The Soft Bulletin is the ninth studio album by American rock band the Flaming Lips, released by Warner Bros. Records on May 17, 1999, in the United Kingdom, and on June 22, 1999, in the United States. Remix, Mastered By – Dave Fridmann (tracks: CD1 to CD13), The Flaming Lips (tracks: CD1 to CD13) Notes Entire album is included on the DVD in Advanced Resolution Surround Sound 5.1, Advanced Resolution Stereo, Dolby Digital Surround Sound 5.1 and Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo, with Bleep-Blop Visualizations.
The Flaming Lips have survived and evolved through an astonishing number of indie-rock life cycles. They were labelmates with Fear, Wipers, and the Dead Milkmen and were three albums deep by the time Nirvana released Bleach. They were contemporaneous with both 90210, on which they memorably guested, and The O.C., which fomented the Bush-era indie boom they rode to festival ubiquity. They ushered Miley Cyrus through the weirdest phase of her public identity crisis. On record they’ve been skuzzy noise-bombers, fuzz-pop cartoon characters, experimental stunt artists, digital folk-pop anthem-slingers, and tripped-out paranoiacs. They formed the year I was born, and I am now halfway through my thirties — old enough that today’s teens make me feel like an ancient relic and albums released when I was their age are turning 20.
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.
The version of the Flaming Lips we have today, the one that has long since calcified into a shtick? With Wayne Coyne in a suit playing ringleader for a fantastical circus, spewing blood or rolling atop his audience in a giant bubble while Steven Drozd leads the band through psychedelic symphonies? That began here in spectacular fashion, with a dozen tracks that rewired the Flaming Lips and, upon impact, rewired quite a few listeners’ brains too. Among them are some of the most successful psych-pop crossover stars of our time. It’s hard to imagine acts like Tame Impala and MGMT existing in their present form without this record’s influence. The Soft Bulletin is a world to be explored, and it has continued to beget new galaxies as fellow visionaries discover it.
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 much easier and significantly more thrilling to simply press play on “Race For The Prize” and let it sweep you away. With a jarring thwack, Drozd’s drumbeat begins bashing away at the front of the mix, a disorienting production choice that contributes to the feeling of a demo transposed into holographic 3D. Instead of overdriven power chords, we’re treated to a swirl of synthesizers mimicking orchestral strings, sighing wordless harmonies, Michael Ivins’ steadfast bass, and an assortment of other pretty instrumental flourishes. Atop the ruckus is Coyne’s Neil Young mewl crying out about a pair of scientists racing to save mankind from some unspecified threat even if it costs them everything: “They’re just humans with wives and children!” (Weird side note: Between this, Keep It Like A Secret, and Summerteeth, Young’s current label home Warner Brothers was absolutely running indie-adjacent, Young-inspired rock in 1999.)
“Race For The Prize” is both epic and completely ridiculous, a balance The Soft Bulletin strikes throughout its hourlong runtime. Working with sound-bombing producer Dave Fridmann at his Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, the Lips funneled a vast array of instruments and wanton studio trickery into an aesthetic that made Coyne’s avant-twee pop songs feel truly otherworldly. In the wake of the Parking Lot Experiments, Warner Brothers had given the band $200,000 and left them alone to create two new albums with the understanding that they’d quickly follow the gimmicky Zaireeka with a more normal release. The Soft Bulletin was probably not what they were expecting, but it ended up saving the band’s relationship with Warner anyhow. Making full use of their budget, the Lips and Fridmann concocted a lush yet hard-hitting update on Brian Wilson’s pocket symphonies, a style that exists at the intersection of chamber-pop and noise-pop and plays out with the pomp and circumstance of a Broadway production.
