The friendship of Miley Cyrus and The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne
During her most daring musical period, Miley Cyrus found an unlikely ally in The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne. The frontman had been the psychedelic poet laureate for alternative rock for three full decades when he and Cyrus became friends. It all started when Cyrus gave Coyne a shoutout on Twitter, calling him one of her favourite artists. Appropriately, things got weird from there.
“I tweeted her back my phone number and said: ‘Text me,’” Coyne told The Guardian in 2017. “Since then, we’ve texted each other every day. I’ll say: ‘What are you doing?’ and she’ll send me pictures of herself peeing. Sometimes it’s 1,000 times a day, sometimes it’s a couple of times a day, but we’re in each other’s lives.”
Apart from being friends, Coyne and Cyrus extended their relationship to music. In 2015, Cyrus released Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, an experimental album that diverged from her mainstream pop work of the past. Coyne and The Flaming Lips were the тιтular Dead Petz, with additional collaborations coming from Big DEan and Ariel Pink. Another artist who was around the sessions at the time was rapper A$AP Rocky.
“He’d just got a new set of gold teeth, braces things, and he was talking about taking acid,” Coyne claimed. “In between, Miley was whispering: ‘He’s never really taken acid. He’s just saying that because he wants to write music about taking acid.’ He would keep talking and she would go: ‘He doesn’t know anything about acid.’ She’d know. Cyrus has done acid plenty.”
Rocky would indeed release a song called ‘L$D’ a few months before Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz was released. Cyrus had previously appeared on the collaborative LP With a Little Help From My Fwends, a full-album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Cyrus performed on ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘A Day in the Life’, and at the time of the interview, Coyne said that another Dead Petz album was in production.
“She’s going to keep being a judge on The Voice, but I know she wants to make music at the same time,” Coyne claimed, referring to Cyrus’ brief stint as a coach on the American singing compeтιтion. “I’m thinking of a way we can make a record without her having to sit there for months and months. I think she likes it when it’s like: ‘You guys do some of the work, and then I get to come in and do something really cool.’”
That record never came to fruition, with Cyrus opting to record the country pop album Younger Now in 2017. The Flaming Lips and Cyrus haven’t collaborated since, but the door always seems open for another go-around. After all, once you’ve shared pictures of yourself peeing with someone, you’re bonded with them for life.
Check out ‘Dooo! It’ down below.
