The W.A.N.D.
Wayne Coyne was watching a homeless man in Oklahoma City. The man, Vietnamese, with what Coyne described as a wizardly beard, was carrying a long stick and using it as a cane. Then something shifted. The man began fighting an invisible enemy, and the stick became a magic wand. Coyne's first instinct was pity. His second was envy. "The more I thought about it," he said, "the more I envied him, for the evil magic he faced could be defeated by the power of his will, armed with just a wand." That observation became The W.A.N.D., an acronym for The Will Always Negates Defeat, the lead single from the Flaming Lips' eleventh studio album At War with the Mystics, released April 3, 2006 on Warner Bros.
The song was recorded at Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, New York, the same upstate studio where the band made The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, with producer Dave Fridmann, who'd shaped the band's sound since 1995. The W.A.N.D. is the most propulsive thing on an album that otherwise tends toward sprawl. Three minutes and forty-two seconds of Wayne Coyne's falsetto over Steven Drozd's drums and a fuzzed-out guitar riff that sounds like someone actually defeating something. It hit number 11 on the Billboard 200 and number 6 on the UK Official Albums Chart. At War with the Mystics won a Grammy for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical in 2006, a rare institutional nod to a band that'd spent two decades doing things entirely their own way.
"I envied him, for the evil magic he faced could be defeated by the power of his will, armed with just a wand."
The Flaming Lips formed in Oklahoma City in 1983 and never left. Still based there, still releasing music, still performing elaborate theatrical concerts with confetti cannons, giant balloons, and Coyne crowd-surfing in a plastic bubble. They're one of the few bands from the American underground that made the jump to a major label, kept making genuinely experimental records, and survived it. The W.A.N.D. is the distillation of everything they believe: the will, armed with the right instrument, can defeat whatever it faces. Hallucination, gravity, the music industry. Anything.