art of Self Destruction), which Rolling Stone listed last month among its best-streamed performances of the stay-at-home era. Lively, funny, chatty and affable, Malin performs his own songs and covers, all while taking audience requests. He also recommends films (John Cassavettes: Five Films, The King of Comedy and documentary The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town) and books ("Conversations with Tom Petty," which he’s currently reading) and relays anecdotes from his life. Having played in bands since he was 12 years old, including his seminal New York punk band D Generation, before he embarked on his solo career almost 20 years ago, the 52-year-old Malin has plenty of rock and roll stories to share.

Beginning this weekend, Malin's moving his livestream out of his apartment and into Berlin, a downtown N.Y.C. venue he co-owns where he’ll broadcast every Saturday afternoon at 4 p.m. ET on his YouTube channel. In the spirit of '70s "SNL," "Jools Holland" and early Howard Stern, "The Art of Self Distancing: Live from New York City" will include live performances from Malin along with his keyboardist Rob Clores, short comedic sketches and segments, and pre-taped Zoom interviews with high-profile guests including Lucinda Williams, Debbie Harry (Blondie), Alejandro Escovedo and Craig Finn. Audience members can make requests and dedications and chat live, and there will be an option to donate and buy merchandise with all proceeds going to Malin's band, production crew, downtown New York City bars and MusiCares.

While he's having fun hosting livestreams, Malin says nothing truly beats live concerts. "I'm having a great time doing these livestreams," he says. "I’m trying to take some lemons and to make lemonade to fire it up and throw a party and to keep a good sense of humor about things but there’s still something great about getting in a room and being with people, in the dark with strangers and loud music, feeling the air push through the speakers."

Ever the optimist, Malin remains hopeful. "We’ve got to get through each day and not look too far ahead as there’s so much uncertainty but I have faith and I know it will all be back at some point. Hopefully, not too long. People are going to need music and to have that heartbeat and to be around each other. As much as Amazon and Netflix like to keep everyone in the house, people are going to want to be live and not Memorex."

Jesse Malin's 'Meet Me At The End Of The World' EP: Track By Track

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Foo Fighters

Photo: Lester Cohen/WireImage.com

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Foo Fighters, Norah Jones To Perform At Tom Petty MusiCares Tribute

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Gary Clark Jr., Don Henley, Stevie Nicks, and Kings Of Leon also among performers added to star-studded GRAMMY Week tribute to 2017 MusiCares Person of the Year Tom Petty
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GRAMMYs
May 15, 2017 - 2:36 am

GRAMMY winners Gary Clark Jr., Foo Fighters, Don Henley, Norah Jones, Kings Of Leon, Jeff Lynne, Randy Newman, Stevie Nicks, George Strait, and Lucinda Williams will perform at the 2017 MusiCares Person of the Year tribute concert honoring Tom Petty on Feb. 10 in Los Angeles. GRAMMY-nominated singer/songwriters Jackson Browne, Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen, Elle King, and Regina Spektor; and rock band the Bangles will also join the performance lineup. Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers will close the evening's performances, and multi-GRAMMY-winning artist and producer T Bone Burnett will serve as musical director.

Petty will be honored as the 2017 MusiCares Person of the Year in celebration of his extraordinary creative accomplishments and significant charitable work. Proceeds from the 27th annual Person of the Year tribute provide essential support for MusiCares, which ensures music people have a place to turn in times of financial, medical and personal need.

The MusiCares Person of the Year tribute ceremony is one of the most prestigious events held during GRAMMY Week. The celebration culminates with the 59th Annual GRAMMY Awards at Staples Center on Sunday, Feb. 12, 2017. The telecast will be broadcast live on the CBS Television Network at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

Tom Petty in 1987

Tom Petty in 1987

Photo: Ross Marino/Getty Images

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Tom Petty's 70th Birthday Bash: Stevie Nicks, More tom-pettys-70th-birthday-bash-stevie-nicks-foo-fighters-rick-rubin-more

Tom Petty's 70th Birthday Bash: Stevie Nicks, Foo Fighters, Rick Rubin & More

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The free five-hour extravaganza is raising awareness and donations for the NIVA's Save Our Stages Fund, MusiCares, Arts In Medicine and Digitunity
Ana Monroy Yglesias
MusiCares
Oct 20, 2020 - 1:02 pm

Today, Oct. 20, would have been Tom Petty's 70th birthday. To celebrate the music and legacy of the GRAMMY-winning rock hero, his estate is throwing a fittingly star-studded livestream concert on Fri., Oct. 23.

The fourth annual Tom Petty's Birthday Bash festival goes virtual this year, featuring performances and speeches from his friends and fans, including Stevie Nicks, Lenny Kravitz, Eddie Vedder, Rick Rubin, The Flaming Lips, Brandi Carlile, Norah Jones, Beck and many more. The five-hour extravaganza is free and is raising awareness and donations for the National Independent Venue Association's Save Our Stages Fund, MusiCares, Arts In Medicine and Digitunity.

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Must Read: Let Your Heart Be Your Guide: Adria Petty, Mike Campbell & More On The Enduring Significance Of Tom Petty's 'Wildflowers'

The annual concert was launched in the "Free Fallin'" singer's hometown of Gainesville, Fla. in 2017 just weeks after he died, as a celebration of his life and timeless tunes. This year's birthday party will begin on SiriusXM's Tom Petty Radio (which he helped launch in 2015) from 4:30-7:00 p.m. ET. It will feature performances from Grouplove, Jason Isbell, The Killers, Kurt Vile, the Raconteurs, the Arts In Medicine Hospital Band and others.

From 7:00-9:30 p.m. ET, the festivities will move over to Amazon Music's Twitch Channel and TomPetty.com, with an audio simulcast on SiriusXM. This show will feature Vedder, Kravitz, Nicks, the Flaming Lips, Foo Fighters, the Heartbreakers' guitarist Mike Campbell, Post Malone, Chris Stapleton, Emily King, Gary Clark Jr., Jackson Browne, Lucinda Williams, Lukas Nelson, Margo Price and more. Music mogul Jimmy Iovine, actor Kiefer Sutherland, super producer Rubin, Olivia Harrison and Stephen Perkins of Jane's Addiction will also appear.

The news follows the release of Petty's Wildflowers & All The Rest on Fri., Oct. 16. It's a long-awaited reissue of his 1994 Rubin-co-produced album, yet the first time it was released as the artist intended, a 25-track double album.

