Songfacts®:

• The first single from The Flaming Lips' 11th studio album finds the experimental psychedelic rockers battling evil with a magical wand. "The idea of a magic wand and magic powers occurred to me while watching a homeless guy in Oklahoma City," Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne explained in a press release. "He was, I believe, Vietnamese, and had a cool looking wizardly beard and mustache and he carried a long stick, which he used as a kind of cane-weapon. And one day I saw him fighting an 'imagined' enemy and the long stick became (as best I could tell) a kind of magic wand that made his invisible foe retreat. I mean... it seemed to give him a confidence that allowed him to defeat his hallucinations, and at first I thought 'how sad, he believes this old stick is saving him,' but the more I thought about it, the more I envied him in a way - for the evil manifestations of his mind he invented a sparkling sorcerer's baton to lead his psychic revolution... yes!"
  
  He continued: "And so we delved into a kind of radical protest rock mentality. We sing, 'We got the power now, motherf--kers, that's where it belongs,' but I believe it's cosmically empowering - not actually empowering. In the song, we rail against the greedy, corrupt evil beings who are in control and trying to enslave us. But our rebellion is simply to fight back - we have no solutions."
• Before delving into a fantasy land of evil sorcerers and supernatural weapons, the band started with a studio jam. Wayne explained: "I was playing electric guitar, Michael [Ivins] was on fuzzwah bass and Steven [Drozd] was on the drumkit and we stumbled upon this druggy prog-rock riff and stuttery, funky beat. It was like Black Sabbath getting mashed up with Sly & the Family Stone or Stevie Wonder, and it sent us off in a wonderful new direction."