The Soft Bulletin

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Weingarten, Marc (July 9, 1999). "The Soft Bulletin". Entertainment Weekly . Retrieved May 12, 2015. You’ve got these anniversary shows coming up. Do you feel as if you might do this for ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’ or your other album? 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. No, not really. I think people will point it out and go, ‘Oh there’s Tame Impala or MGMT’ but really to us it was the other way around. We loved their music before they even knew who we were. If someone compares Tame Impala or MGMT to us then that’s great. I think they make great and original, crazy music. I’m glad that people would put us in that category, but I don’t think that Steven and I would ever think of it in that way.” The Soft Bulletin is the ninth album by The Flaming Lips, released by Warner Bros. Records on May 17, 1999 in the UK, Europe and Australia, and on June 22, 1999 in the United States.

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. 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.” 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.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. Every song on The Soft Bulletin feels like a journey, both sonically and emotionally and it would take far too long describing why each and every one of them is so great. – Nathan Brooks

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] Terich, Jeff (July 2, 2015). "10 Essential Neo-Psychedelia Albums". Treble . Retrieved November 6, 2021. 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.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.

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?’” 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?’” 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?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. 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. The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin - Pitchfork Classic". YouTube. February 27, 2013. Archived from the original on 2021-12-12 . Retrieved April 4, 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.

During this tense period, when The Flaming Lips weren’t sure what would come next, Coyne, Drozd, and bassist Michael Ivins experimented. Working informally in Oklahoma City, they began filling cassette tapes with strange music — fragments of songs, sound effects, drones — and constructed events in parking garages where the tapes would be played in car stereos of a few dozen volunteers and then the concrete structure would be transformed into a collective art installation. Out of these happenings, they began to develop an idea of what the next phase of The Flaming Lips might sound like. Absent Jones’ irreplaceable guitar, they would think in terms of arrangements, shifting the focus of their songs to keyboards, strings, and horns. 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] 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.”