Wayne Coyne Talks Flaming Lips' New Album 'American Head,' Kacey Musgraves & Pool Parties At Miley Cyrus' House

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Tom Petty

Photo by Mark Seliger

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Revisiting Tom Petty's 'Wildflowers' let-your-heart-be-your-guide-adria-petty-mike-campbell-more-enduring-significance-tom

Let Your Heart Be Your Guide: Adria Petty, Mike Campbell & More On The Enduring Significance Of Tom Petty's 'Wildflowers'

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Ahead of Petty's long-awaited, expansive 'Wildflowers' reissue, GRAMMY.com speaks to those who know it—and its beloved late author—best
Pamela Chelin
GRAMMYs
Oct 16, 2020 - 9:14 am

For years, Tom Petty fans eagerly awaited the release of the second half of Wildflowers, Petty's esteemed second solo record, released on Nov. 1, 1994. Co-produced by multiple GRAMMY-winning producer Rick Rubin, Tom Petty and Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, Wildflowers was originally conceived as a 25-song double CD, though Petty’s new record label Warner Bros. asked that it be condensed to a 15-song one-disc album. Four songs from the Wildflowers sessions ended up on the She’s The One soundtrack. Another song, "Leave Virginia Alone," was recorded by Rod Stewart and debuted on "Saturday Night Live"'s 20th season finale. The remaining five songs never saw the light of day. 

Today, however, two weeks after the third anniversary of Petty’s untimely death and several days before what would have been the rock icon’s 70th birthday, Wildflowers & All The Rest has finally been released. Produced by Petty's longtime engineer and co-producer Ryan Ulyate, the collection was curated by Petty’s daughters Adria and Annakim, Campbell, Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and Petty's wife Dana (the couple married in 2001). There are several editions available in various formats (digital/CD/vinyl), starting with a 2-CD/3-LP reissue of Wildflowers remastered and All The Rest comprising the previously unreleased 10 tracks, the Deluxe Edition (which also includes 15 home demos and 14 live performances ranging from 1995-2017) and the Super Deluxe Edition, which includes Finding Wildflowers and comprises 16 alternate studio takes.

A benchmark in his illustrious career and his fastest-selling record, Wildflowers, certified triple platinum within nine months of its release, held significant meaning to Petty. Speaking to author/journalist Paul Zollo in "Conversations with Tom Petty," Petty says, "I think it’s maybe my favorite LP that I’ve ever done. Though I’m kind of partial to a few of them. But I think, as a whole, it’s a real long piece of music—it’s almost 70 minutes long—but that’s the one that really gets me when I hear it. I can kind of go, ‘Wow, I’m really proud of that. That came out exactly like I wanted it to.'"

Sadly, as Petty wrote songs for Wildflowers, his marriage to his wife Jane Benyo was collapsing. (The pair married in 1974, had daughters Adria and Annakim, and divorced in 1996.) Filled with pain, loneliness and uncertainty, Petty’s songwriting shifted in accordance with the crisis in his personal life, reflected in Wildflowers' lyrics and song titles including "Hard On Me," "Time To Move On" and "Only A Broken Heart." More intimate and raw than ever before, Petty openly expresses his sadness, anguish and frustration amidst sporadic shimmers of light.

Recorded at Sound City in Van Nuys over an approximately two-year period beginning in 1992, Wildflowers wasn’t technically a Heartbreakers record but all the Heartbreakers still showed up with the exception of drummer Stan Lynch, who was replaced by Steve Ferrone when escalating tensions with Lynch reached a breaking point. Ringo Starr, who played drums on "To Find A Friend," and Carl Wilson, who contributed backing vocals to "Honey Bee," were the record’s special guests.

On the opening and title track, the sweetly melodic “Wildflowers,” Petty sings, “You belong among the wildflowers/ You belong in a boat out at sea/ Sail away, kill off the hours/ You belong somewhere you feel free." Though it was never released as a single, "Wildflowers" was a huge hit with Petty fans. In audio posted to Tom Petty’s official Instagram page, Petty reveals the ad-libbed song was a departure from his usual songwriting process. “The 'Wildflowers' song was one of the only times it ever happened to me in my life. I really just stepped up in my little studio at home and I put the mic on and played the whole song straight from the top to the end with all the lyrics and the music in one go. And then I stopped the tape and played it back and I really was kind of, you know, confused. I kept playing it again and again thinking, ‘Well, what do we work on and what would I change?’ And then I thought, 'I’m not going to change it. I’m just going to leave it stream of conscious.'"

While Petty wasn’t aware of it at the time, he actually wrote "Wildflowers" for someone very specific, someone who was desperately in need of compassion and freedom. He wrote it for Tom Petty. According to Warren Zane's bestselling book "Petty: The Biography" (2015), Petty’s therapist listened to the song and "asked the singer who he was addressing. ‘I told him I wasn’t sure,’ Petty says. ‘And then he said, ‘I know. That song is about you. That’s you singing to yourself what you needed to hear.’ ‘It kind of knocked me back. But I realized he was right. It was me singing to me.'"

Infused with rock, folk and blues, the critically acclaimed Wildflowers landed at number eight on Billboard’s 200 record chart. Rolling Stone gave the album a 4-star review. "Wildflowers' resolute passion and maturity grow more evident with each listen until the album acquires a haunting, enduring resonance." GRAMMY-nominated for Best Rock Album album, Wildflowers yielded four successful singles that each scored positions on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart; the tongue-in-cheek "It’s Good To Be King," "You Don’t Know How It Feels" (GRAMMY Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, and MTV Music Video Award for Best Male Video), "A Higher Place," and "You Wreck Me."

Originally titling the song "You Rock Me," Petty shared the backstory to "You Wreck Me" at VH1’s Tom Petty Storytellers session in 1999. "I was calling the song 'You Rock Me, Baby' and, you know, you can’t really say that anymore because it was pointed out to me, anyway, that the band kind of just held their heads and said, 'You can’t sing, ‘You rock me’ in a song,' which I suppose made sense...and then, one night, it hit me. It’s ‘wreck me.’ All I did was change ‘rock’ for ‘wreck’ and we had, ‘You wreck me, baby.” With that, Petty smiles, chuckles, and launches into the highly energetic rocker with the Heartbreakers. 

There’s a chance the song might never have been recorded at all. Campbell, who wrote the music for "You Wreck Me" and co-wrote several Petty hits including "Refugee" and "Runnin’ Down A Dream," says initially Petty liked the demo Campbell gave to him. But when Campbell asked about the song months later, Petty said he wasn’t sure if he knew where he’d put it. At the studio one day, Rubin asked Campbell if he had any songs. When Campbell played it for him, Rubin told him to show the song to Petty, but Campbell said he already had. Rubin suggested he show it to Petty again.

"I showed it to Tom again and kind of nudged him and said, ‘Why don’t you write to this?'" Campbell tells GRAMMY.com. "The funny thing is, I think maybe because Tom was busy writing his own songs and he was overwhelmed with that, he wasn’t really keen on that track at the beginning. He kind of did it under duress a little bit. I got the feeling as we were recording it that it wasn’t one of his favorite songs. But when we went on tour, a couple of days into the tour, we played that song live and it went down so well, he leaned over to me and said, 'I get it now. This is really a good song.'"

Filmmaker/photographer Martyn Atkins, who directed both the "You Wreck Me" music video and the documentary "400 Days,” which he shot during the recording of Wildflowers and its tour, designed the record’s tastefully understated packaging and cover; four black-and-white photos, one of which shows Petty looking out the window of a van on his way to the recording studio, set against a craft paper-brown background with a red circle surrounding a red beaded flower in the cover’s lower-left corner, providing the only splash of color. Petty’s name and "Wildflowers" are written across the top in lowercase letters in Atkins’s handwriting. 

