The Soft Bulletin

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It was also a culmination of sorts. Its brilliance might have caught people off guard, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. The band had been inching away from the revved-up psych-pop formulation that yielded surprise hit “She Don’t Use Jelly” ever since the commercial failure of 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic (which may be the real best Flaming Lips album depending on your mood). After guitarist Ronald Jones departed, Coyne and drummer Steven Drozd cooked up a series of stunts called the Parking Lot Experiments, ambitious compositions comprising dozens of cassettes designed to be played simultaneously through car stereos in a parking garage. This led to 1997’s Zaireeka, an album released on four discs designed to be played all at once. You couldn’t listen to it unless you had four CD players and at least one friend on hand — or made very creative use of your own appendages — but if you did manage to hear Zaireeka, you got an inkling of the Lips who’d emerge on The Soft Bulletin two years later. That’s a real thing. We used the words ‘soft’ and bullet’ and ‘in’. It’s like part of you is being executed by something that doesn’t hurt you like a real bullet. It’s a soft bullet. ‘The Soft Bulletin’ is giving you this gentle message. That’s why I say it’s for sensitive people. I think for a lot of people it doesn’t matter that much. Your mind can be filled with other things, but if you’re an innocent person and your mind has that deep connection to love, beauty and family, then you have a lot to lose. You may lose yourself. You may be so devastated by your love for it that you don’t want to live. Somewhere in there ‘The Soft Bulletin’ was just saying, ‘I know, I know what you mean’. That’s enough. There’s a Daniel Johnston song that goes ‘To understand and be understood’. There’s something in there that let’s you go to the next day.” Christgau, Robert (February 1, 2000). "Happy You Near". The Village Voice . Retrieved June 30, 2009. Cohen, Jonathan (August 3, 2002). "Flaming Lips' New Warner Set Reminds Us To Live For The Now". Billboard. Vol.114, no.31. Nielsen Business Media, Inc. p.11 . Retrieved November 6, 2021.

It speaks to a certain sensitive person. I don’t think it speaks to a Foo Fighters’ kind of audience. When Steven, Dave Friddmann [producer] and I we were making it we were grappling in our minds with the idea that the world is a happy and beautiful place. You know; you’re optimistic and all of this is work for you in your young life. The longer you keep going forward into this beautiful place you start to realise that it’s not really a beautiful place. Bits of it are full of unfair and horrible things. It’s a shift of going from this innocent person saying ‘Anything is possible, everything is beautiful – bring it on. I love life so much’, then having to say ‘Well if you love life so much, what if some of it dies? What are you going to do now?’” Densely textured, awkward but somehow melodic, The Soft Bulletin finds these pop oddballs with their poker-faced humor firmly intact —‘When you got that spider bite on your hand/I thought we would have to break up the band,’ sings Wayne Coynein his strained Neil Young-style voice, referring to an accident that could only have happened to the Lips, and did,” Rolling Stone wrote of The Soft Bulletin in a 1999 album review. Only now. I don’t think we would have liked that in the beginning. I don’t think we could have made the album if we thought that was going to happen. We’re not those young, innocent guys getting ready to make that transition that ‘The Soft Bulletin’ was about.” But you see it for what it is now?

Notes

Fading into the Next Song: "What is the Light?" and "The Observer" are threaded together by an insistent thumping beat; and "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" and "Sleeping on the Roof" being threaded by the sound of bugs buzzing and Wayne's voice fading out. What Is the Light? (An Untested Hypothesis Suggesting That the Chemical [In Our Brains] by Which We Are Able to Experience the Sensation of Being in Love Is the Same Chemical That Caused the "Big Bang" That Was the Birth of the Accelerating Universe)" (4:05) The Soft Bulletin was lauded by critics and fans alike and topped numerous "Best of 1999" lists. The album is now considered by many to be the Flaming Lips's masterpiece. [24] The Soft Bulletin is considered by some to be partially responsible for establishing the latter-day identity of the Flaming Lips, and as its following expanded over the years after its release, paving the way to their being among the most well-respected groups of the 2000s.

