Masley, Ed (December 31, 1999). "The Best of 1999/Pop CDs". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Archived from the original on March 9, 2012 . Retrieved November 6, 2021. 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.

This is a very Coyne-ian way of seeing things. He tells me he isn’t a great musician – “Steven [Drodz, the band’s long-time multi-instrumentalist] is the level of a Miles Davis… embarrassingly I don’t even know the chords to ‘Do You Realize??’” – but his big thinking and idealist adventure has elevated The Flaming Lips into singular terrain, equally brilliant and bonkers, where the surreal meets the existential. There wasn’t a fear of failure, we just had to be sure that we wanted to make it.” – Wayne Coyne So the live shows just became more instinctual? The Soft Bulletin is the ninth studio album by The Flaming Lips. Their commercial and critical breakthrough, it was released in 1999 through Warner (Bros.) Records and is widely considered by many to be a career high in the extensive Lips canon, as well as one of the best albums of the decade— if not all time.

Shows

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" ALL WE HAVE IS NOW: Tezcatlipoca, troutmask, jshopa, earwax, tommo, aaronleclair, sergegrone, yeda, ivank79, theironlung, dmpulp, axelcarrington, bogoslav, Ciaran52, Sluggo714, m0rph3us, thekeefe, assasass, jefqoi, JusticeShades, Usurping Python, Drummer1956, Kevvy, RustyJames, notesofachord, mborlan1, Dr Roy, jsh357, Ben V, ecjam6, Slot Machine 777, Rube, steinib, TalkBoxist) And what wonderful company he is. On video call from his Oklahoma home, Coyne is charming, garrulous, funny; I get the impression he could talk endlessly. He immediately introduces me to his young son, who also excitedly interrupts us later (think that BBC News interview that went viral), and is perhaps even more chatty than normal. “I took a small steroid this morning,” he tells me at the outset, trying to combat his kid’s allergies. “So I think I’m feeling too good. You can see why people want to take steroids every day.” Dbx 165 compressor, 160A compressor/limiters (x3), 166 dynamics processor, 172 stereo gates (x2), 119 compressor/expander.

Josephes, Jason (July 1999). "The Flaming Lips: The Soft Bulletin". Pitchfork. Archived from the original on October 10, 2004 . Retrieved June 30, 2009.

Robert Dimery; Michael Lydon (March 23, 2010). 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: Revised and Updated Edition. Universe. ISBN 978-0-7893-2074-2. The best song in the world from age 15 - 18. Haven't heard it in a long time...not sure I like this version with the country guitar up front as much, but it's still pretty much perfect. Questioning Title?: "What is the Light?" (its subtitle provides the answer) and "Waitin' for a Superman (Is It Gettin' Heavy?)" Liberated by their indulgences on ‘Zaireeka’ and with newfound view on mortality, they emerged with 1999’s bittersweet ‘The Soft Bulletin’ – a symphony of strings, machines and synthetic sunshine. The single ‘Waitin’ For A Superman’ is Coyne coming to terms with the fact that a miracle to save his father was not forthcoming, ‘The Spiderbite Song’ is child-like lullaby of love from Coyne to his bandmates in the wake of their recent near-misses, ‘Feeling Yourself Disintegrate’ admits that “ life without death is just impossible” but worth it for love all the same, and ‘Race For The Prize’ is the glorious set-opener telling of two scientists willing to sacrifice everything to save the world. At the very least, they’d saved themselves. Instrumentals: "The Observer" and "Sleeping on the Roof", which both act as codas to "What is the Light?" and "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate", respectively.

Terich, Jeff (July 2, 2015). "10 Essential Neo-Psychedelia Albums". Treble . Retrieved November 6, 2021. Terich, Jeff (April 5, 2012). "10 Essential Dream Pop Albums". Treble . Retrieved November 6, 2021. 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. In 2006, Robert Dimery chose The Soft Bulletin and its follow-up Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots as part of his book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. [25] Pitchfork ranked the album 3rd on the Top 100 albums of the 1990s list, [26] and awarded it a rare score of 10.0. AllMusic's Jason Ankeny gave it a highly enthusiastic review, concluding that "there's no telling where The Lips will go from here, but it's almost beside the point– not just the best album of 1999, The Soft Bulletin might be the best record of the entire decade". [3] According to Acclaimed Music, The Soft Bulletin is the most acclaimed album of 1999, as well as the 110th most acclaimed all time. [27] Though his work with both Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips has been experimental, Fridmann is adamant that neither band indulges in experiment for its own sake: "If we're at a fork in the road and one direction seems purposely confrontational, and it seems that people are probably going to like the other one better, we'll take that one. We don't say 'Oh, that's too beautiful. Let's make it horrible so that people won't like it.' It does happen for some people, but not really with these guys."

This legendary concert was only ever released on DVD and as a two-CD set, but now for the first time it gets the full vinyl treatment. Each one is numbered, so you can be sure you're getting a piece of musical history, and each sale helps raise money for Nordoff Robbins, a charity that uses music to enhance the quality of life for those with life-limiting illness, disabilities or feelings of isolation. The Jaded Hearts Club – Live At The 100 Club PHASE ONE entailed a motley crew of acid-fried misfits trying out their new equipment in the recording studio with either interesting yet undeveloped results or no result. 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. Oldham, James (May 6, 1999). "The Flaming Lips – The Soft Bulletin". NME. Archived from the original on August 17, 2000 . Retrieved June 30, 2009.

There’s probably a perception of The Flaming Lips that is probably like The Grateful Dead or Phish or a jam band or something. You know, that we take a song that you know that’s 20 minutes’ long and it becomes a 30-minute jam session. But we really don’t do that. I like it when Jimi Hendrix or Miles Davies does that but I don’t like it in particular for us. With a record like ‘The Soft Bulletin’, that’s not what the music is. We’re always very careful to do the music as well and as familiar as it can be. I know just by talking to people in the audience that they have some very powerful connections to these songs. I’m always aware of that with songs from ‘The Soft Bulletin’.”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] 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?’” At the same time, we were working on The Soft Bulletin. Initially, The Soft Bulletin was meant to be largely a two‑mix version of Zaireeka, but then it sort of evolved into something else..." Soft Sounds Coyne thinks of the song, and its parent album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which The Flaming Lips are performing in full on a belated 20 th-anniversary tour, as some sort of supernatural happening. “Those songs were given to us by the gods of music. And we happen to be the humble humans that got to be the ones that made them.”