Atkins spent a lot of time with Petty, taking photos and shooting film footage, letting ideas spark organically. Inspired by the intimacy of Petty’s songs, Atkins opted for a low-key design. “My thought about the packaging and graphic for "Wildflowers" was that it should feel a little more homemade, something crafted that Tom was crafting. I got that feeling from the music. It was much more internalized coming from Tom. It felt like you were getting something personal,” says Atkins over the phone. He cut and printed negatives from his 16mm film footage for the cover photos instead of using a regular camera. “I wanted the grittiness and real grain for the album artwork. The idea was not to have something glossy.” 

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He explains the red beaded flower's significance. "Tom had a tobacco pouch at his house, an American Indian suede pouch with a beaded flower on it. I think somebody had given it to him. He wondered if we could use it in some way. I took it away and photographed it and suggested we make it like a seal on the cover, something graphic that could become a motif. He liked that idea as the pouch meant something to him. We did stickers of it and included them in the CD packaging."

Petty himself stuck a Wildflowers sticker onto the upper-left corner of one of his favorite guitars, his blonde Telecaster (nicknamed "Torucaster" for luthier Toru Nittono), where the sticker remains to this day. Some of Atkins's Wildflowers-era photography, along with pictures taken by photographers Mark Seliger and Robert Sebree, are included in the new box set. 

For years, Petty longed to reissue the beloved Wildflowers along with its second half. "He thought it was really important because the legacy of the Wildflowers album loomed large in this career and he knew that the second half of Wildflowers was an important statement," said Rick Rubin, speaking to bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell on their "Broken Record" podcast in 2018. 

Ulyate and Petty first cracked open the Wildflowers vault in 2013, poring over tapes during breaks between recording sessions for Hypnotic Eye, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ final studio album. By 2014, they'd remixed the 10 previously unreleased Wildflowers tracks, which Petty sequenced and named All The Rest. Petty also selected some home demos to release as bonus material. He told Rolling Stone about a two-disc Wildflowers release slated for that Christmas. A year later, Petty released the Wildflowers-era song "Somewhere Under Heaven" as promotion for a Wildflowers: All The Rest collection that didn't have a release date yet. He was waiting to release Wildflowers: All The Rest when he could give it his undivided attention and promote it properly with a tour. Between touring Hypnotic Eye, working with his early '70s band Mudcrutch (whose members include Heartbreakers Campbell and Tench), and the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 40th anniversary tour in 2017, he held back Wildflowers: All The Rest until he could prioritize it. 

"He wasn’t putting out music by the pound," says Ulyate over the phone. "He thought about it and was like, ‘I don’t want to just toss this thing out.’ He was never into flooding the market with stuff. If he had just put it out without promoting it, he felt it wouldn't have gotten the reception he thought it deserved so he decided to hold back. He was going to get back to it, take stock, and figure out how to move forward when they got off tour in 2017."

Throughout Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' 40th anniversary tour, the 18-song setlist included five Wildflowers songs, alongside a bevy of classic Petty hits including "American Girl," "Free Fallin'," and "Mary Jane’s Last Dance." Two days after the tour wrapped, after three sold-out nights at the Hollywood Bowl, Petty told the L.A. Times that the Wildflowers project was probably where he'd turn his attention next. While he said he still had some research to do, he speculated that a three-city theater residency, instead of stadiums and arenas, might suit the material best. 

"We had several discussions about doing a tour of only Wildflowers songs, maybe in theaters," says Campbell. "For so many decades, it was a greatest hits tour, which is great, but this would have been a different type of thing. We could share this intimate album and we'd have different guest singers come in with the band to give it a different vibe and experience from the touring we’d been doing, which would have been artistically rewarding for us." Campbell says among the potential guest singers they’d discussed were Jeff Lynne, Eddie Vedder, Norah Jones and Stevie Nicks.

Tragically, five days after his L.A. Times interview, Petty, who suffered from emphysema, coronary artery atherosclerosis, knee pain and a fractured hip, died suddenly at 66 years old from an accidental overdose of prescription pain medications. But Petty’s incomparable legacy lives on with Wildflowers & All The Rest, which arrives on the heels of two previous Tom Petty posthumous releases: An American Treasure (2018) and Best Of Everything (2019). 

Over the past few months, several Wildflowers & All The Rest songs and videos have been released: Petty's home demos of "Wildflowers," "You Don’t Know How It Feels" and "There Goes Angela (Dream Away)," which was unearthed after Petty’s death. "We didn't find that when Tom was around," says Ulyate. "We found about half the demos with Tom and he approved them and liked them and then after he passed, we really scoured the bottom of the vault to try to find everything. That’s when we found more demos."

"Confusion Wheel," the first official single from All The Rest, epitomizes Petty’s tormented and highly confessional Wildflowers-era songwriting. Petty sings, "So much confusion has torn me apart/ So much confusion has made me afraid/ That I don’t know how to love/ I don’t know how to trust/ And I don’t know why that is." Yet Petty hasn’t lost all hope for a fresh start as he sings, "One of these days, we'll drive away/ Drive away singing a brand new song/ We'll wake up singing a brand new song."

Mindful that the material was close to her father’s heart, Adria is also highly cognizant of its significance to the Wildflowers narrative. Speaking to GRAMMY.com over the phone, she says, "If the 'Wizard Of Oz' had another reel or if 'Let It Be' had another album you’d be like, ‘Woah! To me, that’s what Wildflowers & All The Rest is, and that’s why it’s so important for us to get it right because it’s a little gem in the archive."

"Everybody involved is trying to honor and use their sixth sense as to what it is he would like, to carry on the legacy as he would have if he were still here," says Ulyate, who worked closely with Petty for more than 10 years. He misses Petty terribly but notes that being immersed in his music has helped his grief somewhat. "I don’t think any of us will ever get over the loss but, in a way, working on the music has made it easier because he’s still here and he’s still coming out of my speakers. Finding this stuff and putting it out feels like we’re all doing our job in honoring him and his legacy. In that way, we’re doing the right thing and doing justice to his legacy so we’re keeping him around in a way and that part of it makes me feel good."

Exploring Petty’s archives was tough for Campbell, however, whose history with Petty dates back 50 years. "It was a bittersweet experience going through the stuff and not having Tom there to do it with us," he says. "Going over the songs brought up a lot of joy and grief as well. He really wanted this stuff out though, so we worked very hard on it and took the best stuff of what was laying around. It was as if he was sitting there with us and we made decisions based on that.

Some of the tracks I’d almost completely forgotten about until I heard them and it was nice to hear this good music that we could share with the audience. At the same time, I’m still grieving and it was kind of hard to sit there and hear Tom’s voice in the speakers and him not be there. Sometimes I would just have to leave the room for a while, but we got it done."

