Bag Full Of Thoughts

Album: The Flaming Lips (1984)
Play Video

Songfacts®:

  • The Flaming Lips released their first EP in 1984 with the hypnotic "Bag Full Of Thoughts" as its lead track. At the time, the lineup was Mark Coyne on lead vocals, his brother Wayne Coyne on guitar, Michael Ivins on bass, and Richard English on drums. Wayne, who took over as frontman the following year, described the tune in the book Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma's Fabulous Flaming Lips: "It was this sludgy, trippy song that we thought of as early Joy Division."
  • According to Wayne, the EP was an experimental effort by amateur musicians who didn't really know what they were doing. He told Uncut in 2008: "I hear this now and it sounds so demented. It's kind of druggy, kind of punk rock and it's kind of psychedelic. We don't even play in the right key sometimes and we're out of tune. But we do it with such a 'Who cares...' attitude, and it's wonderful. We felt like that would be the only record we made. We'd run into musicians and we thought, 'Wow, they're really musicians. They know what they're playing.' They would talk about chord structures and what key things are in on our own record and we'd be like, 'We have no idea what you're talking about.' But at the same time, that worried us. We were pretending that we were musicians and we knew what we were doing, but really we were just dorks that liked music. It's like suddenly being thrown on Top Chef and saying, 'Well, I just like eating in a restaurant, I don't like f--king cooking the food.' We felt like there's no way that this hoax could perpetuate itself much further than that. My brother Mark was in the band and at this time we were discovering that he didn't really like music and didn't like to sing, so we said, 'Why don't we get rid of this guy?' I think it surprised him that we asked him to quit, since it was his band."
  • This also appears on the compilation albums A Collection of Songs Representing an Enthusiasm for Recording...By Amateurs (1998), Finally The Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid (2002), and Scratching the Door: The First Recordings of the Flaming Lips (2018).
  • If you're getting a Nirvana vibe from this tune, it's because of the chord progression, which is similar to Nirvana's 1989 track "About A Girl."

Comments

Be the first to comment...

Editor's Picks

Phone Booth Songs

Phone Booth SongsSong Writing

Phone booths are nearly extinct, but they provided storylines for some of the most profound songs of the pre-cell phone era.

Chris Frantz of Talking Heads

Chris Frantz of Talking HeadsSongwriter Interviews

Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz on where the term "new wave" originated, the story of "Naive Melody," and why they never recorded another cover song after "Take Me To The River."

90s Metal

90s MetalFact or Fiction

Test your metal - Priest, Maiden, and Beavis and Butt-head show up in this one.

John Kay of Steppenwolf

John Kay of SteppenwolfSongwriter Interviews

Steppenwolf frontman John Kay talks about "Magic Carpet Ride," "Born To Be Wild," and what he values more than awards and accolades.

Stan Ridgway

Stan RidgwaySongwriter Interviews

Go beyond the Wall of Voodoo with this cinematic songwriter.

Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake & PalmerSongwriter Interviews

Greg talks about writing songs of "universal truth" for King Crimson and ELP, and tells us about his most memorable stage moment (it involves fireworks).