The resulting voyage is as captivating now as it was back then. On “A Spoonful Weighs A Ton,” peaceful symphonic reverie is disrupted by bass blasts deep enough to test the limits of your subwoofer. On “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate,” wistful layers pile up atop a looped human whisper beatboxing like the world’s gentlest snare drum. “The Gash” faces down depression with the Disney version of a military march, while “Buggin'” more closely resembles a swarm of dancing fireflies than anything Owl City ever came up with. Occasionally they let tender beauty remain uncluttered, as on instrumental epilogue “Sleeping On The Roof,” a song so charged with emotion that it brings me to the verge of tears for reasons I don’t fully understand. Other tracks play out in movements, like “The Spark That Bled,” where gaping swoons give way to a constantly shifting rhythmic landscape and gigantic fist-pump climaxes, and “Suddenly Everything Has Changed,” a series of shifting dioramas connected by eerie shapeless passages.
Coyne’s lyrics matched the music’s larger-than-life scope. He’d always had a thing for outlandish narratives, and now he had a proper canvas to truly geek out. Thus, The Soft Bulletin is filled with stories of dreamers who dared to lift up the sun in the name of love(?) and revolutionaries who stood up and said “Yeah!” at the risk of being struck down by “the softest bullet ever shot.” Yet as the album rolls on, he makes plain the connection between these hero journeys and the daily struggles of human life. The Lips endured some big ones while creating this music. Coyne’s father died of cancer. Ivins suffered a traumatic car accident. Drozd’s heroin abuse — one factor that caused Jones to leave the band — got so bad that doctors worried his hand might have to be amputated, a situation addressed directly on the silly-sounding “The Spiderbite Song,” named for an injection-related abscess Drozd originally blamed on a poisonous spider.
The further you get into the tracklist, the more Coyne lays bare the pain at the heart of these epic sagas. “Suddenly Everything Has Changed” chronicles everyday situations marred by the onset of depression. “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” is about finding the will to live even as the reality of certain death sets in. On “The Gash” he poses a question that looms larger as modern culture grows ever more comfortably numb: “Will the fight for our sanity be the fight of our lives?” And on “Waiting For Superman” — the simplest and most devastating track here, on which Coyne reckons with watching his father slowly wither away — he admits some burdens are too heavy for even a superhero to lift. In that context, it’s easy to hear “Race For The Prize” as a metaphor for what Coyne and his cohort were attempting to accomplish at Tarbox. Again and again he urges his listeners to hold on, buckle down, keep going. “What choice do we have?” he recently told the NME. “Do we live half a life because we don’t want to get hurt so much? Do we love half a love because we might lose it?”
The Lips would return to these themes on Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots three years later, coming off more like a caricature but scaling far greater commercial heights. In the years since, it’s been easy to write them off as overgrown children trading in gimmicks that prioritize artifice over substance, leaving a trail of useless gummy skulls in their wake. At times they have lived up to that reputation — increasingly so as their magical mystery tour has rolled on despite their lysergic well of ideas seemingly drying up. Maybe even The Soft Bulletin’s idealistic calls to perseverance strike you as naive. Fair enough. Laugh at the Lips if you must, but a good-faith survey of their accomplishments reveals they’re no joke. The fearless freaks have built one of the most impressive discographies in rock history, enacted dazzling spectacles around the world, and continually dared to bring their wildest ideas to fruition. They’ve had home runs and strikeouts, but man, they have swung. And with The Soft Bulletin, their ambitions manifested one of the greatest triumphs in psych-pop history.
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The Flaming Lips: We’re An American Band
The Flaming Lips face the nation’s uncertain future with a dose of revisionist history on their most soul-stirring release since The Soft Bulletin.
Wayne Coyne is standing alone in The Flaming Lips’ Oklahoma City warehouse, surrounded by the band’s long list of decommissioned stage props. Bedazzled unicorns and deflated robots rest lifelessly in the corners, waiting—like most of America—for the pandemic to be over.
“All this stuff gathering dust should be in the back of a truck on the way to a festival in Atlanta or something,” the frontman says while scanning the room.
