“I picked this Tom Jones song because for The Flaming Lips I sometimes do try to wonder ‘How did we get the way we got?’ My mother absolutely loved Tom Jones and he was quite popular in the late ‘60s. He had his own television show [This Is Tom Jones] and quite a few hits that were on the radio.

“He really had that dramatic, emotional thing in his best records. As he went along, the songs probably got more hokey or jokey, but on those early records it was the only emotional music that I've ever really heard like that. I'm sure there are a lot of singers doing that sort of over-the-top production, but at the time he was the only one that I really knew of. My mother would play his records all the time and we only had a few records at the house. A couple of them would be Tom Jones records and the rest were Beatles records, and 45’s that my older brothers and older sister would buy of songs they heard on the radio.

“I remember playing the Tom Jones album [13 Smash Hits]. “I Know” is a Perry Como cover and not a popular song of his, but it's popular enough that you can Google it and download it easily. It's one of his gospel type songs, and he's got four or five songs written by the same songwriters [Carl Stutz and Edith Lindeman] that have the same kind of hooks and arrangement.

“It was on the A-Side of the record, and back then we were just little kids and we would literally play an album a hundred times a day on the shittiest little record player you could get. It was from the TG&Y store and it was just the speaker, everything else was right inside the enclosed plastic. It started off as a black, shiny record and we played it until it was so scratched up that it went grey.

“When my mother died in 2004, I took charge of the music we’d play at her funeral. I knew this one Tom Jones song and my brothers and sisters all zoned in like, ‘I remember her loving that song.’ I went to search for the song and I found it on CD, but part of me was ‘This doesn't seem like the same song.’ You get used to there being a lot of different versions and mixes of songs out there, but I was slightly perplexed and then I realised that without all the scratches and all this distorted murk of us playing this record 10,000 times, the song was there, but it didn't have all this stuff that is embedded in the memory that I have of the song.

“I dug out the record my mother had, we played it on a turntable and recorded it. When it played in the ceremony, you started to hear the crackles and this ghostly, otherworldly version of this really emotional Tom Jones song. I thought, ‘That's the way I know it.’ When I hear it now, even searching for it getting ready to talk to you, I heard it again. I was like, ‘Oh yeah, nice song, but it's missing something." All these little nuances and ‘Listening is just a motherfucker!’ It doesn't discern what's a drum, what's a voice, what's the wind, what's a car door. It just becomes part of you trying to understand this thing. I still love that song, and when I hear it I think ‘I’ve gotta put some distortion on’ and we've done that with some of our records. We wanted to be emotional, but we don't want it to be hi-fi emotional.

“It's not unique to me, but I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way about hearing music through a different filter and it has a different effect on you. I remember a time when I was pumping gas, right when these convenience stores were starting to install speakers out there when you're pumping gas. I think it was Bobby Goldsboro song that I knew from way back in the day and it was through one of these really battered, tinny gas station speakers. I stood there pumping the gas and I was lost. I just drifted into this other world.

"Then the ‘BAM’ of the pump shutting off when it gets full goes and I remember thinking ‘Wow, here I am.’ Is it the song doing that, is it this mood or what was it? Or maybe it was the gas fumes and all that combined. I don't know, but certainly there is magic in that otherworldly context. In the way that I've heard the Tom Jones song, but I don't know if it has the same power without all the other stuff attached to it.”

“I don't know why we had this fuckin’ Steppenwolf album, but it was the Steppenwolf Live album. We had The Beatles, Tom Jones, and this one weird ass live Steppenwolf record. It had the song, “The Pusher” on it and it's a live version, completely distorted and completely fucked up

“We weren't allowed to play it and sing it while our parents weren't home, but when they’d go to the grocery store, we would put on “The Pusher” and play it a hundred times before they got home, because we could sing the lyric, "God damn the pusher man." It was just this elation of being able to say, ‘God damn,’ even though my Dad said every cuss word you could learn. But if we said it, especially before we were 10 years old, he would get pretty mad at you. So there was some freedom in finally being able to sing this. It was ‘Hey, well, they're a group. We're just singing what they're saying.’

“At the time we wouldn't have been aware that it was an anti-drug song or not. It's a very confusing song. It sounds so fucked up, especially that live version, you wouldn't even want to listen to it if you weren't on drugs. Then part of it was ‘What's a pusher man?’ Even though we're growing up in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s when this term was around, I never heard anybody use it. Part of it was it was just a cool-sounding song, and it got into my vocabulary of The Beatles with a little bit of Tom Jones, and this little bit of fucking Steppenwolf.

“I see now that if I was to break down some elements of The Flaming Lips music, it's really just a couple of these elements that are left over from some deep, deep part of my mind, when I was becoming aware of music. I don't have access to it as a memory, it's only there in the background.