Adria says when her father died, "It was such an eternal primal scream of disbelief to have him die on us so suddenly." She says it felt like a universal loss and that while the world mourned along with her family, they also gave Petty’s heirs a lot of support. As to her grief, three years later, she says, "I feel like I’m turning a corner with it, and as time goes on, I feel like parts will get easier. But no one ever gets over the death of their parent." At times, however, her grief is overwhelming. "There are times when you just don’t want to hear those songs...when they come on in the grocery store and you’re like, ‘That’s a lot.'"

She says, however, that listening to Wildflowers is uplifting. "There’s a lot of joy in listening to this particular era of the music for me. It touches my soul. It touches my heart and makes me feel good. It’s not the kind of stuff that makes you really think necessarily about the live shows or the hit-run of Dad’s catalog but it’s a little bit more of a pure experience." As of late, Adria says she’s been getting lost in her dad's lyrics and the purposeful manner in which he chose each word, constantly editing himself, as reflected on studio notes, legal pads and notebooks where he constantly scratched out and replaced lyrics.

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Rick Rubin and Tom Petty 
Photo by Robert Sebree

Renowned for his anthemic songs, witty lyrics and compassion for underdogs, along with his uncanny skill for conveying profound wisdom and emotional depth using plain and concise language, part of Petty’s artistic genius was how deceptively simple he made his thoroughly relatable yet equally epic songwriting seem. In truth, he was a blue-jeaned, tirelessly working poet, inducted into the Rock and Roll Of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

While the more comprehensive editions of Wildflowers & All The Rest are a treat for fans, they also serve as a masterclass in songwriting as you hear the evolution of Petty’s songs. Some demos were reworked before being recorded in the studio. For example, before he changed the chorus for the completed studio version of "Crawling Back To You," on the demo Petty sang "coming back to you" and "running back to you." Other demos were set aside entirely, with portions of their lyrics transplanted into other songs. "There’s a Break in the Rain" is a beautiful and heartfelt demo that Petty never developed further. Instead, he used its lyrics "in a memory of a dream," in "You Don’t Know How It Feels," the first song recorded for Wildflowers. Years later, he recycled its chorus in "Have Love Will Travel" on The Last DJ (2002). 

"He really cared about writing good songs and performing them well," says Ulyate. "He always wanted to keep getting better and better and refining his craft. He was more into that than being a famous guy," says Ulyate who says Petty’s meticulousness was all-encompassing. "He was into every facet of songwriting. The song had to be good, the first line had to grab you and the song had to have good construction, and he was into production, and how the songs were arranged in the context of an album was important. He wanted to make sure he was telling a story."

Petty would continue to scrutinize and change songs even after they were recorded. "I’d go into mastering and say, ‘OK, we’re going to master the album and finish it up’ and he’d call me two days before and say, ‘I have a better line for the third verse,'" says Ulyate. "Luckily, we had a set-up that made it easy for me to drop in a line at his studio and we’d listen back and I’d say, ‘Man, I’m so glad you called me. That was so much better.’ He was always thinking of ways of improving stuff."

Ulyate partially attributes Petty’s songwriting prowess to his "encyclopedic knowledge" of music. "If you want to be a good songwriter, you have to be a good song listener," he says. "Tom Petty was probably the best song listener of anyone I knew." Petty’s extensive and colorful musical palette ranged from the most obscure music Petty could find to the blues to his heroes Bob Dylan, the Byrds, The Beatles, Beach Boys and Elvis Presley. 

He laughs incredulously when recalling Petty’s meeting with director Thom Zimny who, at the time, was making the documentary, Elvis Presley: The Searcher. "Thom Zimny asked a couple of questions about Elvis and Tom Petty went into this thing where, basically, for the next 45 minutes he just schooled the guy about Elvis! He knew more about him and I was like, ‘How do you know this much about Elvis?!'"

"Even if you never shook his hand, you knew him, and it will always feel like we lost a friend, not just the standard-bearer for great songwriting." —Cameron Crowe on losing Tom Petty

In fact, when Petty was 11 years old, growing up in his native Gainesville, Florida, he was taken to meet Presley by his uncle who was working on the set of a Presley film shooting nearby in Ocala, Fl. Petty relays the Presley anecdote in Oscar-nominated director, screenwriter and author Peter Bogdanovich’s four-hour documentary, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down A Dream (2007). "Elvis appeared like, you know, a vision. He didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen and I’m just dumbstruck...I went home a changed man," Petty said at the time. "When I hit the street the next day, I was trying to find some Elvis Presley records. The music just hypnotized me and I played these records to the point my parents began to worry that something was wrong with me."

Speaking over the phone, Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show, Mask) says though he and Petty were both proud of the documentary, which won a GRAMMY for Best Long Form Music Video in 2009, ("I was thrilled. What director gets a GRAMMY?"), it's forever "tinged with sadness" due to Petty’s untimely death. He says when Petty had a three-week window between tour dates in 2017, the pair discussed adding material to Runnin’ Down A Dream. "We talked about maybe adding 10 to 15 minutes to it to include the last 10 years to bring it up to date. We had a nice talk about it and he was keen on the idea but it didn’t work out because he died."

Bogdanovich says he last spoke to Petty after he attended his penultimate concert at The Hollywood Bowl three years ago, and called Petty to rave about his performance. "It’s tragic. I miss him dearly. I just loved the guy," he says. "He was a real artist who cared about the art, singing terrific songs that he put his heart and soul into. It was everything to him. It wasn’t about the money. It was about the work."

Petty’s dedication to his fans matched his commitment to his art. During the 40th anniversary tour, Atkins expressed concern to Petty about carrying a heavy guitar every night while suffering from a cracked hip that needed surgery. He says he suggested the idea of stopping the tour to get better and touring the following year instead. Petty said, "I don’t want to stop the tour because people book their holidays around coming to see me and it’s important in people’s lives and I don’t want to let them down."

Dating back to 1981, Petty famously fought his record label MCA who wanted to add a dollar to the price of his record Hard Promises. He withheld the album until MCA relented and didn’t raise the price. Petty describes his fan-philosophy in director and Oscar-winning screenwriter Cameron Crowe’s 1983 MTV hour-long documentary Heartbreakers Beach Party, which was Crowe’s first directing credit. Facing the camera directly, Petty says, "At the risk of sounding corny, you have to thank the fans. I’m still very reverent about that. I will stop and sign the thing because it’s that important. I think that if you lose that, if you get where they’re just them, then it’s all gone."

"Tom always carried himself as a fan," Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) tells GRAMMY.com over the phone. "First and foremost, I think, he was somebody who never forgot his music-loving roots in Florida and remained an avid music lover and collector his entire life."

Crowe says Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were one of his favorite artists to write about when he was a Rolling Stone journalist and that it was "a dream come true" for which he’ll forever be honored that Heartbreakers Beach Party was his directorial debut. As a matter of fact, but for Petty (and executive producer Danny Bramson), it would have taken Crowe much longer to have become a director, if it even happened at all. "We were on the way to the video shoot for 'You Got Lucky' and he said, 'Pick up a camera and I’ll play you a song.' I said I wasn’t a director. He said, 'Just film me.' So I did. He played the novelty song ‘I’m Stupid’ and when it was done, he said, 'Guess what. Now you’re a director.' Can’t think of a better person to convince to jump in the deep end and start a new career."

