Most artists I run into aren't that thrilled with what they do anyway. They are glad to have different versions out there to see which one the audience likes the best.

Sometimes the song title comes with the songs, other times you just sorta make something up afterwards.

I call it "being interrupted by success." We had done The Soft Bulletin, which came out in 1999, and we knew we that were gonna make another record before too long. But in between this, we were still in this mode of kind of just - not re-creating what we could be, but kind of doing different things. For the longest time in the Flaming Lips we were like, "Make a record, go on tour. Come back, make another record," and you know, I think, frankly, we were kind of like, "There's more to life than just recording records and going on tour."

We wouldn't be artists, writers, painters, musicians, if we weren't sensitive.

I think the more music becomes something you could simply download and have on your iPod, I think to a lot of people that is plenty, but to some people, they still want these artifacts that are touchable, and you can smell them, and look at them, and hold them and just have other dimensions of experience with this music.

We wish that we could take magic drugs, play around all day, read, and do nothing strenuous, and be the smartest, happiest people in the world. The truth is, it's all about sweat.

The movie that we could've finished in 2001 would've sucked. The movie that we could've finished in 2002 would've just been a disaster, even into 2003, it would've been very cobbled together, amateuristic stuff. But as we went along, we really did stumble upon some accidental themes, and with the things you could do with computers, and all that sort of stuff just sort of really accelerated into where the stuff that we could do right here at my house became - you could almost do anything.