King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard singer talks ahead of Phoenix concert

The world needs King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard right now.

I’m just going to go right out here on this limb and shout it from the rooftops. The world needs a band like Melbourne, Australia’s King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard because creativity, passion and the willingness to work motherfucking hard are wonderful things, especially when everyone can reap the benefits.

Truth be told, it’s terribly easy to get excited about King Gizzard &the Lizard Wizard. The band have cranked out a staggering number of albums (over 50 if you include live stuff that may or may not be licensed by the band) over the last decade or so. Rivaling Thee Osees (whose leader, John Dwyer, owns the first U.S. label, Castle Face, to release a record by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard) for productivity, these six Australian dudes not only absolutely rip on their instruments, but can knock out tunes that cross genres as well or better than any band playing rock music right now in the world.

Luckily for us desert dwellers, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard are hitting Phoenix on Saturday, Nov. 9, at Arizona Financial Theatre.

If you listen to their latest record, "Flight b741," which you should absolutely do right now, you'll be treated to some of the best boogie inducing 70s-style heavy, jam oriented rock and roll that you can find. "Flight b741" is basically a time machine and you can book a ticket on it any time you want.

Stu Mackenzie was kind enough to hop on an internet phone call from his home several weeks ago to talk about what it's like to be in one of the most prolific and creative bands of today. He couldn’t have been nicer, too, as he shared how his day was going and why he loves coming to America.

Phoenix New Times: Your publicist mentioned that you don’t like doing a lot of interviews, so I feel pretty special right now.
Stu Mackenzie: Yeah, no, you’re right. I don’t do that many anymore, but I actually do like (doing them). I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’m happy to talk about myself these days. I like the moment of introspection.

You’ve got to be a very busy dude.
Pretty busy. I dig it that way. I think, you know, that it’s a good way to keep the madness at bay. Either be busy or be mad. That’s how it works for my brain, at least.

It seems like you must always be creating or making something…
I’m wired that way, I think. I’ve been very lucky to be able to do this one thing for a really long time and keep it going. I’m really grateful that it has kept going this long. Almost all the buddies I grew up making music with, or playing music with, we’ve created this sort of community of musicians and artists ... we are sort of the last ones left still doing it and I’m just stoked to still be on track.

The band have been together for 14 or 15 years now, correct?

Yeah, yeah. And we haven't really done anything else. We've just kind of done this one thing, like I said, just kind of constantly. So, it's pretty cool.

That’s a good run. It takes a lot of work.
I think (the band) is lucky that we do love each other. But yeah, it's work. It’s a good kind of work, but it's still work.

It’s like a marriage. Speaking of, you and your wife are about to have an anniversary if I did my homework right.
We are coming up to our fifth, actually. We’ve got two kiddos these days. There are quite a few Gizzard kids in the squad these days. They outnumber us now, so it’s pretty cool.

Awesome. I love "Flight b741." It reminds me of the music my parents listened to in the '70s.
That's cool. I mean, we had a lot of fun making this one.

We did a couple of records before this, which were, let's say, like kind of ultra-conceptual. We spent a lot of time just being very thoughtful about the construction of them and I think this record, in a lot of ways, was the antidote to that. It was just, "let's get everyone in a room, put a mic on everything, take off the headphones, turn everything up, and just record all of it."
So, you guys didn’t intend to do a super jammy, '70s kind of thing?
No, we went in with no ideas, kind of on purpose and we were the songs' "napkin sketches." You know, you could just write a couple of chord progressions out or whatever. ... We decided that no one could come in with anything too worked out. You had to figure it out in the room. That was kind of, I guess, sort of the rules we put around it.

But in terms of the music and the vibe and the style, I think in a lot of ways, this kind of music is ... common ground. In a lot of ways, it's the kind of music that we would listen to in the green room. A lot of us grew up on music like this and I think it was just like the common-ground music that we just made when we went in without a plan, if that makes sense.

