Earlier this week the flamboyant Flaming Lips performed new song The Castle on the Tonight Show. The band was a comparatively demure while performing the new song off of their new album Oczy Mlody, which was released yesterday. Leader Wayne Coyne was nonetheless was a bit bedazzled while singing the devastating ode to a female friend who took her own life (lyrics at bottom). It’s a beauty performed perfectly by the ensemble. Enjoy.

About the song, Wayne Coyne has said:

“An embarrassingly pure little song.. Ha.. I say embarrassing because as I wrote it (just a couple of lines, that didn’t end up in the song, and the one chorus line “and the castle can never be rebuilt again.. No way..” I was truly sad and I was singing and writing about this sad sad situation (a friend of ours had committed suicide) and felt like I was doing what a songwriter should do.. be real and let it flow.. Ha.. But the next day when I listened to it.. I thought it was really boring and approached the song as being about the person (who had killed themselves) instead of it (the song) being about me.. So yeah.. I’m embarrassed about that part.. But I think songs work like that.. They let you get something out.. And I think this delicate whimsical song really came to life as soon as I sang (into my phone .. It was the only recording device I had in that moment) the very first lines.. ‘Her eyes were butterflies her smile was a rainbow’.. I still heard it (the song) as being very very sad and so, to me, because I was convinced of its power (the power of this sadness.. which, I think, was just me being still sad about the real life situation) it allowed me to sing these utterly silly romantic lyrics as a way of masking something horrible and brutal and fucked up and unspeakable.”

Go HERE to pick up the new album.

“Her eyes were butterflies
Her smile was a rainbow
Her hair was sunbeam waves
Shining ’round like a halo
Her face was a fairy tale
That has a poison apple
Her skull was a mighty moat
Her brain was the castle

And the castle gets mistaken for a ship that’s floating in the clouds
And the castle is brighter than a thousand Christmas trees
And the castle can never be rebuilt again
No way

One day a strange storm rolled in
While she was riding on her dragon
The mushrooms and the bumblebees
Told the flowers how it happened
She was lost in the invisible war
Fighting in the battle
Her love is still buried there
In the ruins of the castle

And the castle oscillates to the beating heart of her mind
And the castle is taller than the Northern Lights
And the castle can never be rebuilt again
No way

And the castle can never be rebuilt again
No way
And the castle can never be rebuilt again
No way

No way
No way
(No way)
No way, no way
No way”