The Soft Bulletin

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The album was considered to mark a change in the course for the band, with more traditional catchy melodies, accessible-sounding music (their previous album Zaireeka was a quadruple album of experimental sounds meant to be played on four separate stereo systems simultaneously), and more serious and thoughtful lyrics. [8] We thought, “well, we’re going to make this record and if it’s the last record we make and the world doesn’t need any more Flaming Lips' records we would know that we did the thing that we wanted to do.” The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin - Pitchfork Classic". YouTube. February 27, 2013. Archived from the original on 2021-12-12 . Retrieved April 4, 2021.

Oldham, James (May 6, 1999). "The Flaming Lips – The Soft Bulletin". NME. Archived from the original on August 17, 2000 . Retrieved June 30, 2009. Josephes, Jason (July 1999). "The Flaming Lips: The Soft Bulletin". Pitchfork. Archived from the original on October 10, 2004 . 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. Waiting for Superman” takes a similar idea and stretches it wider. The one thing we’ve always thought would save us is gone, and all we’re left with is each other. It’s a terrifying realization at first, but then it becomes hopeful. The force that binds us together — love — is, The Soft Bulletin argues, the most powerful we could ever know. Those who experience it can do things beyond their imagination, like, say, lifting the sun into the sky. 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?’”If you live, you love and you absolutely throw yourself into it then what if it dies? What choice do we have?” – Wayne Coyne You can still hear echoes of ‘The Soft Bulletin’ in a lot of today’s big psych bands. Do you often notice your influence in other artists? 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.” It’s unfair but inevitable that Deserter’s Songs will spend the rest of its existence being undermined by a stronger album that came out eight months later. – Nathan Brooks

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] 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’.” 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 Terich, Jeff (April 5, 2012). "10 Essential Dream Pop Albums". Treble . Retrieved November 6, 2021.

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Yeah, I do. It’s something that I wanted when I was growing up. I never got to see Pink Floyd or The Beatles, but in my dreams I would have loved to have seen The Beatles play ‘The White Album’. Who wouldn’t, you know? I think we’re very capable of that stuff now. The guys in the group with the technology and all of the shit we have available to us now, it really is great to sing these songs with the arrangements and those kind of sounds.

One of those albums is The Soft Bulletin, which completes its second decade today. (It was released on 5/17/99 in the UK before coming out in the US the following month.) Hailed as a masterpiece upon arrival, the album is still arguably the Lips’ finest creative output, though with a discography as vast and varied as theirs you’ll never have complete consensus on that. What cannot be disputed is that The Soft Bulletin is the most pivotal release in the band’s career, the one where they cemented their status as legends and established the archetype they’ve been tweaking ever since.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. 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’? 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. It’s an album you return to and hear differently as your own life moves forward and endings of every kind become all too real, a reminder that this flash of now is all we will ever have.”

We were throwing confetti around, I’d pour blood on my head, and we knew that if you’d come see us we could entertain you. I didn’t know if we were gonna look like any other band you’d seen before but we were going to try and entertain you and see how it goes. Who’d have ever thought that would work? There’s no marketing and there’s no plan.” 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. 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?But there’s no better measure of the Lips’ late-’90s zenith than the stellar songs that never found a proper home. These include “The Captain,” arguably the most over-the-top gesture from a period of over-the-top gestures. In stark contrast to The Soft Bulletin’s serious tone, the song’s snowballing orchestration exudes an anarchic joy, like riding a rollercoaster that’s just tipped over its peak into a never-ending free-fall. And then there’s the divine “Satellite of You,” a sweeping serenade that could be the closing-credits theme of a Hollywood musical circa 1945—or a last-call standard at a karaoke bar circa 2045. It’s quintessential Lips, rife with down-home sentiments expressed in far-out imagery. However, for the Lips of the late ’90s, such space-age love songs were less the product of an overactive imagination than a simple reflection of the rarefied cruising altitude they occupied at the time. Now that billionaires are spending the equivalent of a small country’s GDP to enjoy a few minutes in suborbital space, The Soft Bulletin Companion offers a much more cost-effective and environmentally friendly way to experience that fleeting, zero-gravity sensation of floating at the top of the world. The record is saying, ‘You’ve got to love life as much as you can, and if something tears some of that away from you then that’s ‘The Soft Bulletin’. It’s ‘Oh no’. If you live, you love and you absolutely throw yourself into it then what if it dies? What choice do we have? Do we live half a life because we don’t want to get hurt so much? Do we love half a love because if might lose it?” So the bad is ultimately worth it for the good? 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. Twenty-year anniversaries are the best album anniversaries — long enough to say the album truly comes from another world, but not so long ago that this particular world is entirely unfamiliar. By some measures, 20 years is the length of a generation, enough time to reflect on those around you who were born and grew up and grew old and those who might not be around anymore.