Headlining the Tibet House Benefit Concert last night, The Flaming Lips – with a little help from a string quartet – jammed out an epic “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” at Carnegie Hall, offering a taste of their upcoming Soft Bulletin shows. They followed it with an utterly unique arrangement of “Do You Realize” with Philip Glass on piano. Both of these, especially the latter, were unlike any versions they’ve ever played before and can be summed up as heartfelt and cosmic in the ways the simultaneously reached inward and outward.
Other highlights from the too-good-to-be-true-(but-it-was) line-up include The Roots playing with Taj Mahal and then covering Neil Young’s “Down By The River” and the live debut of REM’s “Everyday Is Yours To Win” from their new album “Collapse Into Now” by Michael Stipe (backed by The Patti Smith Group). For more information on the annual concert and highlights from past years click here, for background information on this year’s event click here.
Rolling Stone posted backstage video interviews with Michael Stipe, Wayne Coyne and Taj Mahal as well as rehearsal videos of The Flaming Lips’ two numbers (which are wonderfully filmed but clearly a rehearsal – in other words, they don’t do last night’s performances justice… not by a long shot). I’ll be posting recordings from the concert at youtube.com/user/psychexfutureheart that will hopefully give a better impression of what the actual performances were like after they worked out the rehearsal glitches, and added Glass.
I’ll also be posting many more details on the concert on this blog and elsewhere over the next few days. Follow twitter.com/FutureHeartDay for the latest.
So far there’s been press and pictures published by USA Today, Village Voice, NY Press, and NY1 (click on any of these links to read the respective source’s review and see the pictures).
If you were at the concert, managed to take pictures (no easy task at Carnegie Hall!) and are willing to share them (to be posted on this blog and/or in a YouTube video – fully credited, however you wish) e-mail futureheart@ymail.com.
Everyone, of course, is welcome to comment below as well: questions, observations, corrections, whatever…
The Future Heart 
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