Love Yer Brain

Album: Oh My Gawd!!! (1987)
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Songfacts®:

  • Although Wayne Coyne wasn't a heavy drug user, the Flaming Lips frontman understood the need for an escape when life got too tough, especially after a drug-addict friend committed suicide during a bout of depression. "If your choice is to do drugs or kill yourself, I'd say that you should do some drugs," he explained in the band's biography, Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma's Fabulous Flaming Lips. Wayne had been working as a fry cook at Long John Silver's when his friend tried - and failed - to speak with him during a particularly hectic shift. Wayne got the sad news the next day and, shortly after, wrote the piano-driven ballad.
  • The last track on the album, this closes with a loop of the phrase "turn off your mind, relax," from The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," playing over a ruckus of the band demolishing an old upright piano. Contrary to popular belief, the piano is not the white baby grand that Elton John gave Stevie Nicks, who once owned the studio where the Flaming Lips' album was recorded - but the band had fun fueling that rumor.
  • Miley Cyrus tattooed her forearm with the song title in 2014, around the time she first started collaborating with The Flaming Lips. That year, she was a guest vocalist on the band's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band tribute album - With A Little Help From My Fwends - and reunited with them for her own Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz album in 2015. In 2017, she featured on the Lips' tune "We a Famly."

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