The Flaming Lips will release a vinyl album on Record Store Day (April 21), entitled, The Flaming Lips And Heady Fwends.
The record will include collaborations with Ke$ha, Bon Iver, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Prefuse 73, Tame Impala, Jim James, Nick Cave, Lightning Bolt, Yoko Ono, Neon Indian, Erykah Badu, New Fumes and Coldplay. Now, the first of these collaborations has been released online.
"Ashes in the Air" has Grammy winner Bon Iver stepping out of his "Holocene" days and into a very electric future -- one inhabited with "robot dogs."
On the track, Justin Vernon, otherwise known as Bon Iver, croons, "You and me / We thought we were so smart / We thought we could outrun them / But they had robot dogs."
In February, Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne tweeted details about the band's new collaborative double LP, including a handwritten tracklist. Not only did the Flaming Lips collaborate with these various artists, but Coyne has also revealed that he's been collecting their blood in his refrigerator.
“What I’m going to try to do -- and I’m collecting stuff for it as we speak -- is I’m going to try to make a record that has every person’s blood in the record,” Coyne told MTVHive. “I don’t have everybody’s blood just yet, but I collected quite a few vials of blood, and it’s actually sitting in my refrigerator as we speak.”
But what will The Flaming Lips mastermind do with the blood? Coyne told MTV that the record will come in picture disk form. “I’m going to try to take that same concept and put little bits of everybody’s blood in the middle of this record, like a glass specimen thing.”
And who will buy these special blood-stained editions? “Interested rich Flaming Lips people,” said Coyne.
Fans of The Flaming Lips shouldn't be that surprised by Coyne's decision to use human blood on this project, since in 2010, Coyne printed a copy of Flaming Lips poster art with his own blood.
The Flaming Lips And Heady Fwends will be released on vinyl on April 21.