Tag: The Flaming Lips

The Flaming Lips and Nell Smith drop video for ‘Red Right Hand’

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The Flaming Lips and 14-year-old musician Nell Smith have returned with cover of Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand.”

The cover comes from Smith and the band’s Nick Cave covers album, Where the Viaduct Looms, released back in November.

Backdropped with a psychedelic light screen, and with members of The Lips faded into the background, Smith takes center stage coupled with her beautifully-mature vocals and presence.

The performance, captured live on CBS, is the latest in a series of videos, including a stunning cover of Cave’s “Ship Song” dropped in November.

At the end of the performance for “Red Right Hand,” drummer Matthew Kirksey reveals a t-shirt which reads ‘Bad Seed.’

I hadn’t heard of Nick Cave but Wayne suggested that we should start with an album of his cover versionsNell Smith

Where the Viaduct Looms features nine Nick Cave covers performed by Smith and The Flaming Lips.

“I hadn’t heard of Nick Cave but Wayne suggested that we should start with an album of his cover versions, and then look at recording some of my own songs later,” Smith said about being asked to record with the band. “It was cool to listen and learn about Nick Cave and pick the songs we wanted to record.”

The record features “Red Right Hand,” plus previously released covers “The Ship Song” and “Girl in Amber,” among others.

The band and Smith first met at a Flaming Lips concert where Wayne Coyne offered the mic to Smith who was seated in the front. Apparently, Coyne heard something special in her voice.

Interesting, the album’s front cover referencing only “Nell” without even a mention of The Flaming Lips. View it and listen to the stream via Bandcamp.

14-year-old vocalist Nell Smith and Flaming Lips cover Nick Cave Classics

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When we first watched this new music video featuring 14-year-old Nell Smith fronting The Flaming Lips, we were blown away.

This amazingly talented teenager could just be a future sensation in the making.

The way Smith commands this spectacular cover of Nick Cave‘s “Ship Song” is so impressive and powerful for ‘a kid’ that it’s a rare thing to experience. But here she is.

Smith’s vocals are deeply touching and beyond her years as far as maturity. It’s no wonder that the band wanted to record with her.

Additionally, to take on such a classic track is ballsy enough for any vocalist. So, there’s that too. It’s such a fresh and personal take on Cave’s classic from the perspective of a young teen girl and thanks to the impeccable recording and production skills of the Lips.

How’d Smith and The Lips Meet?

Growing up in Canada, Smith regularly attended Lips’ concerts always wearing a parrot costume.

Three years ago, the story goes, Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne noticed Smith (then 11 years old) at a show in Calgary and sang a David Bowie cover to her and Smith sang right along with Coyne.

Through her father, Coyne and Smith maintained a long-distance friendship. Coyne encouraged her to learn the guitar and write her own songs.

smith-lips

A Cache of Cave Covers

Not long afterward, Smith and the Lips joined forces specifically to record a batch of Cave covers.

The result is the new album, Where the Viaduct Looms, set to drop November 26.

On his way to record with the band in Oklahoma in 2019, Coyne encouraged Smith to record vocal tracks of Cave songs and email them to him. The intrepid young singer did just that. Coyne and the band produced the final tracks resulting in nine altogether.

Earlier this year, Smith and the band released their first music video – a theatrical cover of Cave’s “Girl in Amber” with director Alex Hanson.

“Nell shows a remarkable understanding of the song, a sense of dispassion that is both beautiful and chilling. I just love it. I’m a fan” – Wayne Coyne

On his website, Coyne wrote: “This version of ‘Girl in Amber’ is just lovely, I was going to say Nell Smith inhabits the song, but that’s wrong, rather she vacates the song, in a way that I could never do,” he said. “I always found it difficult to step away from this particular song and sing it with its necessary remove, just got so twisted up in the words, I guess. Nell shows a remarkable understanding of the song, a sense of dispassion that is both beautiful and chilling. I just love it. I’m a fan.”

A Promising Future

As this new video/song proves, Smith is talented, knows it, and is determined to grow as an artist. It would not surprise us one bit if she were to start getting inquiries from A&Rs and label execs.

Hopefully, however, Smith will not sign any deal, and/or her parents won’t consent, in any form. Firstly, she’s only 13. Secondly, staying in school, of course, is priority one. Nevertheless, a recording or video here and there could be just the right formula, especially now that hundreds of thousands (eventually) – millions? – will see this video.

Even if no such numbers are achieved, the facts remain: a talented Flaming Lips teenage fan records an album of Cave covers with the actual Flaming Lips as the backing band.

Of course, leave it up to Coyne and the other Lips to be original, daring, and different, and more importantly, are good and have fun, well into their middle years.

The Flaming Lips’ ‘The Soft Bulletin Companion’

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The Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin was a watershed moment for the Oklahoma City rock band. Released in 1999, it was a moment when the group essentially started all over again with something wholly new as they reacted to the death of Wayne Coyne’s father, as well as other deaths of loved ones experienced by longtime guitarist and keyboardist Steven Drozd. Dubbed by a few bold critics at the time as the Pet Sounds of the ’90s, their ninth studio record started to unlock a whole new level of festival audience far beyond what came before for the psychedelic weirdos from the Sooner State.

Frontman Wayne Coyne has often referred to rare Flaming Lips hits during past interviews as gifts from the “gods of music.” Concert staples such as “Do You Realize??” or the title track off 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots are moments when the gods bent down and tapped the band on the shoulder, said it was time, and rewarded the good work they had set up previously with the best tracks on The Soft Bulletin only three years before (“Race for the Prize” and “Waiting for a Superman”).

It’s abundantly clear that The Soft Bulletin Companion is a compilation of curios for diehard fans of a monumental album from early in the band’s nearly 40 years of existence. There are odd experiments, melodic dead ends, plenty of outtakes, prototype mixes, and everything in between on this 13-song collection originally intended by the band’s manager and Warner Bros. as a promo-only CD to pair alongside The Soft Bulletin. It’s seen new life this year during Record Store Day, and longtime fans of the band will take note of hearing rarities like the fuzzed, psychedelic rocker “The Captain,” which are a welcome sight on vinyl after years of being hard to find.

Also, it’s nice to hear a couple stereo versions of tracks from the endlessly curious 1997 experimental release Zaireeka (which, infamously, was ideally played from four separate CDs blasted in unison from different car sound systems). In other corners of the release, a Lips Mix of The Soft Bulletin’s “Buggin’” and an early mix of “The Spiderbite Song” both fall far short of the quality heard on the original Soft Bulletin classics.

The Soft Bulletin Companion’s early versions of “Slow Motion”and “Little Hands” are also not too bad, and remind you of the band’s songwriting chops during the period, with Coyne directing the band on the rough mix of the latter track. The Soft Bulletin still stands as a classic where the best of ’90s experimental rock and pop collided, and its companion piece does sit fairly comfortably in its long shadow. Seeking this one out as a chaser to another long sip on the Soft Bulletin vibe is the best way to experience it.