For about a year, a rather unique musical friendship has been brewing between Miley Cyrus and Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips. They’ve played live shows and performed on television numerous times, like when they covered The Beatles on CONAN last summer. The pair even got matching tattoos. (So did Coyne’s wife, so as to make it slightly more weird.) But according to Billboard’s brief chat with The Flaming Lips’s frontman, there’s also an album in the works.
Coyne broke the news to Billboard on Friday:
Cyrus and The Lips are prepping a disc of seven songs that they wrote and recorded together during the last year. No release date has been set, but the tracks are nearly done; Coyne and Lips guitarist Steven Drozd are mixing them in their Oklahoma City studio. “She does the pop thing so great, so it still feels pop, but a slightly wiser, sadder, more true version,” Coyne says of the project. “Some of it reminds me of Pink Floyd and Portishead.”
Sure, this all seems really, really weird — matching tattoos or not. Then again, Cyrus and Coyne’s professional bond and its resulting friendship were bound to lead to this. Who didn’t think some kind of recorded collaboration wouldn’t result from all the touring and performing?
But Pink Floyd and Portishead? Hearing Cyrus belt out tunes akin to either of those two acts requires a bit of imaginative stretching. (Maybe some assorted re-colorings, too.) Plus there’s that moment when Coyne compares Cyrus with Beyoncé:
“Her studio is just a little room with a desk,” says Coyne, “and Miley was sitting there mixing. I was like, ‘I can’t picture Beyoncé doing this!’ It’s not a putdown of Beyoncé. I just don’t see her recording her own vocals and then EQ’ing it. It’s so punk rock!”
Unlike Beck, Coyne may or may not have walked himself right into this one. Have fun, Internet!
(Via Billboard)