He says Petty contributed music generously to Crowe’s film soundtracks over the years, including an exclusive mix of "It’ll All Work Out" for Elizabethtown. He also gave Crowe an opening quote to use in the first trailer for his TV show "Roadies."

"He was as down to earth as down to earth gets," says Crowe. "Even if you never shook his hand, you knew him, and it will always feel like we lost a friend, not just the standard-bearer for great songwriting, and a band that can pivot in any direction to deliver his songs."

In honor of their father’s unique relationship with his fans, both Adria and Annakim switched their private social media settings to public when Petty died. "His fans really came first for him in his career," says Adria. "That’s a lot of our job and our responsibility, to say, ‘We are here to still treat you well and to make things affordable and to give you access to all sorts of cool stuff he left behind.’”

Earlier this month, on the third anniversary of Petty's death, Adria posted a home video shot at Petty’s home studio at the family’s last Christmas together. Petty's strumming an acoustic guitar and singing "Crawling Back To You (one of Petty’s personal favorites) while Cammie, one of Adria’s and Annakim's younger cousins, plays the piano. In the caption, Adria writes that as soon as Petty heard Cammie playing the song, he took everyone into his studio to sing along and encourage her. The caption ends with, "I miss you too much every day, dad." On that same day, Annakim posted a selfie, captioned, "This was me a month after my dad died I feel greatful [sic] to feel alive again." 

Hundreds of Petty fans responded to the sisters’ posts. "His music has made many of us feel alive," wrote one fan while another wrote, "I've loved your dad's music since I was 10 yrs old. I'm 52 now. Was lucky to see him in concert about 19 times. Always the best and most memorable shows. Crying now...still hurts so much."

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As to the possibility of a future Wildflowers & All The Rest tour, Campbell, who toured with Fleetwood Mac for a year and a half and has since been focused on his band The Dirty Knobs, becomes emotional at the thought of moving forward without Petty. "I’ll tell you how I feel about it," he says. "I don’t know how many stages of grief there are but I’m still in probably stage four or whatever it is. I don’t ‘feel emotionally comfortable with having all the Heartbreakers in a room and going ‘one, two, three, four’ and playing without Tom there. It’s a little too painful, but I’m not opposed to the idea only because this was something Tom really wanted to do. I would remain open to the idea when our grief settles to do what he would have wanted, and maybe get the band back together with some singers and learn the songs and do that Wildflowers tour in his honor." 

After a pause, Campbell says, "I need more time. It’s such a huge loss. He was my best friend for 50 years. I’ll probably never get over it completely and I am doing well but for something that close to Tom’s energy and soul, I need to be a little stronger to take that on."

In the meantime, Adria says she's currently in discussions with a director about a Wildflowers documentary, and that there will definitely be more Tom Petty music to come. "We have a big beautiful archive,” she says, “We’re just going to take our time with it and work on this one for the time being and then sit down and think about what should happen next."

"It's hard. And it's still hard": The Heartbreakers Keyboardist Benmont Tench On Life After Tom Petty

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The Flaming Lips in 2020

The Flaming Lips in 2020

Photo: George Salisbury

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Wayne Coyne Talks Flaming Lips' New Album wayne-coyne-talks-flaming-lips-new-album-american-head-kacey-musgraves-miley-cyrus

Wayne Coyne Talks Flaming Lips' New Album 'American Head,' Kacey Musgraves & Pool Parties At Miley Cyrus' House

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The frontman dives deep into the Lips' new album and its trippy Tom Petty inspiration, the 25th anniversary of 'Clouds Taste Metallic,' the year of the space bubble and much more
Ana Monroy Yglesias
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Sep 10, 2020 - 1:01 pm

When Oklahoma City alt-rock oddballs The Flaming Lips put out their debut LP, Hear It Is, in 1986, it's unlikely that anyone involved would've imagined they'd be a major, GRAMMY-winning act releasing their 16th studio album 34 years later. And when lead singer Wayne Coyne first performed in his space bubble at Coachella 2004, there's no way he could've known that, 16 years later, said spherical orbs would look a lot less silly during an unprecedented health pandemic. But the lived experience of 2020 isn't really what any of us had on our vision boards—and yet here we are.

If anyone is primed to help guide us safely to the end of this absurd year, our bets are on Coyne and the Flaming Lips. Luckily, their latest technicolored dreamscape, American Head, drops tomorrow, Sept. 11. Its 13 tracks are a trip through the band's latest alternate universe, specifically a fantastical daydream imagining a "lost" Tom Petty album he and his band might have made after a wild drug detour in Oklahoma in the '70s. "Space Cowboy" Kacey Musgraves and frequent collaborator Particle Kid help add extra doses of magic to the story and bring it to life. As the Lips music so often does—with shimmer and effortlessness, nonetheless—tales of bad trips, longing, death and escape take on a playful, effervescent and even comforting tone.

Ahead of the new album, we caught up with the loveable frontman, who takes us deep into the wild daydream that inspired it, the creative process and recruiting Musgraves, who offers haunting vocals on three tracks. He also talks collaborating with Miley Cyrus, accidently predicting 2020 would be the year of the space bubble and the "wonderful" creative chaos he now hears on Clouds Taste Metallic. Read on for more, and enjoy the ride!

Revisit The Flaming Lips' 'Clouds Taste Metallic'

I want to start with American Head. In the press release, you talk about the vision you and Steven Drozd had that sort of sparked the album, where you imagined Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on this mythical drug trip that involved your older brothers in Tulsa in the '70s. It's hard to not giggle as I say this-

I'm wearing a Tom Petty concert shirt right now. Well, before they were Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, they traveled from Gainesville, Florida, trying to make their way out to L.A., but the producer sort of halted them and said, "Hey, meet me in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Let's do a little bit of recording there before." I suppose it was his idea, before they got corrupted by all the drugs and wild women in L.A., or something like that. But what he didn't know is that my older brothers, especially in 1973, 1974, were dealing all kinds of crazy drugs and knew all kinds of crazy drug dealers and bikers and freaks. They could have easily ran into my older brothers if they spent a couple of weeks in Tulsa recording way back then.           

Now, there's no proof of this. This is all speculation turned alternative-history-fantasy, but it did get my mind going. I mean the dilemma is if I ask my oldest brother who's 68 or something now, he would want to help me. If he thought it would be better if he met Tom Petty, he would be very much like, "Yeah, I think I did. It was great." So I never really confronted him about it because I know he would want to help me no matter what the cause was, and the truth would get to be second to helping me.

But it did help Steven and I gravitate towards an identity—a sound, a mood and a feeling and all that—that we know is a fantasy. But even if you create it yourself, some sort of direction to go in is always helpful. I mean, whenever I work with people where I'm not the director, I always say, "Tell me what to do. I'll gladly do whatever you tell me to do, because it helps me." So we kind of do that with ourselves, give ourselves a goal, a direction and see how that works.

And so, once you had that fantasy daydream vision, how did that develop into the album and the different storylines in the songs?

