The Flaming Lips released an album that was patched together over 2011 and 2012 with recordings of their collaborations with some of contemporary music’s most influential artists. The album is called Heady Fwends, and was relatively ignored until the band released a music video a version of Roberta Flack’s First Time I Ever Saw Your Face that featured Erykah Badu.

The music video was highly controversial as Badu’s sister, Nayrock appeared nude and smeared all manner of goos and sparkles all over herself in a bathtub. Erykah was angry about the release of the video, expressing that she was never given the consideration of previewing a rough cut of the video and was left out of the editing process. She also felt that her reputation was endangered of being sullied because of the nature in which Nayrock was portrayed in the video. The video was taken down from vimeo, and The Flaming Lips replaced Nayrock with Amanda Palmer. Palmer also re-sang the song. It was all super drama.

Nonetheless, while I was listening to music a couple of nights ago, I yearned to hear Badu’s sultry voice sing First Time I Ever Saw Your Face. I searched for a recording of the track and found that the video was back up. So,  here it is. Soon, we’ll be spinning a hifi recording of the song on the Publik / Private podcast. Look out for that.