Today in wishful-thinking collaborations: Yoko Ono and The Flaming Lips, Lee DeWyze and Sufjan Stevens
It’s like Cinderella said: An interview is a wish your heart makes, especially when you’re a musician looking to collaborate with another musician, but you don’t actually want to face the possibility that said musician might reject your offer, so you just go ahead and tell everybody else. The news has been full of them lately, whether it’s Dizzee Rascal extending overtures to Marilyn Manson to help him develop his “dark side,” or Lady Gaga telling Larry King that, in some alternate timeline, she would have been singing a duet with Michael Jackson as the supporting act for his London O2 Arena run. Then she coulda been a contender, coulda been somebody, instead of a bum wrapped in police tape and diamond-studded panties, which is what she is, let’s face it.
Recently Yoko Ono got into the act, telling fans via a recent online Q&A session that she’d really like to get together with The Flaming Lips again, after enjoying their reworking of “Cambridge 1969” on 2007’s Yes I’m A Witch. (Also included in that session: Ono’s opinion, solicited for some reason, on the breakup of Oasis, which she laments. "I love Oasis," she said. "We need the power of goodness like them. The goodness is shining from their music. I hope they will make more albums.")
But of all the dream collaborations we’ve heard lately, none is more unpredictable than recent American Idol winner-we-guess Lee DeWyze’s recently expressed desire to work with Sufjan Stevens, as told to Rolling Stone. While DeWyze admits to the surprise of no one that his radio-rock yarl is influenced by folks like Dave Matthews, Kings Of Leon, and Ben Harper—and that he loves “all kinds of music,” including Rage Against The Machine and Counting Crows—it’s Stevens’ 2005 disc Illinois that’s provided “endless inspiration.” DeWyze was quoted as saying, “I love that kind of stuff, that deep, earthy, lyric, folk feel is just really, really cool. I don't shy away from anything. I sing rock sometimes, but sometimes I can break it down and I like it to have a quieter feel, a more intimate feeling to it. I've been listening to him for a long time now. I'm a big fan." The ball is in your court, Sufjan, and it's ready to spit some generic rock rasp all over your next strings-and-glockenspiel-laden opus.