Aaliyah’s first union with Missy Elliott and Timbaland was a jolt, completely upending R&B through a collective vision of futurism, cyber goth, and sci-fi samples that remain virtually unmatched in scope and impact, as evidenced by the number of contemporary musicians still mining her catalog for inspiration. One in a Million arrived when R&B needed an overhaul, and Aaliyah was the perfect vessel: her breathy but assured alto gave her an aura of mystique, and she possessed a kind of reticence and remove even while singing about her own desire. (Furthering this mystique was the unfounded rumor that her signature side-part and sunglasses were hiding an amblyopic eye.) Her own reasons for this remain cause for speculation—she’d been illegally child-married to R. Kelly for less than a year when One in a Million came out—but the record was unmistakably the sound of her gaining her agency as a young woman and changing the course of music history, all before she even graduated from high school. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd Since late 2010, the album has been sporadically performed live in its entirety over the years, and on May 26, 2016, an orchestra was used to embellish sounds of the album while the band played their main instruments for the album at the concert. [28] Weingarten, Marc (July 9, 1999). "The Soft Bulletin". Entertainment Weekly . Retrieved May 12, 2015. One of the Flaming Lips’ most charming songs, from 1995’s noise-pop spectacular Clouds Taste Metallic, with a premise so cosy and heartwarming it could be turned into a children’s picture book. It’s Christmas Eve, and a young Coyne decides to spread some Yuletide cheer to the local zoo by freeing all the animals. There’s just one snag: the critters don’t want his charity because, even though they’re miserable, they’d rather organise their own jailbreak and save themselves. “The elephants, orangutans / All the birds and kangaroos,” sings Coyne, over a sweet Beach Boys-like melody, underpinned by fuzzy, sludgy guitars and the sound of cymbals crashing like Christmas bells. “All said, ‘Thanks but no thanks, man / But to be concerned is good’.” In some parallel universe, listening to it every year on 24 December is as cherished a part of the Christmas ritual as watching The Snowman. 5. Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair Josephes, Jason (July 1999). "The Flaming Lips: The Soft Bulletin". Pitchfork. Archived from the original on October 10, 2004 . Retrieved June 30, 2009.

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A lot of the MIDI stuff we do is orchestral, and the way those sounds work is that you have to play the MIDI instruments so that the sounds actually end up in time — I don't mean just because of MIDI delay, I mean because it takes a while for the swell to happen, but if you want it to be at full volume by the downbeat, you've got to start substantially beforehand. So you can't program it in step time, or quantise it; that doesn't work. You have to play it live, just so it lines up correctly." Your Friendly Local Producer... so for the old fans, this edition can be distracting but it is definitely better sounding than the previous. Yeah. We’re great ambassadors to being the ones who get to stand there and sing these songs, but it’s a strange world. ‘The Soft Bulletin’ is catching us in the transition of going from one mode to another. We knew that at the time; that we weren’t the same people who’d started to make this thing. We knew we couldn’t make another record like that. All we could do was make another record of how we felt at the time.” A lot has been said over the years that this could very well have been your last album.

I think ‘Zaireeka’ really freed us up. We got signed to Warner Bros in the early ‘90s, wanting them to succeed but not knowing how to do that. We knew there was a limit to that kind of freedom and we pushed that to the absolute limit when we made the ‘Zaireeka’. We were just looking at the future going ‘If we’re gonna make a record like ‘The Soft Bulletin’, why would they keep us?’” The Soft Bulletin [Demastered] (Produced by Dave Fridmann, The Flaming Lips & Scott Booker) [Warner Bros. Records 2005] New Sound Album: Whilst still very spacey and psychedelic, this record drops the guitar noise of old for orchestral pop, with the only song that prominently uses guitars being "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate"To celebrate the album on its 20th anniversary, we caught up with Wayne Coyne to talk over the seismic impact that the record had on his life and thousands of others. Once we started to play shows after putting up The Soft Bulletin we just weren’t that interested in playing shows and so our idea was, “well, if we’re gonna play shows, let’s just do whatever,” and that’s when I started to have hand puppets and throw confetti and balloons around. Hoskyns, Barney (July 1999). "The Flaming Lips: The Soft Bulletin". Spin. 15 (7): 126–27 . Retrieved May 14, 2015. The Flaming Lips performing The Soft Bulletin + Dinosaur Jr perform Bug + Deerhoof perform Milk Man - All Tomorrow's Parties". Atpfestival.com . Retrieved March 10, 2012. It speaks to a certain sensitive person. I don’t think it speaks to a Foo Fighters’ kind of audience.” – Wayne Coyne The band were dealing with a lot of loss and demons at the time. 20 years later, what would you say the resounding message is of ‘The Soft Bulletin’?