He is the founder, lead vocalist, main songwriter, and only constant member of the psychedelic rock band the Flaming Lips.

"[3] In 1977, while in high school, Coyne began working as a fry cook for a Long John Silver's restaurant in Oklahoma City.

Coyne formed the Flaming Lips in 1983 with brother Mark singing lead, Michael Ivins on bass guitar, and Richard English on drums.

[7] According to an article in the September 16th, 1993 issue of Rolling Stone Mark and Wayne Coyne came up with the name "The Flaming Lips" as a reference to a rumor of a high school classmate who contracted genital herpes after receiving cunnilingus from a partner with active cold sores.

Wayne remarked on this unsubstantiated claim:When Mark and I were in, I think it was Junior Year in High School, there was a rumor about this girl who got herpes from this guy at a party.

But when we were thinking of band names one night over a pack of Schlitz and some left-handed cigarettes and remembered how we joked that they both had "Flaming Lips" and it just stuck.

[8]During large-crowd festival performances, Coyne makes his entrance by descending from an alien mother ship (a nod to Parliament-Funkadelic[9]) in a bubble and floats across the audience.

Coyne does this to pay homage to a famous picture of Miles Davis who, after a performance, had blood on his suit because a police officer had beaten him during the show.

Their performances have been likened to psychedelic experiences rather than simply music shows, a tradition that goes back to the band's formation.

The band instructed forty cars to start the tapes at the same time, resulting in a surround sound.

The parking lot experiments led to the experimental album Zaireeka, which is made up of four stereo tracks, each on four different CDs.

"[11] At the New Year's Eve Freakout [citation needed] in Oklahoma City on January 1, 2010, Coyne instructed the audience to set their cell phone alarms for 12:55 a.m.

The poster commemorated The Flaming Lips' appearance at the Austin City Limits Music Festival.

The frontman stated, "We thought it would be silly to use chicken blood or something, they don't need to sacrifice their vital fluids any more than I need to"[12] In February 2017, Coyne debuted an art exhibit at the Waterloo Center for the Arts in Waterloo, Iowa called "Works by Wayne Coyne".

"The concept was to come up with another one of those midnight movies, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show that I went to see as a teenager, all toked up, before the days of cable.