The Flaming Lips Walk (Really Fast) Onto Broadway

We broke the news that Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne has been collaborating with Tony-Award winning director/producer Des McAnuff to turn the band's 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots into a Broadway musical. Now there are reports that the project has an official and unlikely scribe: "West Wing" and "Studio 60" creator Aaron Sorkin. (Apparently McAnuff, who will be overseeing the show, recommended Sorkin for the job after directing the TV potentate's play, "The Farnsworth Invention.")

Coyne told our Andy Greene that there's still some creative work to be done to turn the conceptual album into a fleshed-out narrative. "We'll have to write some connecting songs. They'll be one song about love or death or something and you connect it with another song about love or death and in the middle you tell a more precise story-line moment. Those are the things we'll probably be writing." Coyne & Co. are apparently just as excited to see the end result as we are: "Most songwriters and performers love nothing more than knowing, 'What the fuck are we singing about?'"

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Song Stories

“The A Team”

Ed Sheeran | 2011

This debut track from the then-20-year-old British singer-songwriter has a dark story behind it. Sheeran says he culls songwriting inspiration from "viewing other people's situations," which, for the heroine in "The A Team," involves drug addiction and prostitution that began as a teen. Sheeran paints the woman's trials with haunting imagery such as "But lately her face seems/Slowly sinking, wasting/Crumbling like pastries." "I did a gig at a homeless shelter, [and the song] is about one of the women there. It's her story," he said.

More Song Stories entries »

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