Well, I mean, you got to have songs. Without songs, we're all just kind of floating around in the process. We a couple of these songs, including "Mother I've Taken LSD" and "Dinosaurs On the Mountain," that were already in a longing kind of nostalgic vein, which we do a lot. I think we were just looking for some excuse to do more of that, which is always a bummer. You don't know if you should you be reinventing every molecular thing, reinventing the wheel every time, or just get a good vibe going and try to capture eight or nine of these feelings within this vibe. That's our greatest dilemma, when you don't know which way to go.

I think once we got this idea that we would be making this "lost" Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album, that let us feel like, "Oh, it's going to be an album. It's going to be like eight or nine songs in this vein." And we ever really tried to sound like Tom Petty, but in a mode of singer/songwriter with ordinary backing group, great songwriting, so that would be our idea for this record. It would be more singer/songwriter with cool ensemble behind him, which we're really not. Steven and I oftentimes are just the two of us recording and just making everything up. Rarely is there really an ensemble playing and recording. I mean, we do that sometimes, but not very often, so it's just us sort of making up a scenario.

The album opens with "Will You Return / When You Come Down"—how do you feel like this track sets the tone for the rest of the album? And was this one of the first songs you worked on?

I think we were waiting on like a song like this to happen. Steven's had that little refrain that starts the song for a couple of years now. We knew there was some magic in it, so we didn't want to mess with that, but we thought, "We have to turn this into a song. What are we going to do here?" We just kept waiting and waiting until we knew what we could sing about.

I think what helped is that Steven and I've been doing this podcast called "The Sorcerer's Orphan" for a couple of years now. We try to tackle one song per episode, which is about 45 minutes, and we want to fill it up with cool stuff. We talk about stuff like, "What did you mean by that? Why did you do this? And why would you do that?" Since it's just the two of us, we would talk about in-depth things that we probably know a little bit about, but wouldn't have gotten as far.

He could say something like, "Well, I was playing with my dad, and I remember when my mother died." In casual conversation, you don't keep going but in the show I'd ask, "Well, man, how did you feel about that? And how could you just continue the next day?" Or something of that ilk. And you get deeper and deeper into it, because you're looking for something to put into the podcast. I think the byproduct of that is that we really started to figure out a lot of why we are so much alike and why we like each other and why our songwriting works.

I think all that was leading up to us being able to do an album where we talked about the way we feel about it. On "Will You Return / When You Come Down"—Steven wouldn't say this—but for me it feels like he is in a sense talking to his dead relatives. I don't think he really is. We don't really write songs like that. But I interpret it as him somehow having a little bit of survivor's guilt in the same way that I do, about when people died, and when things would happen to my brothers and their friends when I was younger. Steven and I didn't want to be like our brothers—even though we were really exactly like them—because we wanted to pursue doing music and art, and life. We didn't really want to just take drugs and go to jail. I mean, that's what scared us.

For the longest time we wouldn't admit that or write a song about that or even want to think that. But now that we're both older, there's a way of sort of admitting that about ourselves or being proud of it or ashamed of it or whatever it is. We thought, "Well, if we try to put it into a song, no matter what it is that you're saying, that always makes it kind of beautiful." I think that's one of the things that art does for the person that's creating it. You sort of set your things into this beautiful thing.

 "We thought, 'Well, if we try to put it into a song, no matter what it is that you're saying, that always makes it kind of beautiful.'"

I think in that way, we were hoping for just a really great, emotional, melodic, rollicking kind of song. And this was towards the very end of [working on] the record. We'd already done a lot of songs. 13 songs on an album is a lot of songs for us. And we had all this stuff up and running, and we just got lucky. And then this two-hour session we did with an engineer here at my house was just blammo. We put that together in just a couple of hours. And when we presented it to Dave Fridmann, our [long-time] finishing producer guy, he was just like, "Oh, man, this sums it all up." You don't really know that until someone outside listens to it.

I think that's what we were trying to do. We wanted something that was simple, but carried emotion and carried some epic-ness and some secret story to it. But doesn't every songwriter? Everybody that writes anything says, "I hope what we write is f***ing cool and not stupid, like I think I am." And that was one part of American Head. We were determined to somehow say this thing.

Do you know the documentary maker Ken Burns? We love everything he does, and he is the quintessential American documentary maker. We thought, "If Ken Burns approached us about making a documentary about The Flaming Lips—which he's not—what would that music sort of sound like?" Because his take on the American past and the American life or whatever, it's almost religious sounding, even though it's really not. It's based in some kind of gospel vibe, but it is epic and biblical without being religious. And so, it's a hard vibe to catch accidentally. You kind of have to be in a mode. For me, those strings that kind of erupt out of the guitar solo at the end of "Will You Return / When You Come Down," is that epic American life that though it's gone, lives on forever.

What was the flow of working on the songs for the album?

For us, we still think of albums as being the first song to the last song. For me, I almost always listen to the first song, all the way through an album. It's like making a movie or anything, you want the beginning to be really, really great and special, so people don't just shut it off. You want a good 15, 16 minutes of, "Man, I'm into that."

So, even though "Will You Return / When You Come Down" was almost the last song that we came up with, it ended up being the first [on the album]. And then the second song ["Watching the Lightbugs Glow"] is a track that we wrote knowing that Kacey Musgraves was going to be the voice of it. Once she agreed to do a couple of tracks on the album, we made this track figuring the night that we got together we'd have a few things prepared. If the first thing went well, we'd get to the second thing and maybe third thing. So that would've been the third song we did with her.

I think Steven wrote it in the tone of what Kacey's voice would do and he was right. When she was doing it, you could hear her little inflections. And Steven and I looked at her, "Man, that's exactly what we were hoping would happen—in a good way."

So you put these things together just because you want the listener to kind of be like, "Oh, man, that's easy listening." I always say, I want it to be easy for people to feel what's going on and not make it too difficult, especially when we're singing songs about your mother being dead or your brother dying of a drug overdose.

For me, it's not a story at all if it's not warm and loving and regretful and mournful. I mean, no one wants to hear a story about people they don't care about. So once you start caring and loving people, the music sometimes is so comforting as though it allows you to tell any deep, horrible story that you can or want to, and you feel like you're in good hands.

Swaddling them with the sound, so the story is not so hard.

I wish I'd said swaddling. Yeah, exactly that.

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Watch: Kacey Musgraves On 'Golden Hour,' "Space Cowboy," Katy Perry & More

I feel that. I want to talk more about Kacey's contributions to the album because, like you said, they just fit so well. I love her backing vocals on "Watching the Lightbugs Glow" and "Flowers Of Neptune 6," where she sounds kind of like an alien goddess. What was it like working with her on this project and how did the collaboration happen?

We knew that she was a fan and we were looking for an excuse to approach her. You never really know what people are like or will say. You always fear the worst. She covered our song, "Do You Realize" at her Bonnaroo show last summer. I had a lot of people text me that were there and said, "Hey, she just did your song. It was great. I can't believe it." Once she did that, we thought, "Well, we could probably approach her and at least she would be nice about it." But you kind of have to come up with the songs to present to her. You have to work in this void of, "I hope this all works."

