Wayne Coyne Gets an Album Named After Him

You're in a new band. You're making some headway with your sound, but you're lacking a hook, an angle, a way to grab peoples' attention. Plus, you're from Denmark, totally removed from the globe's many hip rock locales. What to do?

The record is called, simply enough, Wayne Coyne, and it's out Nov. 17 on Speed of Sound/Last Gang. The album cover, pictured below, is an image of Coyne's glorious coif superimposed on poet William Blake's body:

Although the music of The William Blakes has little to do with The Flaming Lips, it's interesting to see a current band using another current figure as its album namesake. The band's first stateside single, "Secrets of the State," is an endlessly catchy '80s pop blast (think: Tears for Fears) that could've owned early MTV.

So where does all the Coyne love come from?

"I met Wayne Coyne briefly at the Roskilde Festival right after The Flaming Lips played in front of 70,000 people," frontman Blake Kristian Leth tells Paste. "We were really inspired by the mix between crazy big rock showmanship and this really unpretentious 'How are you?' attitude: that the music you do is really important and can hold big themes, but it's not about you."

To The William Blakes, though, the name is just as much about Coyne inspiring them as it is about honoring the man inside the big inflatable ball. "I think it's good to show some love to people who are doing something extraordinary right now," guitarist-Blake Frederick Nordsø says.

Although Coyne hasn't addressed his musical namesake publicly, The William Blakes take comfort just in knowing that he does have a copy; Leth handed him a copy when the Lips played recently in Tivoli, Denmark. "He laughed at the cover and thought it was cool," keyboardist Blake Bo Rande recalls. "I don't know if he's heard it yet, though. Wayne, if you're out there, let us know. We're fine even if you hate it."

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