Even though I’ve spent my life around musicians and artists, it’s always been hard for me to think of members of certain bands and certain artists as humans. Some just seem to transcend these Earthly boundaries the rest of us are stuck in (looking at you, David Bowie). And there is no bigger contemporary example of that than The Flaming Lips.
The Flaming Lips aren’t humans. They’re love creatures sent from outer space (or maybe inner space) to explore, inquire, to try and make us better.
Except The Flaming Lips are humans. They have a job and regular headaches to deal with, just like the rest of us. And, it turns out, most of them have kids.
Still, it’s strange to think of members of The Flaming Lips leaving their magical neon-drenched stage set only to return to the same everyday life the rest of us enjoy. But they do. Because they’re humans after all.
I spoke with one of those humans, longtime Lips drummer* Nicholas Ley, about balancing fatherhood with art and ambition, and how he shows his kids that playing the drums is a job like any other.
How many kids do you have?
I have three kids. Radley is our ten-year-old daughter, Mayella is our seven-year-old daughter, and Jasper is a year-and-a-half.
When you joined the Lips, you had just had a kid, right?
Yeah, Radley had just been born. It was a really wild time. Looking back on it, I’m still kind of putting all the pieces together and realizing how it all fell into place. It was insane. This band I was in for a long time was kind of fizzling out, and I was just saying yes to everything, but also kind of spinning out of control in a way. And I thought, “If I’m not in this band Colourmusic, I don’t know who I am, or what I am.” I had to try some other things. So I had made this punk record with a friend of mine, who was one of the Lips’ roadies at the time, and (Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne) said we could do vocals at his studio. And so we took it over there, Wayne asked who played drums on it, and then later, it kind of all happened.
It’s funny how those tiny little things, where I was spinning out of control, thinking I wasn’t going to have a future in music, when you kind of double down, turn out to be an amazing opportunity.
The Flaming Lips are past the point of roaddogging, correct? As in the “getting in the van for two-hundred shows a year” sense.
Not like that, no. But it’s a different kind of roaddogging, one that’s pretty awesome. The first few years I was in, we were going out and winning people over. I came in right after The Terror record. And so people who know our hits and such, thought, “That’s not the band I thought it was.” We had a lot to prove in the band after that. So we said yes to everything for six years straight. And that was when my daughter was about a year old until she was about seven.
So after that, we agreed to never do that again.
Right. When I was touring heavily, I had to do it two-hundred nights a year. That’s just how that band existed in my mind and it couldn’t exist any other way. And that was not my idea of fatherhood.
Dude. Exactly.
These days, we try to cap a run of shows at fourteen days. But if something comes in on either side, we’ve gone everywhere from seventeen to twenty-one days. But we all have young kids, so we try to keep it two weeks or less.
Do your kids know what you do? Do they understand it?
I think they understand it at whatever level a kid would know. My ten- and seven-year-old came to a festival with us last summer and it was so amazing because it was the beginning of a bus tour, so they got to come out, stock the bus with snacks, pick their bunk, crash on the bus that night, come to catering with me in the morning, watch me build my drums.
So everyone in the band is cool with kids being on the bus?
Oh hell yeah.
When I came into the band, it was just a bunch of really great people who give a shit about what they’re doing. There was just this really cool, supportive energy from the band really early on. All of that made it super easy to come in with kids and a family and all that. Now, Wayne has kids, but I think Steven (Drozd) had kids when I came in. But now that we all have kids, it’s just this giant, awesome experience. And now when we get together to rehearse, it’s like, “Let’s not get too serious but if we’re going to get together, let’s make it count. Let’s make a video,” or something like that.
Does everybody have their kids on the bus?
Not every time.
Is it just more like, “My kids aren’t in school right now, can I bring them?”
Exactly. Or it’s like, “Mama needs a break, so the kids are gonna come out,” or whatever. It’s not everybody all the time. But it’s pretty loose. We have plenty of room, we have two busses, so as long as we float the idea, “Hey, I’m thinking about bringing my kids. Is that cool with everybody?”
Most of the time, nobody’s gonna say no. And if they do, they’re gonna have a great reason for it.
You mentioned that when you practice, the band tries to optimize their time together by making a video or doing some other project. Tell me about that through your lens as a father.
Yeah, if we’re gonna get together, let’s do it all. In the past, you’d show up and it was anybody’s only job. So we were gonna practice at three but everyone showed up at six and we didn’t get done until midnight.
Now, it’s like, “Shit, we’re getting everyone together. There’s an opportunity cost if we don’t get everything out of it right now.”
How does having kids change when you are home? You’re a stay-at-home dad between tours?
Oh shit, how much time you have, dude?