Indeed, if this were any other summer, Coyne and company— fellow songwriter Steven Drozd, Michael Ivins, Derek Brown, Jake Ingalls, Matt Duckworth and Nicholas Ley—would be on the road, taking their awe-inspiring psychedelic circus from city to city, festival to festival. “It’s the first summer, in probably almost 20 years, that we’re just eating barbecue on the patio and drinking with our families, as opposed to doing that same thing in hotels and airports all summer long,” Coyne observes.
Since forming in 1983 and breaking through years later with hits like “She Don’t Use Jelly” and “Do You Realize??,” The Flaming Lips have long grown into cross-genre touring titans. Yet, curiously enough—despite leading a band that’s hell-bent on offering the most immersive stage show in rock music— Coyne is quick to bring up the fact that he and Drozd are actually natural introverts.
“There was a time in The Flaming Lips, especially in the mid-tolate ‘90s, where we considered just making records without really playing live,” he recalls. “That really appealed to us because we loved making records, but we never really felt that comfortable— and still don’t—in front of an audience. That’s why we have unicorns and lights and all this crazy stuff because it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve got this crazy stuff for you to watch!’ It’s not about us; it’s about our music and about our unicorns. And don’t get me wrong: I wish this wasn’t happening now; I wish everybody in the world was able to do their job and be secure. But for us, we don’t ever really miss the idea of performing. I don’t get up at parties and play music and sing.”
Yet, while their stage show is currently sitting on ice, The Flaming Lips are still thinking up unique ways to shepherd American Head into the world. A press release deems it a “return to form” for the group, reminiscent of their 1999 masterpiece The Soft Bulletin and centered around the idea of being an “American Band.” Compared to the multicolored, storybook psychedelia of 2019’s King’s Head, the album showcases a more sonically refined version of The Flaming Lips, using a healthy serving of live instrumentation to ruminate on the intertwined nature of drugs, youth and family in the United States.
“A couple of these songs coalesced a couple of years ago, and then Wayne started talking about how the theme could be growing up with our crazy families in the ‘60s and ‘70s: drug tragedies and car wrecks,” Drozd explains. “He wanted to frame it in that vibe because our crazy families are very similar. There’s drug damage and stuff like that. There’s a lot of parallels.”
Then, in classic Flaming Lips style, Coyne amplified those themes into a fictionalized reality. He considered The Flaming Lips in the context of their American Heartland origins.
“In the very beginning of making this album, Steven and I set ourselves up as characters,” Coyne adds. “I used Tom Petty as an example. ‘Let’s be like Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers!’ And none of us are really like Tom Petty, and none of us are really like The Heartbreakers because we just aren’t set up that way. But, we like the idea of a singer-songwriter. There’s a main dude and he sings, and then there’s a great group that plays with him. We just sort of made ourselves like that, even though that’s not really the way we are.”
Coyne furthered the Tom Petty connection by tossing in a nice dose of revisionist history, wondering how the rock legend’s early- ‘80s stop to record in Tulsa, Okla., could have gone awry.
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“My brothers and their friends were all into motorcycle gangs and drugs and all kinds of crazy shit, and they could have very easily run into Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers while they were in Tulsa and sold them some acid,” Coyne laughs. “It started speaking to my imagination, sending me down this path of like, ‘What if they did run into my older brothers and some of their really fucked up druggie friends, and they got so wasted on their drugs that all their records never happened? What if they made this great, sad record instead of becoming Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers?’”
“There are so many parts of Oklahoma that are just flat and there’s just nothing, and I definitely hear that in some of our music,” Drozd adds. “One of our songs is called ‘At The Movies On Quaaludes.’ The beginning of that has this Rhodes piano sound. To me, that [recalls] being out in the back of a pickup truck in the ‘70s. The sun’s going down and you’re out in the country getting drunk.”
