Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

This is “Halloween on the Barbary Coast” by The Flaming Lips:

Back before two scientists started racing for the good of all mankind, back before Yoshimi and the robots he battled, back before people in animal costumes and an oversized hamster ball, the Flaming Lips were an Oklahoma psychedelic-fried punkish rock band that put out a string of weird and wonderful and often scrappy albums.  The period from Hit to Death in the Future Head (1992) to Clouds Taste Metallic (1995) they made three of the funnestest albums I spent time with during my teenage years (Transmissions from the Satellite Heart from 1993 is the other).  The Flaming Lips evolved from the less coherent 1980s band into the one I loved in the 1990s, into the bombastic world-conquerors they are today, and though I like some of the stuff they’ve done this century, none of it tickles my fancy quite like those from the middle of their career. I hope they gave copies of them to Myley Cyrus.