I was wearing several different hats for a long time (Ed: Nicholas was working at a university music program when he joined the band. After a few years, he quit to focus on the Lips full time). When I’m with The Flaming Lips, I’m there one-hundred-percent. I have minimal contact with my family, mainly because of time differences or we’re in the UK or whatever. If I was at school, I come home from tour, and immediately have to go into prepping lectures, giving tests, handling all the crazy administration stuff. And when I’d get home at the end of the day, everything I had—any niceties or energy-wise—was gone, spent on these other places.
So after years of doing that, and me not doing anything about it because I was scared of losing insurance, losing income, whatever, I finally (quit the university job) and I feel amazing. I feel absolutely incredible. I what I finally realized is that you can’t live in three different places like that forever.
And the pandemic had a lot to do with that. I couldn’t go to school, I couldn’t tour. All I could be was this depressed, worthless, miserable-feeling piece of shit when I was at home. It got to the point where I was suicidal early on (in the pandemic). Because it’s heavy. My complete identity, what I do, was erased from the calendar. It was like, “You’re worthless. And now you’re just miserable and depressed and you’re not taking medication for it or figuring it out yet.” You feel like it’ll just be better if you’re not here. So going into those conversations with my wife, getting into therapy, dealing with all that stuff, helped my realize that I was quitting the university job because it was bad for my health.
Now, everything makes sense. Now, when I leave to go on tour, they miss me. It’s not like, “Phew, we need a break from dad.”
What is your kids’ relationship like with music? And how do you inform that? Or do you try and stay out of the way?
I try to stay out of the way. I try to do the same thing that my dad did with me, like, “Hey, we like this thing together. I’m gonna go back and play guitar. If you want to come back and play drums, come on back.” With my dad, it was like, this is what I want to do with my spare time. I’d love to connect with you over it. Come on in.
So, because playing music is so much of my career, I’m trying to look at it like, “My dad didn’t make me become a gynecologist like him. So I’m not going to do that to my kids.” I’m not gonna do that but I am gonna have instruments everywhere. They’re gonna know that it’s my happy place.
Also that it’s a job. A lot of kids don’t realize that it’s just a job, that there are hundreds of thousands of people around the world who make their living playing music.
Totally! My only stories growing up were Behind The Music. It was like, you worked your ass off, you got discovered, then you got on drugs, burned out, blew your money, and got all fucked up. But the real shit, there was none of it. Because I didn’t have a traveling musician across the street growing up. It was an accountant or a plumber.
The trick is to teach your kids—at least I think—that there is so much value in creating a thing that didn’t exist before. And if you don’t place value on that from the beginning, it’s really difficult to get them to place value on that later on.
Right. I love that. I’m a huge advocate of valuing the arts more and paying artists more but there’s also so much in the idea that we don’t need to commercialize everything. There was something that exists now that ten minutes ago didn’t exist. And you made that. And that’s fucking awesome.
When you can tell your kids early on, “You made that. That’s badass. Now what are you going to do with it?” And if I’m going to anything, I’m going to try to demystify what it’s like to be in a band. Because it’s hard to talk about this unless it’s to other people who are in bands. Especially people who have kids and are in bands.
What kind of dad was your father? What about his style of fathering are you carrying forward as a father? What are you consciously trying to avoid?
One I’ve definitely carried forward is that my dad was always for the underdog, no matter what. Whether it was sports or someone who needed help. He was able to identify somebody who was in a room and felt uncomfortable and making them feel welcome and seen. He had this amazing bedside manner.
In a lot of ways, my dad had thousand of fans before I ever thought of having a fan. You’d walk around and he’d delivered everybody’s kid in town.
He’d get up at four in the morning, go see patients in the hospital, then see patients all day in his office, all so he could be off at three pm when I’d get off school. And we’d drive around from three to six, just doing all the projects he was working on.
It’s funny you say that because my dad did the exact same thing. It was essential for him to be home every day when we got home. And he sacrificed a lot of money for that. But he was always there. And now, even though I always knew it, I;m realizing how much more essential that is as a father myself.
Dude, it’s everything. Even if you’re a bit of an asshole, it’s better that you’re there.
The thing that I absolutely didn’t want to do that he did… how do I say this? There’s one critical mistake that I’m sure he would take back in the moment. But it got me to understand how kids change as they grow older, and the answer is not always to clamp down harder. The discipline thing, that doesn’t always work. My daughters need to know, and my son as well, there’s not something they could do that could tarnish our relationship. Not that that happened with my dad, but, I just learned that I have to love my kids harder as they get older and grow up.
*It should be noted that late last year, Nicholas left The Flaming Lips. We did this interview long before that decision (sorry for my tardiness) and asked if he wanted to change or update from our talk, Nicholas said, “No way. (Our conversation) is just like an album; a record in time.”