The first one we did with her was "Flowers Of Neptune 6," which she really liked. We already knew we were going to do that one. After, that's when we made "Watching the Lightbugs Glow." And then out of just sheer dumb luck and timing, the "God and the Policeman" track happened right before we went to see her. It was very short before we added Kacey into it as a duet. We elongated the song, and Steven did another Kacey-type of demo so she could hear it. She immediately loved it, like, "That's the one." I said, "If it goes well, we'll try to get to other ones." And she agreed.

You're trying to make it as easy as possible for someone to do something really great. The way we approach it is we have the song and all the parts, and you can do a stylistic thing that you want with them, but you don't have to worry about making up something. All you got to do is show up and as long as the recording equipment works, it's probably going to be pretty good.

It was quite magical when she did it. I always worry that's not going to happen. Even when it's happening, I can't quite get out of the mode of worrying that it's not going to happen, up until the point where people have it in their hands.

But there were moments when she was doing it, I felt quite good about it. Like, "Oh, man, we really did it." She was really the only person we were trying to get. I mean, there's lots of people that we love, don't get me wrong, but for this particular album, she was the only one. I think if we wouldn't have gotten her, we probably wouldn't have anybody on it. What a great moment of luck.

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Listening to the album, her voice fits so naturally with it. It's a collaboration where you go, "Wait, have you guys worked together before?"

We've done lots of collaborations with people, but none, I don't think, that were as crafted for that other person. Obviously, we've worked with Miley Cyrus, and a lot of those songs were written for her. I don't think she knew that we were writing them for her. In this way, Kacey knew in advance, "Here's what we're going to do."

With Miley, a lot of times we would have the stuff and she would record for 20 minutes in between a bunch of other weird shit she's doing. And that would be the song. You don't really know what's going to happen. I think with Miley, we always thought, "Well, this is fine, but we'll get another couple of sessions out of her." And then the next time we'd get together, we'd do something completely different, and it would go another way. We always sort of felt like, "Well, one of these days we'll get all this stuff together and it'll be great." Before we could do that, it [2015's Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz] was all put out, which I love. I think that's the great fun about working with other people, they have their own trip.

But with Kacey, the song was pretty much finished, we just needed to get her on it. So that felt really good. She's real normal and sweet and easy and all that. Miley is normal and sweet and easy, but we were recording most of her singing at her house. By the time we would all show up, a lot of times—I mean, it's quite a long time ago now, but back in 2014—there would be a raging pool party going, and you'd have to remind her at 4:00 a.m., "We still have to do the singing, because two of these guys are flying out in an hour, and we have to get this done." It would be fun, but it would be a bit of a challenge.

In the music video for "Will You Return / When We Come Down" you guys are performing in the same room but separated by filmy dividers, and then in "Dinosaurs on the Mountain," you're performing in your bubbles. It's wild how it feels very 2020 now.

Well, that was what we wanted. The one where we're separated, part of that we just did because we knew there were going to be a few more people there than usual, and we did really want to be safe. Derek [Brown], our guitar player/keyboard player, he's got three young girls. And his wife paints people's faces, so she's always out in the public, warily, with masks and taking precaution. We're always trying to be aware of everybody's situation, because not everybody is in lockdown as much as [my wife] Katie and I are. We've always been kind of in lockdown at our house.

For the second video, it was more like, "Well, we're going to do this anyway." [The bubbles] ended up looking really marvelous in the video, so we sort of exaggerated it. I made a kind of a commentary cartoon where I drew the Flaming Lips in 2019 and I'm the only one in the space bubble on stage, and the Flaming Lips 2020, with everybody on stage and in the audience in a space bubble. I drew this on the very first day of the lockdown here, I think it was March 15th.

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I just drew it like, "Isn't this funny?" Not really funny, but not thinking this will become true or anything. And little while after that, the guy who books musicians on the Stephen Colbert show got ahold of me. We were talking about doing at-home concerts, which none of us really knew what those were. They were still sort of conceptualizing it and he hinted that they wanted to see if I could do this space bubble performance like that [cartoon]. I said, "I do want to do that, but you have to help me because I need more of the space bubbles."

In the beginning, I don't think any of us thought it was going to last more than a month or something, really. That was my feeling. Pete and I, the talent buyer, conceded that if the bubbles take too long to get in, this thing will be over and it won't really be relevant. It aired at the beginning of June, which, by now, seems like kind of the beginning of the whole thing, even though we thought it would be over by then. It's happened in real-time. There was no plan. None of it was opportunistic. It was just, "Well, let's start to do this and see."

But I have to say, it is true, it is absolutely safe in that way. Once you get in the bubble, there is a lot of air in there. It's not like you get trapped and you're going to suffocate. We've done plenty of tests with three people in those bubbles for an hour, and plenty of air. It does get kind of hot and stinky. [Laughs.] There's no way anybody could know those things about it except for us because we're the only ones that do it. All of that was absurd to us too. As it would happen, it would start to be like, "This is really going to happen. This is really absurd and really true."

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How has the quarantine affected the band? Especially as you're about to release an album and, like you said, having to figure out at-home shows and that sort of thing?

In the beginning, this record was supposed to come out in May or June. When this happened in March, luckily, it wasn't really up to us. Some of the pressing plants and those sorts of things shut down even before we shut down, and we already knew that's going to be a delay, and we accepted that. And in the beginning, we didn't really want to promote anything. We felt embarrassed to be like, "Hey, look at us. We have a record. I know your grandmother's dying, but…" We didn't do any of that. We hated that.

Then after a couple of months, we would begin to look at things that weren't just the news. We would start to watch stuff on Netflix or whatever and be very glad there was some ridiculous entertainment that took you in another way, and then you can go back to the news. We were also very glad about there being really great emotional things. We didn't want to just be swept away in some stupid fantasy. We liked that there was cool shit happening still. So by the end of May into June, we were glad we had something to do, and that we can do the way the Flaming Lips have always worked for the past almost 20 years. We record at our house. We go to New York when Dave produces us as a finishing thing. We just spent a lot of time there. But a lot of it, we're doing here at our house and we make videos and all that sort of stuff here anyway. A lot of it's always been done with just a few people, never with big productions. All of that was all still pretty easy, and none of us got sick. We would meet and shoot videos, or I'd shoot a video by myself with just one or two crew guys. All that was pretty normal.

And at the beginning of the pandemic—I don't like to say it because it's horrible for everybody—we were relieved that we didn't have anywhere to go. No one wanted us to go anywhere, there weren't any shows to go to, or art openings or birthday parties to go to. Which we're very usually open to, we say yes to everything and we almost always regret it. We end up on a Saturday night going to two birthday parties, an art opening, a concert, then someone's throwing a party later that night. We just do too much. I think for the first time, during the beginning of the pandemic, we realized the value of time. You have to have the time to do things because otherwise there's just flashes coming at you, and you're doing the best you can. For us, that was great. I have a painting studio here and the recording studio. All of these things I can just do and not really feel like I have to make time for it. Although, in the beginning, you didn't know if you're going to look outside and there's going to be bodies piling up in the street. But after a while, it didn't seem like it was going to be that way.

