"We hear so many records these days that are done with click tracks, as opposed to a drummer"
About this Quote
Coyne’s complaint lands because it’s not really about technology; it’s about what gets erased when music is optimized. A click track is the clean grid behind so much modern recording, the metronomic authority that makes editing painless and streaming-era polish possible. Coyne frames it “as opposed to a drummer,” and that contrast is the whole argument: the click isn’t just a tool, it’s a replacement for a human center of gravity.
The subtext is an anxiety about feel becoming a preset. A drummer doesn’t merely keep time; they interpret it. Micro-rushes, tiny drags, uneven accents, the way a chorus can lift because a person is excited and tired and pushing air through a room. Coyne is pointing to the difference between music that breathes and music that behaves. In that sense, it’s a quiet critique of an industry that prizes controllability: if the pulse is locked, everything else can be quantized, comped, tuned, and packaged with fewer risks and fewer people.
Context matters: Coyne comes from a band culture that treats the studio as a surreal playground, but also as a place where accidents become identity. The Flaming Lips’ appeal has always leaned on messy grandeur and communal energy, the sense that a song is a living event, not a perfectly aligned product. His line taps a wider nostalgia currently resurging across pop and indie: audiences are hungry for imperfection not as lo-fi cosplay, but as proof of presence. The click track, in Coyne’s telling, is the sound of safety. The drummer is the sound of stakes.
The subtext is an anxiety about feel becoming a preset. A drummer doesn’t merely keep time; they interpret it. Micro-rushes, tiny drags, uneven accents, the way a chorus can lift because a person is excited and tired and pushing air through a room. Coyne is pointing to the difference between music that breathes and music that behaves. In that sense, it’s a quiet critique of an industry that prizes controllability: if the pulse is locked, everything else can be quantized, comped, tuned, and packaged with fewer risks and fewer people.
Context matters: Coyne comes from a band culture that treats the studio as a surreal playground, but also as a place where accidents become identity. The Flaming Lips’ appeal has always leaned on messy grandeur and communal energy, the sense that a song is a living event, not a perfectly aligned product. His line taps a wider nostalgia currently resurging across pop and indie: audiences are hungry for imperfection not as lo-fi cosplay, but as proof of presence. The click track, in Coyne’s telling, is the sound of safety. The drummer is the sound of stakes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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