This little beauty from The Flaming Lips keeps popping up on shuffle so I figure that’s a sure sign I should be sharing it. From 2002’s slightly incoherent but often brilliant not-quite-sort-of concept album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, “Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell” is one of the loveliest songs in the Lips’ impressive canon.

A companion piece in regret to the album’s angular opening track “Fight Test”, “Ego Tripping” has a bouncy, wet bass line pushed way up front in the mix, a typically quixotic Lipsian choice for a ballad about lost romantic opportunity. But when Wayne Coyne’s high, vulnerable vocal kicks in it definitively evokes that hollow, melancholy feeling familiar to anyone who’s ever hesitated when they should have made a move. “I was waiting on a moment/But that moment never came… I was wanting you to love me/But your love it never came.” Yeah, I think we’ve all been there before.

Coming directly after the amazing artistic breakthrough of 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, a verifiable masterpiece of beautifully orchestrated neo-psychedelia, Yoshimi may not be quite as consistently great an album as Bulletin. But a gem like “Ego Tripping” still shows The Flaming Lips at the peak of their powers. Best of all it’s one of those albums available for free streaming with an Amazon Prime membership, so there’s no excuse for letting the moment pass you by.