The Flaming Lips – “Dinosaurs On The Mountain”

Last month, the Flaming Lips appeared as musical guests on Colbert, and they had a pretty slick way of doing it. The Lips played their classic 1999 song “Race For The Prize” in front of an actual audience — something made possible because both the band members and the people in the crowd were in those giant plastic bubbles that Lips frontman Wayne Coyne has been using in live shows for years. This doesn’t seem like a very practical idea, but it’s at least more fun than some of the other live-show social-distancing ideas out there. And it seems a whole lot more sustainable than the total lack of crowd-protection measures that Donald Trump had in place in his recent video to the Lips’ home state of Oklahoma.

Today, the Flaming Lips have offered up another image of that quarantine-bubble live show. They’ve just shared their video for “Dinosaurs On The Mountain,” the latest single from their forthcoming LP American Head. (They’d already shared the early singles “My Religion Is You” and the Kacey Musgraves collab “Flowers Of Neptune 6.”) Wayne Coyne directed the “Dinosaurs On The Mountain” video with longtime collaborator George Salisbury, and the clip seems to come from the same video shoot as that Colbert performance.

The song itself is a gentle, pretty piece of psychedelia, and it has Coyne imagining a utopian pastoral version of Jurassic Park: “I wish the dinosaurs were still here now/ It’d be fun to see them playing on the mountains.” Check it out below.