Flaming Lips’ Frontman Wayne Coyne Talks Touring for Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz

Miley Cyrus' new album, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, is a weird album. Weird, but strangely beautiful at the same time. Having surprise-released it for free following her hosting gig for the MTV Video Music Awards back in August, Dead Petz stands as one of those collaboration albums where the individual identities of the collaborators are nearly impossible to pinpoint. Figuring out which songs sound more like Miley Cyrus and which ones more like The Flaming Lips presents as big a challenge as deciphering some of Cyrus' lyrics on them.

According to The Flaming Lips' frontman Wayne Coyne, that challenge is precisely what makes the album so great. During a break from the Milky Milky Milk Tour, Coyne spoke with Billboard about what it was like working with Cyrus on her new album and how their musical styles combined to create the tour's unique visual explosion.

Coyne describes Cyrus as a "great fit" for the band, explaining that "the music and the way that she is, it's been such a natural thing. I think she's so much into the way that we do things, and I'm so much into the way she does things. We discover all the time how much coincidence there is about how we feel the same way about things."

Cyrus and Coyne's shared love of glitter, confetti, eccentric characters, and dress-up is evident in the spectacular live shows that comprise the Milky Milky Milk tour. "I think a lot of the stuff is Flaming Lips stuff," Coyne stated.

But Coyne wasn't as proprietary as his initial comment may sound. Quite the opposite: he admits that Cyrus' aesthetic fit perfectly with his band's. As he explained, "If we went back two or three years, you could sort of see the influence of the Flaming Lips on Miley Cyrus and then the influence of Miley Cyrus on the Flaming Lips. I think we've met now at the height of both of those. If we had gone on separate tours right now, people would think that our show looks like a Miley Cyrus show and a Miley Cyrus show look like a Flaming Lips show, we've had such an influence on each other."

Read the full article over at Billboard to hear more about their collaboration process, as well as what the future holds for Cyrus and the Lips. The Milky Milky Milk tour wraps up on December 19 in Los Angeles at The Wiltern.

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