The Flaming Lips – “All For The Life Of The City”

The Flaming Lips – “All For The Life Of The City”

Yesterday, the Flaming Lips released an exclusive Record Store Day LP, King’s Mouth: Music And Songs, limited to 4000 gold vinyl copies before its wide in July. They premiered its lead single, “All For The Life Of The City,” via Billboard. King’s Mouth is a concept album based on the band’s art installation of the same name. King’s Mouth launched in 2015 at Oklahoma City’s the Womb. Visitors experienced a seven-minute LED lights and visuals show inside of a giant head.

The album is about a king who dies while trying to save his subjects from an avalanche. “We started out with a half-hour’s worth of abstract musical, dynamic stuff, and that ended up being 10 minutes by the time we got to the first museum opening in Baltimore,” frontman Wayne Coyne tells Billboard. “Then everywhere we’d go people would think, ‘This is going to be an album…’ We didn’t plan it that way, but I think it became more and more apparent that it could be a record.”

Mick Jones of the Clash and Big Audio Dynamite narrates the project: “So we mailed (Jones) the text and everything — songs we hadn’t even written yet, just some outlines — and we didn’t really know what was going to happen, then about a month later it all came back, already recorded, and it was perfect.”

”This is the center of the story, the middle of the record where he’s celebrated, then he gets buried by the snow. At the very beginning it was a more sinister-sounding track; We still struggle with making it more fun,” Coyne says of lead single “All For the Life of the City.” Listen to it below.

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