If you experienced the Flaming Lips between 1991 and 2024 — most likely through a once-cherished MP3 player or knee-deep in confetti at a transcendent concert — then you were audibly connected to Steven Drozd. He was a longtime guitarist, bombastic drummer, songwriter, melody maker and multi-instrumentalist for the Oklahoma City-based rock outfit. Drozd contributed to more than a dozen Lips records and won three Grammys as part of the group. His former band has adopted and shed multiple music styles and members since its inception more than four decades ago. But nobody’s exit from the Lips has struck such a complicated chord.
Drozd’s departure has been largely unsentimental considering his long tenure with the Lips. Few details have been released outside of cryptic social media posts that created widespread confusion and concern among the band’s fanbase. If you’ve been a devotee for a long time, this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Lips members have been candid about Drozd’s struggles with substance abuse in the past, which have led to near-breaking points before.
The willingness to explore his complicated nature has always drawn me to the band. When they’re at their best as musicians, the Lips mesh darkness and light into pop-rock earworms and joyous concerts that ultimately made me feel like being a weirdo in Oklahoma is more than OK. It’s a sort of alchemy that turns hopeless subject matter into life-affirming songs. I mean, how many other bands do you know who’ve written an iconic downer about Superman failing that’s also catchy enough to hum?
Consider for example that even their most blatantly dreary album, 2013’s The Terror, ends with a song called “Always There, in Our Hearts.” Or the plot to the Lips’ yuletide freakout movie Christmas on Mars, where Drozd’s character “goes insane as he tries to improve lagging morale on a space station by hosting a holiday pageant before the first baby is born into the colony.” In the Lips’ world, the darkness is always there, but so is the light.
So when did Drozd become too heavy for one band to lift?
Fans began noticing his absence at the tail end of an arena tour with Weezer. That was fall 2024, around the time when Drozd’s family faced an emergency — his daughter went missing during a Seattle tour stop but was thankfully found safe days later. This is the sort of TMZ-fueled nightmare that nobody should endure, and it marked a final chapter for Drozd’s tenure with the Lips.
Several months passed without any official news of Steven’s status, but the show went on. AJ Slaughter filled the void for scheduled shows and most recently rang in the new year with the Lips in Washington D.C. Longtime frontman Wayne Coyne acknowledged Steven’s absence in a March 2025 interview with Rolling Stone Japan. It wasn’t until a social media mishap that Drozd’s decampment became a public conversation — one that’s still shrouded in fog.
Drozd replied to a fan on Threads who asked if he was still an active member of the band. He responded: “They’re done with me – but we’re not talking about it. So yes I’m moving on. Just keep it to yourself for now. OK?”
Drozd allegedly thought this was a private exchange, but the now-deleted post tipped off countless music blogs. Whoops. He later made light of the flub, but the horse was out of the barn. Since then, he’s added that not touring in 2025 “felt right” and that he and Coyne had parted ways after three decades of working together.
For the past few weeks, multiple band members have sounded off about the recent drama. Coyne even weighed in writing “the reason he left is sad, and infuriating.... it is HIS responsibility to tell everyone what happened… what he told everyone was a lie ….I was trying to give him (Steven) his own space and time to let everyone know what REALLY happened.”
This leaves us in a nebulous space. What “REALLY happened” sure sounds like something dramatic you’d get fired for. For fans, it feels like Drozd was unceremoniously dumped. I doubt we’ll hear much more any time soon. Either way, it seems the band is pressing skip, and now, so is Drozd.
You Can’t Race For The Prize Forever
For what it’s worth, Steven Drozd sits among my favorite living musicians. His contributions have soundtracked me falling in love. Falling out of love. Working shifts at a terrible sandwich shop. For several formative years, Flaming Lips New Year’s shows were as much a holiday tradition as eggnog and Braum’s peppermint ice cream. I danced onstage inside an inflatable butterfly costume and even shot footage alongside the Lips video crew a few times. Hell, a thing I used to do for fun in college was try to convince my friends that the band’s four-disc experiment “Zaireeka” was in fact not too convoluted to load into 16 boom boxes for synchronized play.
Drozd, 56, was born in Houston and spent much of his youth exploring music scenes in Texas and Oklahoma. His formal education ended in high school but his musical aspirations were bigger than his crowded childhood home in Lawton and playing in his dad’s Top 40 country cover band. I’ll never forget his UFOs at the Zoo performance back in 2006. Gripping a red double-necked electric guitar, he hovered between multiple keyboards and sang into a vocoder. On stage, he could be a colossal force. In a studio setting, he could play complicated parts for multiple instruments, and do the give-and-take work of collaboration.
Examining the sessions that yielded the band’s biggest hit “Do You Realize??” provides the evidence. That dreamy space ballad released in 2002 didn’t happen in a vacuum. Longtime rock critic Jim DeRogatis noted in his exhaustive biography Staring at Sound that Drozd heard the song’s potential on Coyne’s impressive demo. But it was ultimately a team effort that carried the track to our ears. “Take away Steven, and I am just a guy playing chords,” Coyne said in the book. “All of these songs require (producer) Dave Fridmann and Steven to give us everything they’ve got to make them work.”
