American rock band
The Flaming Lips have written a song that will (very likely) be featured in the
Ender's Game movie, and the band has just announced that they will expand this collaboration to release an
Ender's Game-themed 6 song EP titled
Peace Sword on November 29, 2013, Black Friday. The
cover art for this record can be seen on top.
Sidetracked: If you are not familiar with The Flaming Lips... they are a positively crazy bunch of great artists who did some amazing work in the past decade, frequently adapting sci-fi themes, including the masterpiece "
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots", one of my old radio station's Top 100 songs of the decade and a song that is, despite its seemingly fun character, about a girl fighting cancer. Great stuff!
The band's frontman
Wayne Coyne announced last month in an interview with
The Huffington Post that the band is making new music for the film:
I don't know if I'm allowed to say it, but we are working on a song that is going to be in the Ender's Game epic movie that's coming out at the end of the year. If the song works out to be in the movie, we think we're going to pursue making a bit more of an expanded five or six song record that goes along with the theme and the stuff that we did for that movie, which we really ended up liking. A lot of times, people do songs for movies and there are a lot of criteria that you have to follow to make it suit the movie people.
We don't know for sure that's going to happen yet, but we've already done the song and we quite like the mood of it and the way of it, the sound and the theme of it. Steven and I both remarked, "Man, I'd like to do some more music associated with this," and we think they're going to let us. If it works out that they end up liking our song and using it and all that, we think we'd pursue something like that. That would be even as soon as November, so I think it could work out. But I don't know. It'll probably be another week or so before we know, but I'm talking about it like it's going to happen, so that's good enough for me.
Based on Wayne Coyne's recent social media posts on
Twitter and
Instagram, the song has apparently been approved for the movie and the band is in the final stages of finishing up
Peace Sword.
From the record's back sleeve (also posted on
Instagram) we can confirm three of the song titles:
"Think Like a Machine, Not a Boy",
"Wolf Children", and
"Assassin Beetle/The Dream Is Ending". Good chance that we'll also get a title track
Peace Sword, but keep in mind that at the most one of these six songs will be featured in the actual movie.
The band is also very aware of the Orson Scott Card debate and when approached about the controversy, here's what Wayne Coyne had to say (in
Instagram comments):
Our involvement is only with the music directors of the movie... but yeah ...these are conflicts all big projects have to deal with. We try to do cool things with cool people that, obviously benefit us and the cool people we doing stuff with... occasionally these benefits extend to abstractly connected people who are NOT so cool...
The vinyl release (which as an avid vinyl collector I will have to get my hands on no matter what) will also directly address this issue. According to a post on
The Future Heart, the vinyl etching for the EP will read
"Hey Orson Scott Card You Are Wrong" on side 1 and
"Gay People Are Cool" on the flip.
Here is some more artwork from the Ender's Game EP:
(
Source: Instagram and
Instagram)
