Flaming Lips, Goth Babe, Death Cab and more spread sermon of groovy at burgeoning three-day festival

These are the days of Wayne and roses.

When the world outside seems driven by madness, along comes the Outside Days festival to again remind us that, at least for this brief little mylar bubble of time … everything’s groovy.

Just ask the penguins who came all the way from Chicago just to see Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips bring their signature brand of sonic serenity and Wonka-like wonder to the thousands gathered on the Tivoli quad at the Auraria campus.

Their human names are Jeanine and Tony Woodman, and they say they dropped about $2,200 to come to Denver this weekend to see like-minded bands the Flaming Lips, Death Cab for Cutie and Sunday’s headliner, Cage the Elephant.

“More than worth it.” said Tony Woodman.

For Saturday’s Flaming Lips set, a trip back in time to the band’s 2002 feel-good opus “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” the couple came delightfully dressed as emperor penguins with loose black-and-white tunics and oversized beaks. She sported pearls, he a bow tie.

It was the playful, affectionate and slightly vaudevillian look of a couple that, like Wayne Coyne, is here to bring the fun. And while Flaming Lips concerts have long attracted humans dressed as life-sized stuffed animals, I asked anyway: Why penguins?

“Because it’s all about spreading love,” said Jeanine Woodman. “These penguins have brought so many smiles and love to a lot of people, just as the Flaming Lips have brought so many smiles and love to so many over the years.”

As a concert festival, Outside Days does not try to be all things to all people. No, it intentionally brings kindred bands that are as chill in vibe as the pre-summer nights in Denver are warm.

And with apologies to Elvis Costello, the human embodiment of all the peace, all the love and all the happiness is Coyne, the absolute auteur of playground performance art. At 65, Coyne remains the beloved artistic elder of now three generations of faithful who would follow him into battle: With pink robots. With injustice. With those who would lead us into war.

Coyne entered the stage in a sophisticated dark suit with oversized French cuffs and a garland of peach and blush roses draped around his neck – the kind that throughout history have been shown to convey joy and celebration at festivals and weddings.

With this single wreath, rock’s jester of joy conveyed a playful sense of peace and gentleness, and a commitment to nature, romance and counterculture idealism. Before even singing a note.

“Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” ironically, is not a quirky sci-fi concept album about a young Japanese heroine who calls upon her skills in martial arts to conquer a video-game-worthy adversary. I mean, it is. But that heroine, in Coyne’s world view, is all of us, and the robots are universal adversaries – mortality, illness and time. That’s why anthems like “Do You Realize” strike such a universal chord.

The band had planned to play more songs from that seminal album – among them “In the Morning of the Magicians” and “All We Have is Now,” but the set had to be cut short by some initial technical problems. Coyne apologized profusely, even promising a make-up. “We will come back and play six songs in each one of your basements,” he said, in a way that made you think he might actually have meant it.

No need. Coyne and his bandmates (almost all adorned in their hometown Oklahoma City Thunder basketball jerseys) gave the crowd all they could handle in just its opening fusillade of ”Yoshimi,” Parts 1 & 2. In the span of 12 minutes, four monstrous, helium-fueled pink robots came to and from life. Confetti canisters were fired. Mars-sized beach balls were launched.

For the infectious ditty known as the “Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah” song, Coyne emerged with his head protruding through a massive mylar balloon that, perfect for the song, spelled out the words “(Bleep) Yeah Outside Days.”

The joy was palpable. Save for the band’s deeply sincere cover of Black Sabbath’s anti-war classic “War Pigs.”

It almost seemed cruel to later realize that the band’s basketball heroes were being upset at that very same time in Game 7 of the Thunder’s playoff series with the San Antonio Spurs.

The 3-year-old, family friendly Outside Festival, which officials estimate drew about 40,000 (many in tie-dye, plaid and hats that say, “Let’s Party!”), essentially amounts to a massive business summit promoting the outdoor industry. The carefully curated music lineup reflects the laid-back ethos of the Great Outdoors. No elbows, no moshing, no bruising. This is the only music festival on the planet where security could essentially take the weekend off.

While the musical stylings varied greatly, the throughline was universally easygoing: 

• Death Cab for Cutie: Always a sonically tight experience that effortlessly balances Ben Gibbard’s somber, introspective reflections with energetic, feel-good indie-rock jams. When Gibbard sings “I Will Follow You Into the Dark,” we’re all teleported back into our first teenage crush.

• My Morning Jacket: Grizzled frontman Jim James, sporting fuzzy white, knee-high boots, piloted the crowd through the psych band’s cosmic opus jams infused with Southern rock grit. By the time the set was ending, I was six blocks away feeding a friend’s cats, and one could still feel the band’s euphoria in the shaking walls.

• Japanese Breakfast brought the synth-pop dance energy with sweeping, dreamy introspection while Denver’s own Wildermiss brought the cool quotient with their own high-energy, infectious alt-rock.

But the most powerful emblem of the whole Outside ethos had to be Goth Babe, the tongue-firmly-in-cheek stage name of good time singer-songwriter Griff Washburn. His sound is described as “a breezy, sun-soaked mix of surf rock, dream pop and alternative rock.” (In other words: Hilariously not goth).

At the band’s center is a joyful frontman who is as known and admired for his outdoor-centric lifestyle as he is for his music. If the legend is to be believed, Washburn lives a vagabond lifestyle, often bunking in campers or his  36-foot off-grid sailboat (named Lola) with his dog (named Sadie). The face of Outside Days.

The crowd ate him up like a healthy snack.

All in all: The weekend was an emphatic musical statement on the power of positivity, even if only for three days.

“Do you realize that happiness makes you cry?” – The Flaming Lips

John Moore is the Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist. Email him at [email protected].

More coverage:

• Colorado outdoor spirit comes to festival
• An advance look at the 2026 Outside music lineup
• Outside Festival moving to Auraria
• A look back at the 2025 Outside Festival