Perhaps that willingness to give it your all is both a blessing and a curse in the world of rock and roll. Life in a touring act like the Lips is a three-ring circus. You might find yourself in four different cities in as many days, performing multi-part harmonies with your coworkers for excited fans on a few hours of sleep.
Pardon the somewhat crass metaphor, but even the most beloved circus elephants wear down. Drozd clocked in for 30-plus years of touring: an endless series of green rooms, overnight bus rides and neverending bucketfuls of confetti. Nobody can race for the prize forever.
What’ll the Lips be like without Steven? Well, if there’s a will, there’s a Wayne. No matter the band’s DNA, Coyne is a fountain of energy and a master of diversion — be it filling a venue with a buddy’s motorcycle fumes to gifting entire audiences with laser pointers to be fired in unison. He has one gear for his creative pursuits and that’s drive.
I’m confident he and the latest lineup will aim for the same dizzying highs. The remaining Lips members have all been in or around the band’s orbit for a good chunk of years and there’s no shortage of talent. They’re already working on a new record. My guess is they’ll feel Drozd’s absence most from other fans reflecting on the Lips’ legacy. Roadies and fellow festival headliners will hang out backstage and want to hear what happened.
Nostalgia notoriously weighs heavy for rock bands and fans — the Lips do attract multi-generational crowds after all. And when you step onstage as many times as Drozd did, then there’s always going to be at least one fan who remembers yesteryear, who’ll have an epic story about Steven jumping on the drums.
Time Is A Flat Circle
In the midst of all this, I re-watched Bradley Beesley’s 2005 documentary about the Lips, The Fearless Freaks.1 It’s one of the only DVDs I still own, which is good because the most semi-convenient place it’s streaming is at the Internet Archives.
As it turns out, we have, in fact, sorta been here before as fans of the Flaming Lips. Decades ago, Drozd’s time with the band was at an inflection point. His drug use could no longer be minimized and mortality was a very real conversation. The same question that bubbled up recently was being asked back then: What’s going on with Steven?
About an hour into the doc, there’s footage of Drozd that’s forever seared into my memory. Depicted in stark black and white footage with heartbreaking close-ups, Drozd answers questions as he readies a dose of heroin. He’s seated on the floor of a bare apartment, looking over a small table loaded with syringes, cotton balls and a bent spoon. He very matter-of-factly describes his addiction to drugs and alcohol as he inches closer to shooting up. No topic seems taboo — like how withdrawals make you barf and lose control of your bowels. He admits it has taken away people closest to him, his money, his car and his time.
As Drozd fills a syringe with black goo, it’s hard to hold back tears. He struggles to find a vein before settling on one in his hand. Finally, Steven describes how the drug moves through his body and how it voids him of any pain. Viewing it, you can’t help but feel that pain for him. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
“I was confronting him more or less as a friend,” filmmaker Beesley told The Oklahoman in 2005. “‘Why are you throwing your life away?’ ... Because he was really fucking poor for a guy doing as well as the Lips were doing. ... And it was just amazing and touching that he was so nonchalant.”
At the time, Coyne was exasperated even though seeing someone close to him struggle with drugs was nothing new to him. “Steven doing drugs? Really it's none of my business as long as it doesn't interfere with what we're doing,” Coyne said in the film. “It didn't really matter to me, and I let that get the better of me because I would imagine he's doing these drugs. He could go to jail. He could kill himself. He’s got all these people that care about him, and yet he seems to be going directly against what he knows to be our wishes.”2
What comes next in the film is a wake-up call. Coyne confronts Drozd and delivers several blows to his bandmate’s head. For whatever reason, that worked. With help from friends and family, Drozd quit heroin after several years of addiction and rejoined recording sessions for what would become one of the Lips’ most beloved records, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.” So much of this still feels fresh as the band has performed the album in full twice in Oklahoma in recent years.
Thankfully, that story had a happy ending. And today, I imagine countless fans share a similar hope for Drozd — that this ending is also a beginning. He has the ability to score film and television projects. There’s also a very good chance he’ll collaborate with others and hopefully will do so when he’s ready. He’s currently tinkering around with cover songs and even hinted at the possibility of new music. In the end, does the sun ever really go down or is it just an illusion caused by the world spinning round?
Footnotes
- It’s a bummer Freaks didn’t get a proper 20th anniversary celebration. Somebody should write that.Return to content at reference 1↩
- Coyne, like many storytellers, has been known to embellish from time to time. I think back on the March of 1,000 Flaming Skeletons, a Lips-led Halloween parade in downtown OKC. Were there ever that many costumed fans in skeleton attire at once? Probably not, but it definitely sounds better.Return to content at reference 2↩