[Without COVID-19] we would still be traveling all around the world playing shows even now, from March to Halloween, playing festivals all summer. And though it's fun and amazing, and you make tons of friends and have great times and make tons of money, it's a mile a minute. There's never even time to think about anything. Katie and I have been very glad to be with our little boy. He turned a year old in June. So for us, it's been amazing. But there's plenty of people out there that don't have any work and their family is sick, and it's horrible.

It's definitely been a moment to slow down, which is not standard for most American lifestyles, to just be at home and chilling.

Yeah. I don't know if we realized that we were fast. You do spend a lot of times at sound checks and airports. It's not dead time. To me, everything you do can be amazing if it can be done with love. But you do get tired and you only have so much energy and there's only so many hours in the day. We were glad to be going to sleep at 9:00 at night. It was wonderful.

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Do you miss performing live? Obviously, the band is super loved for your shows and that energy and colorfulness you bring on stage. Do you feel like there is a space or a void when you're not sharing your music in that way?

Well, the answer is no. But if everybody else was doing it and we weren't, I think would feel like, "Man, I want to be part of this thing." The reason we're not doing it relieves us from any of that, because it's like, "Well, we can't do it, and it would make people sick, and it's just not right." But none of us are those type of performers that get up at a party and sing and dance. We're not performers, really. I know we perform. And we love what we do! In our minds, we're doing a very specific thing. We're providing this moment for Flaming Lips fans that we get to sing these songs to them while doing some crazy, absurd, over-the top-shit. It's not like I want to go and perform at a club downtown. We just don't have that desire. We love doing our thing, and we love doing it with our audience. But, no.

We're introverts. We like making art and we love the isolation of that. I think we've made the Flaming Lips shows not necessarily even about us. We've made it about the lights and the unicorns and the space bubble and, "Come join us, it'll be great!" We would never say, "Come watch us and look at us." I know it is the same thing, but for us, we're going out there and presenting a big show. We're not presenting us as the show. To me, that would be the difference between being Rihanna or being the Flaming Lips. She's like, "I'm Rihanna. They're coming to watch me." And I'd be like, " I'm Wayne in the Flaming Lips. They're coming to listen to the Flaming Lips while we do crazy shit." It's not about me.

We just don't have that confidence or that sort of extrovert vibe. I know it could look like that, and that's why I don't really worry about it, because they can really look to be exactly the same thing. We never get done with a show and go, "Motherf***ers, yeah!" We're just so relieved that it went well, nobody got hurt, and it just seemed like everybody loved it. I mean, it's a wonderful relief that they sang along with us and they loved the songs and it worked. It's like when the plane lands after you've flown to Australia for 18 hours; "Yes! We didn't crash and we didn't suffocate or get diarrhea."

The seventh Flaming Lips album, Clouds Taste Metallic, turns 25 in September. What do you hear and feel now when you listen back to that album?

Well, I think we celebrated it at 10 years and 20, so, I mean, we've revisited it. And we love all of our records. We never are like, "Ugh, let's not talk about that." We love all of them. And especially that time, as we had our crazy guitarist Ronald Jones, that's really probably the peak of his stuff he did. Steven and I made great efforts to have him really shine on that album. I mean, we thought he was going to shine on all of our albums after that, we didn't know he was going to leave. But Ronald was very shy—I mean, we're introverts, but he was absolutely an introvert.

When we say that we like our music, I am a part of it, but a lot of it's not me, anyway. A lot of it is the group and the other players and songwriters. I'm not saying, "I love me!" I'm just saying I love that whole thing that happened, and Dave Fridmann's production, and all that.

The album really does end a period of the Flaming Lips. It's the marker that says, "We used to be a rock group." We all played guitars and they were loud and rockin'. We loved that but we were looking for a way out. We had been doing that since 1982, so by then, it was a long, long time. And I think we were relieved that it wasn't all that successful, because it led us to sort of say, "Well, let's do something else." As soon as Ronald left, Steven and I started just to go full throttle this other way, into making more music that wasn't just loud guitars and stuff. Which we probably would have done anyway. I think Ronald would have loved that.

But at the time, he had a really great, creative surge, and we were very encouraging and wanting that. So that record, to me, is us being a great, great songwriting group and a great recording group for him, to play his crazy shit over. I'll always be grateful for that because no one plays like him. No one's mind was like his. And he doesn't do recordings on his own. He's such a freak. The only way he would record would be if some determined, driven person like me says, "Well, we're going to do this." Because it would be a lot of stops and starts and all that.

So for me, it's wonderful. I love that record. It's got great songs, but it's mostly got Steven and Ronald—their playing is just, man, it still blows our minds. Part of us, after that, we didn't even really want to continue to play guitars because Ronald became the sound. He became the guitar player. And once he left, it was just kind of such a loss of character that we were like, "Well, we'll just do something else."

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And what space was the band in when you were working on Clouds Taste Metallic?

Well, the previous record came out in 1993, but it wasn't really successful until 1994 and 1995. So we had played lots and lots of shows. Back then, we would play a couple of hundred shows a year. And they would not be glamorous, easy shows. There'd be a lot of struggles and a lot of stress. And Ronald didn't like that. Steven and I were quite used to all that by then, but he didn't like that very much, and you could tell. I felt bad for him because I was like, "We kind of have to do this. This is how we're going to be able to be successful and do what we want." But I could tell it was wearing him out. We kept thinking it would stop, anyway, and we'd have time.

And it really didn't stop, and so we started to make the record, Clouds Taste Metallic, while we're still playing and playing and playing. I could tell that was hard on him, but I didn't really think about it that much. You're kind of caught up in your own thing and you're just going out and doing it. We didn't really sit down with psychiatrists and see how each other were doing. And a lot of what was happening to us was great. People were liking us. We were playing great shows, coming up with some great songs.

So [Clouds Taste Metallic] is all that. I think people sometimes make their best records when there is a little bit of chaos going on. That's why I'm always making so many things. I kind of like the energy of, "It's just another f***ing thing. Let's do it. Who cares?" I think everything gets a little bit ruined if it's too important, in music and art, anyway. It's not that way if it's your baby's brain surgery. Stop everything. Do that. But making music and dumb art, it's better that it's just a flow of you believing in something.

We loved it. But I do think it would have been frustrating if we didn't move on from that. In that time, Steven was just the drummer. And we talked about it a lot, he didn't want to just be the drummer. He wanted to sing. He wanted to play guitar. And I would just say, "We should just f***ing do it. Let's change the way the group is." And then when Ronald left, it was all these things that we thought about, suddenly, we were free to do them. Free to do whatever. And so it was exhilarating.

So when I listen to the record now, I hear all that. I don't really even feel like it's a group breaking apart. The Flaming Lips have gone on—25 years later, we're still here. I never think about that much. There are times when I think maybe this would be the last record that we get to make where get to have Dave Fridmann or Steven or whatever. But I wasn't thinking that then. I thought, "Oh, we're just getting started."

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