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Alongside the pang of classic-rock nostalgia, it’s hard to listen to American Head and not consider how its title, sound and imagery are relevant in the current socio-political era. The music video for “Flowers of Neptune 6,” for example, finds Coyne wrapped in an American flag, walking through a scorched landscape in his famous plastic bubble. As fires burn at the singer’s feet and the bubble furthers his isolation, it’s easy to see the clip as a symbol of America’s never-ending distress in the age of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. When those symbolic alignments are brought to Coyne’s attention, however, he explains that the “Flowers of Neptune 6” video was filmed before the COVID-19 crisis became dire. Even the album itself was written well before the world began to fall apart.
“When things like that line up, it really is just a good coincidence, a bad coincidence or indifference,” he says. “I have always gone out in a space bubble to make videos and play shows and, for the longest time, we’ve been trying to shoot a video in a grass fire. When we made [that video], it was the first night of the lockdown, around March 12. So we made all of this in a world that still felt pretty normal. Back in March, we thought, ‘Well, this’ll happen in March and April but, by May, everything’s gonna be back to normal.’ And then all of these things started getting more intense with Black Lives Matter; protests were happening two blocks away from my house. You could have never made music that mirrored that on purpose. I think that’s just what music can do; music can accompany you in almost any situation. Sometimes it really does feel like, ‘This music is perfect for this situation.’ But I wouldn’t make a statement like that on purpose. I do think that, sometimes, you make even greater statements by accident.”
Elsewhere on American Head, the misguided innocence of “You n Me Sellin’ Weed” juxtaposes the feeling of young love with the harshness of working in a slaughterhouse—offering images of blood-filled shoes alongside the burning desire to escape a doomed planet.
Later, “Will You Return/When You Come Down” puts forth a few chilling lines: “Shooting star/ Crashing in your car/ What went wrong/ Now all your friends are gone/ And they scream/ Screaming from beyond/ Hear their song/ Now all your friends are gone.”
“We weren’t thinking about those things because we didn’t know they were going to happen, but it seems like there’s this strange correlation somehow,” Drozd says of the album’s eerily relevant themes. “I don’t know if I would really call this a happy record; it’s not a total downer but it seems to be a soundtrack for just how weird every fucking thing is now.”
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According to The Flaming Lips’ longtime label Warner Brothers, American Head is the band’s 21st studio album. Coyne, however, isn’t so sure.
“If I count all the new music we’ve made with Miley Cyrus and all these other weird projects that we’ve done, it’s probably more like 30 or 35,” he chuckles.
American Head also includes a few contributions from Kacey Musgraves, who nodded to The Flaming Lips at Bonnaroo 2019 by closing her Saturday headlining set with “Do You Realize??” After Coyne’s phone exploded with text messages from friends sharing the news, he immediately reached out, wanting to collaborate with the Nashville singer, whose own trippy tendencies seemed to align perfectly with his.
“‘God and the Policeman’ was specifically made for her and I to sing together, and ‘Watching the Lightbugs Glow’ was also made for her. Once we knew that she’d do it, we just made it up. I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, fuck! It really happened! I can’t quite believe it.’”
Torrent Flaming Lips Soft Bulletin Board
And it’s that excitement that continues to drive The Flaming Lips, year in and year out. Yes, American Head marks the start of new era for the Oklahoma band. But, undoubtedly, their next album will usher in yet another metamorphosis.
Torrent Flaming Lips Soft Bulletin Free
But with equal parts abstraction and clarity, American Head blends psychedelia alongside Americana, unintentionally snapshotting this weird moment in time. With live music in absentia, 2020 is one big cultural reset, and The Flaming Lips are here to soundtrack it every step of the way.
Flaming Lips Website
“I’m just a creative person,” Coyne concludes. “So given the chance, I’ll make something—sometimes it’s a painting, sometimes it’s a song and sometimes it’s an album. Whatever the opportunity is, I just go, ‘Wow, OK! I’m glad to do something.’”