("Flight b741") just sort of came together quite naturally and slowly, you know, over the course of quite a few months. It was all quite piecemeal and wholesome and fun. Like I said, it was the antidote to a few quite serious and highly constructed records that we thought deeply about. This one was supposed to be from the hip.

It turned out amazing. It’s very different from 2023's "PetroDragonic Apocalypse."
That one is exactly what I'm talking about. That record was pretty hard to make. I'm really, really proud of it, but it was hard to make, and it required a lot of just thought and a lot of prep. We couldn't just get in there and jam; we just wouldn't have been able to do that on that record. We kind of had to really think about what we were doing and that's cool. Sometimes, the hardest thing is actually the best thing to do, and sometimes the easiest thing is the best thing to do.

It sounds like sometimes you're really looking to challenge yourselves.
We found new ways to challenge it ourselves. We weren't challenging ourselves, maybe, in the composition, in the old-fashioned kind of way, but we did stuff with "(Flight) b741" we have never done.

In some ways, we were kind of saying ‘pass the mic’ and this was one of our ideas. In every song there's at least three lead singers. There are very few choruses, or really lyrically repeating parts across, really, the whole record. The idea for someone different to take the lead, you know, and all six of us sing lead vocals at some point on the album.

What a cool challenge.
This is the most collaborative record we have ever made. I don’t think we could have made this record five years ago and we definitely couldn’t have made it ten years ago. We’ve been touring so much, and the shows have gotten looser and more improvised that we have sort of developed a language with each other where we can just get in there and turn the amps on and just go.

“Mirage City” (the opening track on Flight b741) has an almost Grateful Dead kind of feel to it. You guys have a knack for going from genre to genre. Are you all voracious music fans?

Yes and no, I mean, I don't think I listen to more music than any average person. If anything, when I'm in the in the depths of making a record, I don't listen to anything. I just don't have time. I have a space that I'm just completely within, you know, and whatever record I’m working on takes up all that space. Sometimes I'll open my Spotify and see that I haven't played a song for a month. So, yeah, I don't think I listened to more stuff than anyone else.

I do love music and I’m pretty open minded. I just have always had the opinion that I should be allowed to make whatever music I want to make.

Before the band started, we all were playing in different bands, multiple different bands, and we were, kind of, all of us were kind of playing multiple bands, and they were almost all different genres to each other, and that kind of always felt fine. So, when people have made comments about us approaching different styles of music, that's always been quite confusing to me. I mean, I know that's not what other people do, and I suppose I know that that's not the approach other people have, but I've never really quite understood why.

Well, it’s very impressive how you guys can float from genre to genre.

I think we've definitely learned along the way. If you were listening to our discography from the start to the finish, you can hear us learning on the job. We are always just trying to make sure that everything is done with the right spirit throughout and the right intent. You can hear us figuring shit out along the way, and we've just had to put down our egos and just make sure it is interesting enough to us.

With so many records, how in the heck do you guys choose a set list when you play live?

Since about 2019, we've just been doing a different set every night. I've literally got a spreadsheet with all our songs on it, and I can piece together a different set list every night. Usually on the day of show, we really need that hour or so of sound check and we run through songs we haven't played in a while. But, yeah, over the course of the last, US run, I think it was like 120 odd songs rotated over the course of the tour. I'd say this one, we are at about the same.

Do you guys like playing in the US?

American crowds really dig the improv and jamming parts of the set more than any other place in the world and their much happier to let a band kind of be free. American crowds seem to like to get a piece of music that is only happening right there for them and that is something they seem to appreciate more than anybody else.

(America) is the birthplace of jazz, so it kind of makes sense that American musical brains are sort of wired that way. We feel very at home and have always felt quite accepted in the States with the kind of music we make. It’s an interesting thing that we would have never expected, so we love it.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. With King Stingray. 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 9. Arizona Financial Theatre, 400 W. Washington St. Tickets are available here.