Oczy Mlody

Album: Oczy Mlody (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the opening song and title track from the Flaming Lips' Oczy Mlody album. The band released a series of videos explaining the record, with frontman Wayne Coyne describing the meaning behind the album's Polish language title.

    "At first it appealed to us because it appeared to sound like a drug; it reminded us of oxycodone," Coyne said. "And then I think this initial appeal made us curious about what it could mean, and I believe when we looked it up, the very first thing we saw was that it meant 'eyes of the young'… We wouldn't like the title 'Eyes of the Young,' but we liked how these other jumbled words could mean that."
  • What's the best known use of Polish in a western pop song? Our suggestion is David Bowie's Low track "Warszawa" where the Thin White Duke borrows lyrics from a tune sung by the Polish folk choir, Slask.
  • It was the Flaming Lips' Steven Drozd who first came across the title phrase in a Polish translation of the Erskine Caldwell novel Close To Home.
  • Coyne reflected on the melancholic-yet-hopeful tone of the album in a Consequence Of Sound interview, saying: "As we kept working on the production and the music part of it, some of the music to me sounds like music that we’ve never made before. It sounds like some future, f--king weird s--t that we have never made before. I think it allowed us to really go back into our souls and inside our childlike melodies, and at the same time be completely out of ourselves in the future. That's why we started to get comfortable with the way the songs were going. It's hard to be really melodic and melancholy at the same time. I think that's why the contrast works. The way that the bass booms allowed us to be more deep into these melancholy ideas.

    But we sound hopeful. I was singing from the depths of our hearts, but I think when we get there by accident, we don't really know it at first."

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