"Music has a way of opening up these chemicals in your brain and one will flow into the other. Only when music is playing though, if you were to be hypnotised by a therapist, I don't think anybody could retrieve these types of memories the way that music can. When music plays, suddenly you're flooded. You don't know what you're flooded with, but you can feel what you're flooded with and something is familiar about this flood of emotion.

“I actually saw Steppenwolf. It probably wasn't the original guys, but I think the main singer was still there. It wasn't in their heyday, it was the ‘70s. I quite liked it, but I hadn't seen that many concerts by then. They didn't do “The Pusher”, I remember standing on the chair at the end saying, "Well, you got to do The fuckin’ Pusher. You're going to come all the way to Oklahoma and not do “The Pusher?!’”

“I have a Psychedelic Furs song on here and I've got a Donovan song on here. This is the quagmire that’s hard to understand nowadays, because music is so easy and so available. It's virtually free to everybody, but back in the early ‘80s you really only listened to the records that you had or your friends owned. It wasn't like everybody had a thousand records like you do now. You have access to every album that was ever fucking made now.

“I had Donovan's Greatest Hits and The Psychedelic Furs’ first few albums. I remember not having any idea of what The Psychedelic Furs were about, now you can read anything you want about anybody at any time and can find out their whole history, but I didn’t know that much about them. I thought ‘What a weird name?’ and they seemed to come from some sort of punk rock British thing, but they called themselves The Psychedelic Furs. They had fucking cool lyrics and a cool mood. People thought it was cool that they were psychedelic because they were called The Psychedelic Furs

“Then I would listen to Donovan's Greatest Hits, I think I had that record left over from my older sister and I would play it all the time. I really connected this folky Donovan song with the idea of psychedelic and Psychedelic Furs and all that. I don't know why, I only had a few records. I remember playing those two together and people thinking, ‘What are you doing?’

““Love My Way” is not a simple or direct song. You don't know what the fuck he’s talking about. I know Richard Butler, the singer, now and I still ask him, ‘What are you talking about on that?’ It's so weird, but so simple. By the early ‘80s, The Flaming Lips are starting to become a band and by 1983 this is kind of helping us. We know we've got this ridiculous influence, because there's no one that we would ever run into that was our age who liked this kind of music.

“We would go to punk rock shows here in town and no one would play this type of music. The Psychedelic Furs were slightly popular, but you wouldn't listen to Donovan or The Beatles, or a lot of other hokey stuff that we would listen to. So, part of this was feeling like we may be from Oklahoma, but I don't think anything that we listened to came from Oklahoma. None of the people that my brothers knew, even though they were musicians, wanted to sound like they were from Oklahoma, they sounded like The Beatles or Black Sabbath, it was always something freaky like that.

“We became The Flaming Lips and everybody knew that we were from Oklahoma. We always felt slightly embarrassed that we really didn't know anything about Oklahoma music, we'd say ‘I don't know. We just like what we like.’

“Now I think it's probably a good thing that we know as much as we can about Oklahoma music. A lot of it's not very cool. Back then we were slightly embarrassed about it because people would ask us, ‘You're from Oklahoma, what's the music scene like there?’ We’d be like, ‘We like the punk rock bands, but we don't really go to bars to see country bands, maybe we should have and maybe that's part of what's fucked up about us.’

“For us country music, especially in Oklahoma back then, felt like a bunch of rednecks. I didn't really want to be around it. I wanted to be around freaks. I didn't want to be around a bunch of cowboys that wanted to beat us up.”

“As great as Harry Nilsson is, you could hear this song and think he's going to have five records like that, but there's really only a few of his songs that have that quality. There's a lot of great music, but that particular song, man, it's short and it's dramatic and it's so emotional. I'm so glad when I read stories about him or you see documentaries and he's just a funny drunk guy. I like that, because I don't really want him to be this sappy guy crying at the piano that he seems like he is in that song. I'm glad he's doing it because it's music, not because he really is crying or whatever.

“The way he layers his voice and that pitch that he has is so amazing. If you're a singer like me, you hear someone like him and go, ‘Oh shit, I need to stop. I can't deal with that. that's really on a different level.’ Then when you find out more about him, you see that he was shy and he was awkward. He didn't even like playing live or anything. It's a great story. That song, and a lot of those types of songs, would be the only time that we would say things like that out loud. When we were growing up, we would never say something like that to anybody. You just feel like an idiot. You have a way to say those things because this music says it, and I love that about it.

“I have to say, even when I hear Mariah Carey do it, I can still go, ‘Oh, I still like it.’ There's something about it. It's probably a leftover from liking the Harry Nilsson version, but there's something in that, it’s a great song.”